4TB NVME and Acacis enclosure

[MW1]

Hi all

I'd like to pick up a 4TB NVME stick and enclosure in the Amazon Prime sales and wondered if the below items were a good combo

Was thinking of this SSD WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB NVMe

Screenshot 2024-07-16 at 12.34.15.png (187.15 KiB) Viewed 4032 times

and this Acacis enclosure

Screenshot 2024-07-16 at 12.34.41.png (465.63 KiB) Viewed 4032 times

Any advice much appreciated - many thanks!

[James Steele]

See this thread:

viewtopic.php?t=74178

I think it should work just fine.


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[MW1]

Thanks for the info.

It looks as if the Acasis is a safe bet.

I guess the WD_BLACK NVMe will be fine also.

I just hadn't seen it referenced specifically as a lot of people seem to use the Samsung 990 or Crucial P3 - albeit the Crucial seems to have slightly lower specs.

In the real world they're probably all pretty similar performance wise.

[mikehalloran]

Thanks for the info.

It looks as if the Acasis is a safe bet.

I guess the WD_BLACK NVMe will be fine also.

I just hadn't seen it referenced specifically as a lot of people seem to use the Samsung 990 or Crucial P3 - albeit the Crucial seems to have slightly lower specs.

In the real world they're probably all pretty similar performance wise.

In an external enclosure, yes.

[dix]

Even though I wouldn't mind speeding everything up, I've never had any noticeable performance issues using the old fashion Samsung SSDs for both sample libraries and project drives. I'm curious if ppl are using NVMEs as project drives, libraries or both. Are there specific types of projects that benefit more from them?

My practice doesn't involve large track counts these days, so I'm wondering if I would I see a noticeable improvement if I swapped in NVMEs for my SSDs? If so, would it be just load times of projects and sample based VIs, or would I see CPU benefits as well? Thx!

[HCMarkus]

I'm using NVMe only because I had to get some new external drives for sample storage when I moved to my Mac Studio. I use internal storage for project/audio files and macOS/Applications, but all VI Samples are stored on the external NVMe drives.

Although I've never compared directly, observations suggest that any improvement in loading time is not huge. A bigger difference can likely be made by minimizing pre-load size in Kontakt and other VIs, which by all reports SATA SSDs are also fast enough to support.

With NVMe, you would probably see some overall improvements, but I doubt they'd be huge. That said, the drive/enclosure combination that started this thread isn't too expensive...

[dix]

With NVMe, you would probably see some overall improvements, but I doubt they'd be huge. That said, the drive/enclosure combination that started this thread isn't too expensive...

Exactly! I believe the 4TB NVME drive and enclosure above is only slightly more than a 4TB SSD. It seems like a matter of time before NVMEs will be the most economical external drive setup. For now I'm liking the convenience and flexibility of a dock. Thanks!

[mikehalloran]

With NVMe, you would probably see some overall improvements, but I doubt they'd be huge. That said, the drive/enclosure combination that started this thread isn't too expensive...

Exactly! I believe the 4TB NVME drive and enclosure above is only slightly more than a 4TB SSD. It seems like a matter of time before NVMEs will be the most economical external drive setup. For now I'm liking the convenience and flexibility of a dock. Thanks!

I ordered that Acasis w/ fan + 4TB P3 on the Prime sale. I already have the version without a fan housing an 8TB OWC blade. I noticed that when I moved all my Kontakt libraries about 1.3TB, that sucker got hot—if it throttled, I couldn't tell. Since it normally runs cool, I'll turn the fan on only when doing large data transfers.

So, the new box will house the 8TB and the old box gets the 4. The new blade will replace a 4TB SATA III SSD in my setup.

Like others, there's not much of a difference in load times but now and then, I have to re-scan and index my SampleTank libraries, around 600GB or so. There's a notable difference, there.

Although I normally move old DP projects back onboard when I rework them, if it's a minor tweak including an alternate mix, I'm likely to leave it in place. There's a noticeable difference in BTD and a few other disk intensive processes — it might take minutes! AV is the big one, however. For those reasons, I'm putting the SATA drive out to pasture though I might use it to store my Apple Music (iTunes) library, now over 1TB. It is sitting in a TB2 dock—can't increase the speed but lets me hook it up easily to my Studio through the TB2—TB3 adapter.

My old TB1/2 dock has two TB2 ports and can be daisy-chained. I discovered that, when hooking it up to the TB port of my 2012 MBP, I can plug an MDP to HDMI cable from the other port on the dock to one of my 27" LG 4k monitors. That's pretty sweet.