Just setup new 4TB External Drive. Interesting results

[James Steele]

So my 2TB Western Digital Blue NVMe drive that I use for sample libraries was getting full. I was using it in this enclosure BTW:

https://a.co/d/gY1bEaS

I was getting really good performance out of it as you can see here:

2TB Drive.png (895.91 KiB) Viewed 1327 times

But it I was running out of room so I ordered another of the same enclosures and purchased a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drive. This one here: https://a.co/d/3lrL8mt

I installed it in the enclosure and attached to my Mac Studio and formatted it and then named it the same as my sample library drive and copied contents over to it (using CCC). I unmounted old sample library volume, launched Kontakt and various VIs... and all is good!! I now have more free space for more sample libraries. My 2TB NVMe is now going to be dedicated to Final Cut Pro projects.

There is one interesting result though. Read speeds are great on the Samsung, but curiously write speeds are a bit slower. I don't know if that's a "thing" with the 4TB versus 2TB size or what? However, it's write speed and these drive is going to be used for *reading* sample libraries, so it hardly matters as the only time it will be doing any appreciable *writing* is when I might purchase a new library and need to copy it to the drive.

Oh... I will add that the *reads* are a little over 200MB/s faster, and maybe I'm imagining it, but it felt faster on loading some Kontakt instruments.

Here are the test results for the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro:

4TB Drive.png (885.03 KiB) Viewed 1327 times

[James Steele]

Oh... just a word to the wise. If you're going to copy a sample libraries volume to a new larger volume... make sure obviously all you DAW type apps are closed and then re-name the old volume like "Sample Libraries Old" and then format the new volume as "Sample Libraries." I kind of got bit by this because MacOS creates a "mountpoint" (see graphic) with " 1" appended to the name of the volume. This will make it so your sample libraries will come up missing as the OS will use "Sample Libraries 1" in the path... not "Sample Libraries."

I think I solved this just by renaming the old drive, and rebooting. Then on next mount the "mount point" no longer had the " 1" appended to it, and now all appears to be well.

mountpoint.gif (16.87 KiB) Viewed 1312 times

[tbwnm]

The 4TB Samsung 990 PRO SSD is currently discounted to $249 https://a.co/d/3egjWbj. I'm thinking of returning the OWC Envoy Pro FX 4 TB https://a.co/d/5RrEalJ if I can get the same performance or better from the 990 with the https://a.co/d/gY1bEaS enclosure. These are the speeds I'm getting on the OWC Envoy; Read speed of 1674 MB/Second Write Speed of 2653MN/Second. Have you encountered any excessive heat issues using this enclosure and the 990 Pro? Did you need to use additional thermal tape? With the Ankmax enclosure currently going for $127.99 with a 20% off coupon, the total excluding tax would be $377.98 which is $100 less than I paid for the OWC Envoy Pro.