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I saw an ad on Facebook this morning from Crucial for NVMe drives and I was somewhat stunned. 4TB NVMe for about $200 now? That's a tiny bit more than I paid for my 2TB WD Blue maybe six months ago? (Not sure exactly).

https://www.crucial.com/products/ssd/crucial-p3-ssd

But now I'm thinking I might want to swap out my 2TB sample library drive for a 4TB and and get another enclosure and use the 2TB for active Final Cut Pro projects?

James Steele wrote: ↑Wed Mar 22, 2023 2:38 pm I saw an ad on Facebook this morning from Crucial for NVMe drives and I was somewhat stunned. 4TB NVMe for about $200 now? That's a tiny bit more than I paid for my 2TB WD Blue maybe six months ago? (Not sure exactly).

https://www.crucial.com/products/ssd/crucial-p3-ssd

But now I'm thinking I might want to swap out my 2TB sample library drive for a 4TB and and get another enclosure and use the 2TB for active Final Cut Pro projects?

I've been preaching the Crucial P3 as the best bang for the buck for awhile but $199.99 is about $30 less than Amazon.

Their warranty center is in Nampa Idaho in case there's ever a problem and the turnaround time is quick.

Besides the NVMe 3 x4 P3, there's also the NVMe 4 x4 P3+ for $224.99
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Plus-PCI ... ref=sr_1_3

I have not seen NVMe 4 x4 before and have no idea if it's actually faster connected to a Mac. I know that NVMe 4 x6 is generally a waste of money since TB 3/4 has a 4 Lane limit. In any case, the only way to maximize the speed is with an actual, Intel certified TB3 or TB 3/4 enclosure. USB-C "thunderbolt compatible" isn't good enough.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3EX4M2/

This 2 Lane box, while Thunderbolt 3, is only half as fast.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3ENVXP00/

Good timing on this. Just put together this combo:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BP9B9T9K?ps ... ct_details

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B25P44CL?ps ... ct_details

After buying a SanDisk 4TB Extreme Portable SSD USB-C drive that only clocks in at 610.9 MBs read, I bought a Samsung T7 Shield 4TB SSD that clocked even slower, around 550MBs. This is uncalled for.

The Crucial and Anyoyo TB3 USB4 enclosure above clocks in at 2,567MBs read. This is nearly the speed of the internal drive at 2783MBs.

So yeah, it took some researching and a bit of luck that the Anyoyo is a stable quality TB3/4 enclosure, but this IMO is the way to go. The speeds are much much faster than what is commercially available. Side note, the more important number for sample library loading (which is the still slow thing that fast drives help with), is the 4K random read, but the higher 1-5 GB read numbers we all normally look at.