Is someone here using Crucial SSD for Photos in Mac ? RELIABILITY vs regular drives ?
I am currently using LaCie 10 TB d2 Professional USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 External Hard Drive
for my Photos Folder for Apple but I would like to get another drive as backup but also my LaCie never stop spinning. Only option is Eject so maybe SSD could be better for that
The Crucial X10 might be OK for backup or some non-critical storage, but it is QLC and write speeds really tank (even a lot for QLC) when dirty. Buy a real TLC SSD with DRAM and put it in an enclosure.
I've been happy with WD SN850X. I have not yet tried their 8TB, but 2 and 4 has worked well in the ACASIS TBU405 enclosure.
As Scott suggested, wait for Black Friday deals as these too should be discounted. Check the ACASIS website as well as Amazon. ACASIS tends to have frequent discount code offers. My reference sale price point for the WD 4TB is around $250. It's currently $330.
Note also that the Crucial X10's interface is USB 3.2 2x2, which is not fully supported by Apple hardware, the last time I checked. It's 20Gb/s throughput, which is about 2GB/s but on a Mac will drop to 10Gb/s. TB3/4 will do close to 3GB/s, so you'll get real world 3x faster transfer rates. That might not be critical most of the time, but if you're often moving a lot of data, it can make a difference.
I was fortunate to get some of the 8TB WD SN850X last year when they were about US $500-550. I have 5x8TB and 3x4TB in total. Of course now there are much faster PCIe 5 SSDs (up to 8TB in the Samsung 9100 Pro), but those are best used internally, not choked or throttled externally. I was hoping to see 16GB M.2 SSDs in 2026, but it's less certain now and more likely they will be QLC at first and/or quite pricey.
USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 is kind of archaic now, with USB 4 replacing it. Very few devices every worked with the x2 anyway.
EB-1 wrote:
The Crucial X10 might be OK for backup or some non-critical storage, but it is QLC and write speeds really tank (even a lot for QLC) when dirty. Buy a real TLC SSD with DRAM and put it in an enclosure.
EBH
Where do you find info what type of SSD is each of them ? I can't find this on let say B&H website
I agree with EBH but you also need to consider how you will typically use this drive. Based on the Tomshardware test of the 4TB model, it sustained 800GB transfer at peak speed with a 20Gbps connection. 8TB *should* have 2x larger cache on a clean drive, so potentially 1.6TB transfer at peak throughput.
If using this on a Mac you will only get 10Gbps transfer speed, which may delay cache saturation because the slower transfer speed potentially allows the drive to transfer some of the cache contents to permanent storage while more is added to the cache.
It will probably be the most painful to use when making the first massive transfer from another drive but after that, if adding 10s of GB at a time, it shouldn't matter. The price is decent but I can't help wonder what other tradeoffs are under the hood to achieve the current selling price. Even if it can only connect at 10Gbps, it will be ~4x faster than traditional HDDs.
I would not mess with a cheap drive for my valuable photos if I'm working off of it. At the sale price it's probably a good choice as a backup or short term archive. I never understand the Apple folks who are obsessed with the SoC/RAM and skimp on storage systems. OWC makes what looks like a good enclosure. https://www.owc.com/solutions/express-1m2-80g That or a similar TB enclosure is what I would use if I could not use U.2 internal SSDs and had to use Apple.
EB-1 wrote:
I would not mess with a cheap drive for my valuable photos if I'm working off of it. At the sale price it's probably a good choice as a backup or short term archive. I never understand the Apple folks who are obsessed with the SoC/RAM and skimp on storage systems. OWC makes what looks like a good enclosure. https://www.owc.com/solutions/express-1m2-80g That or a similar TB enclosure is what I would use if I could not use U.2 internal SSDs and had to use Apple.
EBH
I have 2 of the 80G OWC enclosures and get +6000mbps easily and I have 1 of the 40G enclosure that's good for +3000mbps. I had those acasis 40G enclosures and they run stupidly hot. The OWC enclosures while larger are insanely cool in comparison. Regarding "valuable photos" 2 is 1 and 3 is 2 😎 (one 80G local, one 40G cloned and Backblaze for the cloud.
OWC stuff is generally good, and they mitigate some of the Apple weaknesses.
I looked into the options for external U.2, but they are not so great.
I'm not sure when TB 6 (PCIe 5.x) will be out, but it seems to always be well behind the curve of PCIe in chipsets. If the Apple bozos would just add an inch in height to the Studio and one U.2/U.3 slot you could put a 15.36, 30.72, or even 61.44TB drive in there and run it at full PCIe speds.
But regarding the OPs question about reliability, I would ready for it to fail at any time. Maybe rotate a couple of them so that when they fail you can just go with the 2nd or 3rd one.
EB-1 wrote:
The Crucial X10 might be OK for backup or some non-critical storage, but it is QLC and write speeds really tank (even a lot for QLC) when dirty. Buy a real TLC SSD with DRAM and put it in an enclosure.
EBH
That's a problem that I've encountered when using these small SSDs for backup drives. The initial backup takes F O R E V E R.
For minimal reads and writes things aren't so bad.
We talked a bit about this in the canon gear forum but it doesn’t look good for the price of storage. If anyone sees the SN850x 8TB on sale in the low $500 range again please post it as I will grab a couple more. You would think they would go on sale now that Gen 5 is out. https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1924004/0#16940909
