Mac Studio External Storage Options

[Michael Canavan]

For what it's worth I've been running an Acasis USB4 enclosure on the Macbook Air and M2 Mac Studio for over a year and it's fantastic, around 2800MBs so top speed.

I want to know where this 8TB NVME drive for $150 is?

I will have to go back and reread my post on that. I thought that I'd saved about $150 buying the last 8TB OWC NVMe 3 x4 Aura Pro drive on closeout (that's what the email claimed I was going to save)..

IMO I think autocorrect did you dirty.

Last night, OWC sent a flier and their 8TB blade was discontinued $170 — so I pounced and snagged the last one.

Yeah 8TB NVME is still ugly expensive. I Got my Crucial 4TB (in the Acasis enclosure) for around $200.

[tbwnm]

OWC Express 1M2 USB 4 enclosure announced by OWC today. Price is right at $119 DIY. This could be the one to get. https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-express-1m2

[mikehalloran]

OWC Express 1M2 USB 4 enclosure announced by OWC today. Price is right at $119 DIY. This could be the one to get. https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-express-1m2

The cooling fins appear meaty-beefy, I'll give it that. Otherwise, I see no reason to pay the extra $20 over the ACSIS. That OWC rates it 346MB/s faster is 100% on-brand OWC Marketing nonsense.

[Michael Canavan]

OWC Express 1M2 USB 4 enclosure announced by OWC today. Price is right at $119 DIY. This could be the one to get. https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-express-1m2

The cooling fins appear meaty-beefy, I'll give it that. Otherwise, I see no reason to pay the extra $20 over the ACSIS. That OWC rates it 346MB/s faster is 100% on-brand OWC Marketing nonsense.

What's really on brand is the extra $410 price tag for a 4TB SSD that regularly go for under $250 these days.

[tbwnm]

The WD and Synology support Time Machine in the firmware — it's in their browser app.

The Qnap should be configurable but you will have to configure it manually and may need to create a Volume. With Ethernet, this will be done through a browser.

Look at my Locations sidebar: the three circled drives are the TM drives available to this Mac over Ethernet as you can see, I'm only backing up to two at the moment but that will change soon. None of them show up on the desktop unless I force them to be double-clicking. If you can get the Volume on that Qnap to show up there, TimeMachine should see it when you open it and try to add a backup volume. Be sure to check the box to encrypt your backups, otherwise, certain data will not be backed up.

Still having issues using an external WD My Cloud USB drives for Time Machine back ups. Seems like there is an issue with Time Machine back ups over network. Does anyone have a Time Machine network back up working reliably with Mac OS Sonoma 14.1.1+ (either WD or Synology or other network back up solution)? Below is my last email to WD tech support but and I'm waiting for a call back from "Level 2" Tech support at WD. At this point I'm not confident that there is a solution to the issues I'm experiencing. I'm going to reformat these drives APFS and the just connect them directly to my Mac Studio via USB to get a reliable Time Machine back up.

"I discovered that WD My Cloud will recognize an external USB Drive only if it is under 16TB (same applies for WD HDD as well as HDD's from other manufacturers). However, Time Machine is still not working consistently. It will sometimes complete a back up after a restart but shows "connecting to backup disk" for several minutes or several hours (ref. screen shot attached). If and when Time Machine does run, it will often not complete due to a "network problem" (ref. screen shot). I'm running Mac OS Sonoma V 14.1.1 and My Cloud. Based on forum posts My Cloud no longer works with Time Machine Ref Western Digital Community link: https://community.wd.com/t/time-machin ... ore/274644 Can you please confirm and/or advise if there is a fix?

Thank you for your assistance"

[mikehalloran]

…
Does anyone have a Time Machine network back up working reliably with Mac OS Sonoma 14.1.1+ (either WD or Synology or other network back up solution)?
…

My TM backups are absolutely rock solid with both my MyCloud EX2 Ultra and the old MyCloud Mirror. The EX2 has a pair of 5400 14TB WD Red HDDs in a RAID 0 array.

The Mirror is not being used by my Studio since it has only 6TB drives JBOD but I could post that screen shot from my wife's, too if needed.

[tbwnm]

Assuming your running OS 14+? Did you have to reconfigure the WD Time Machine Back up disk with "Guest Access" vs "Registered User" (ref. support article below)? I'll give this a try and see if it makes any difference.
https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/d ... x#Subject1

[mikehalloran]

The only problems I have had with my WD units is registration—couldn’t make the links work so I had to contact Suport and they did the registration for me.

In both cases, I went with the default user name, Admin, and created passwords. I set up the volumes for Time Machine and then configured them on my Mac using Airport Utility. Can’t say that I ever looked at the WD manual or support links. I have been doing this a very long time.

I’m so pleased with the performance of Time Machine on my EX2 since setting it up RAID 0, that I will be setting up my Mirror the same soon. Since the loss of one drive in a RAID 0 configuration means the loss of the entire backup, one should never use that as the only TM backup—and I don’t. Everything is backed up to two or three volumes now.

Eventually, all 6 Macs around here will be backed up to three of my five TM volumes—only then will I feel comfortable taking a couple of 15 year old Apple Time Capsules out of service. Whether I just get another EX2 or go with a Synology drive with their redundancy/drive replacement system is not a decision I need to make right now.

I’ve updated my signature to show that I’m doing this all over Sonoma 14.2.1.

[tbwnm]

’m so pleased with the performance of Time Machine on my EX2 since setting it

.

I'm using an older version of My Cloud than the EX2. Is your EX2 running the same firmware as mine v04.05.00-342 (ref. screen shot below)? There are no additional firmware updates available for my hardware version of My Cloud that I am aware of.

Reconfiguring WD Time Machine access as "Guest" vs "Registered User" also didn't resolve this issue and it kicked up a "The backup disk may have been ejected or disconnected from the computer:" error.

In general since I have tried to not just use WD My Cloud as a server but to also configure it to run Time Machine from an external USB drive, the interface is running very slow overall. For example, when I log in via the web browser it takes about 15 minutes to update the WD status and show the whole configuration and when there is any other activity (such as transferring a file or if the unit is running a "Safepoint" back up) it slows down even more. While I expect some performance hit when additional tasks are running, it pretty much grinds to a halt. I think this is why the Time Machine backups either don't run at all, are delayed or don't complete (I would say about 20% of the time I do get a confirmation that a back up has run but given all the issues I'm having I'm not confident of the integrity of these backups). For example, I just restarted the my Mac Studio and the back tried to run and was then "delayed" (Ref. screen shot). I have reached out to WD tech support again.

[tbwnm]

Time to upgrade my trusty 3TB OG WD My Cloud https://a.co/d/h2YIrhG to a current entry level NAS. Have narrowed down my choices to the following which are around the same price point:

1) QNAP TS-233-US 2 Bay https://a.co/d/7SxIERp currently discounted to $155
2) Western Digital Diskless My Cloud EX2 Ultra https://a.co/d/cTnqWeO currently going for $171
3) Synology 2-Bay DiskStation DS223j https://a.co/d/7g9gjvQ currently going for $189

I already have a WD 16TB Ultrastar along with a Dell Exos X18 (both reconditioned) which I'll be installing. I need to verify that the EX2 will recognize a HDD over 16TB as my OG WD My Cloud will not (had to partition the Exos to a 2TB and 16TB). Principal use will be for Time Machine backups (will use one of the drives for this) and as an A/V file server and off-line completed project storage. Based on my research so far, there are pro's and con's to all these units. I'm new to NAS so really just want something that's straightforward/easy to use and reliable (as well as cost effective). Not sure about setting these up as RAID 0 yet (although based on Mikes experience, this seems like the way to go if the NAS offers solid Raid 0 support). To keep costs down I'm not going to go with RAID 1 as to do this I would need at least a 4 bay along with more drives (I'm not running a commercial operation so I can afford to live dangerously and the critical files will be backed up with Time Machine). A feature available on my current OG WD My Cloud pseudo NAS is "Safepoint" that will run an automated back up of the internal drive to a connected external USB drive which in a pinch provides the parity of a RAID 1 set up (from my understanding, its not possible to back up NAS drives using Time Machine). However, Safepoint will only allow the back up of the entire internal drive on the WD My Cloud unit (you cannot choose to back up individual files/folders or any data on external volumes connected via USB to My Cloud so it's somewhat limited). Assuming the newer WD EX2 has still offers "Safepoint" and that the QNAP and Synology units have a comparable feature (will need to verify). Any recommendations would be appreciated.

[mikehalloran]

The Mirror's firmware is 2.12.127 and hasn't seen an update in years. The EX2 is 5.27.157 and is current.

I never use RAID 1. Making both drives work at the same time without a speed increase doubles the noise and that just irritates me. I prefer JBOD and rotating through hourly. I will be moving to three RAID 0 arrays rotating hourly some weekend when my wife is out of town and not using two of her Macs.

The EX2 does not support JBOD for Time Machine on both drives simultaneously (must pick one or the other). There's a workaround that I found on the Synology site that should work — but I prefer RAID 0.

The Mirror doesn't support two JBOD drives for TM either. Not knowing that, I was able to set it up anyway about six years ago and haven't touched it since. WD tells me that, since it can't be done, I did not accomplish this. Uh yea... whatever they say... We did a recent screen share where I showed them that I had it working and I think I heard a face palm on the other end of the line. Anyway, that will be the next I set up RAID 0.

[tbwnm]

Thanks for the reply. So if I go with the EX2, I could strip my two drives Raid 0 resulting in a single 34TB volume and then in the WD Control panel select this volume as the Time Machine share setting the "Maximum Size" to 17TB which would leave 17TB for everything else (A/V server and completed project offline storage)? Could I attach an additional USB drive to the EX2 and somehow automate a back up of specific non Time Machine files from the RAID (this can't be done with Safepoint or Time Machine)? The other option would be to spend $9 a month https://www.backblaze.com and back up everything for redundancy (and also protect against fire and theft). Although, I really feel this is overkill for me and I also just can't stomach paying another monthly subscription for more cloud storage on top of what I'm already paying per month for Apple iCloud and Google One.