Scott Stoness Offline Upload & Sell: On
|
SpecFoto wrote:
Scott, I have a 2019 27” iMac and about 6 months ago I purchased a Samsung 2TB 980 Pro NVME and put it in a Acasis TB3/USB4 enclosure. I made it the start up drive, as the internal 512GB drive was just too limiting. It is just terrific and my speed are slightly faster than the internal SSD at W/2,500 R/2,600 +/-. Now I can have my full Lightroom lr.cat and lr.data files on the start-up drive, which makes Lightroom operate much quicker. Have been using 2 RAID 16TB USB-C enclosures (2x8THDD) for my LR files and backup, with a 2nd backup written to individual HDD. About 320MB/s was the speed of the external enclosures with RAID 0.
I too wanted NVME drives as a solution to faster speeds, but the iMac having only 2 TB3 ports is an issue as you know and my 2nd 27” monitor is using the 1 free TB3 ports. So I got an OWC TB4 Hub that has 3 TB ports and a 10GB/s USB A port and it has worked well for 6 months, it does not have a fan so is quiet and never seems warm to the touch. It operates at about 95% of the iMac R/W speed. My 2nd monitor is hooked up and I have 2 free TB ports available for a RAID system.
For the NVME enclosure I looked at the OWC Express 4M2 but it had 3 issues. The biggest was that it only uses 1 controller that is split between the 4 drives, thus the single speed of only 700MB/s, that you had to buy their software (at added cost) to make it operate at the fastest RAID speeds, and a lot of people complained about the constant single speed fan noise. Other companies are developing these multi NVME enclosures, but none on the market right now seem to have a good, fast solution and be willing to sell an enclosure only that can be set up by using Disk Utility.
So I decided to wait a bit, as I was traveling overseas for 2 months this summer and I wanted to have a full backup of all my files with me (12TB), just in case. My solution was to get 3 of the SanDisk Extreme V2 4TB SSD’s. I read about doubling these up in pairs using Apple Disk Utility to make the RAID 0 8TB setup using 2 SSD’s and 2 cables, their R/W speed just about doubles from 900MB/s +/- single SSD to 1,800/MB/s +/- in RAID 0 for the pair. Perfect for my 14” MBP M1 Pro with it’s 3 TB4 ports, I took 1 RAID set at 8TB and a single one at 4TB that had all my data with me. Being small, compact, weather/drop resistant, and not requiring an additional power supply or a large enclosure, they are the perfect solution for mobile use and storage. Liked it so much that when I got home I bought a 4th Extreme V2 4TB and now have 2 RAID 0 sets at 8TB each that work instantly and are fast without having an external enclosure to deal with. Depending upon what data I want to access, it is so easy to just swap out the 2nd 8TB RAID set with the TB4 Hub. Down the road and once there are better choices for multi NVME enclosures out there I will get one, but in the meantime I am using the SanDisks both at home and on the road to obtain excellent speeds. And they have a 5 year warranty though Western Digital, which I had to use on a non working 5TB 2.5” sata drive recently, and the replacement service was excellent....Show more →
SSD'S in raid 0 are a good solution. 1000mb/s and good at handling heat. And from the experience I listed above, inexpensive nvme's are only great until they fill their buffer and then they are poor- whereas ssd's are keep their performance at 1,000mb/s which is pretty close to what the best nvme's get because of the the enclosure chipset limitations. Even 7200 hdd with raid 0 can get to 320mpb/s sustained as you point out which is better than what I am getting for 500gb with cheaper NVME. But I don't need my whole library like you - so I will wait for prices to improve on nvme's. The more epensive Kingston ones seem pretty good. My learning from all of the above is that if you want nvme's for fast big (>500gb) storage you have to buy the TLC's with big cache and read about them on the links I provided above related to cache, otherwise you should just buy ssd's.
I have the iMac 2017 with 64gb ram and 500gb ssd. I have the owc 1 to 3 TB3 dock with 4bay hdd, 1tbnvme and 2tb dual raid nvme. I have tested the ssd vs the nvme and did not see a big difference in speed between them but like you I am frustrated with the 250gb size because of my music files. Maybe I need to try the acacis enclosure for faster speed. I am thinking about getting a studio or mini if they upgrade to bigger ram and m2 - and its a shame to lose the 5k monitor.
|