Directly attached HDD vs NAS

[etaleb]

Guys - I've used an external HDD for over a year connected via TB4 to my Mac mini M2 and a keep drive spinning app but the overall performance of the machine is just poor. It freezes at times and the mouse cursor does that too and was looking to switch to just a NAS. How much of a performance decrease would I see by doing that on my 1gbps network? Thinking of TrueNAS. Since my computer only has a 256gb SSD, all large media files, etc would be on the NAS. The OS and all applications would continue run on the 256 SSDs

Thanks

 

[CanPhantom]

If you're using a rotating drive, that's the limiting factor here, not the connection speed.

 

[etaleb]

If you're using a rotating drive, that's the limiting factor here, not the connection speed.

So NAS would be similar with my 7200? Also what are the chances the attached external HDD is causing all these freezes on my computer

 

[marstan]

I have had a WD 14TB HDD attached to my macmini M2 Pro and never had a problem accessing it on demand or streaming from it let alone a mouse or disconnect problem. Get a different enclosure and/or HDD.

I am not a fan of NAS'. The expense, maintenance and power consumption and often proprietary hardware/software make them more trouble than they are worth. I have both direct attached storage and a NAS (albeit an old repurposed pentium tower running Unraid) that cost me nothing. The NAS works but it is slow so I only use it as another occasional backup device. I even use a direct attached HDD and SSD on my downstairs HTPC rather than stream from the wired main mac mini upstairs; just simpler, faster and no networking hassles.

I just got a very fast USB4 SSD external enclosure that is attached to my mac mini. I was stunned when I accessed it through wifi on my MacbookAir; order of magnitude faster than the old NAS. Put your money on a fast external ssd for your working data and use the spinners for archiving/backup/large data sets. Plus the Apple silicon machines and SSDs use very little energy. What's not to like?

 

[etaleb]

I have had a WD 14TB HDD attached to my macmini M2 Pro and never had a problem accessing it on demand or streaming from it let alone a mouse or disconnect problem. Get a different enclosure and/or HDD.

I am not a fan of NAS'. The expense, maintenance and power consumption and often proprietary hardware/software make them more trouble than they are worth. I have both direct attached storage and a NAS (albeit an old repurposed pentium tower running Unraid) that cost me nothing. The NAS works but it is slow so I only use it as another occasional backup device. I even use a direct attached HDD and SSD on my downstairs HTPC rather than stream from the wired main mac mini upstairs; just simpler, faster and no networking hassles.

I just got a very fast USB4 SSD external enclosure that is attached to my mac mini. I was stunned when I accessed it through wifi on my MacbookAir; order of magnitude faster than the old NAS. Put your money on a fast external ssd for your working data and use the spinners for archiving/backup/large data sets. Plus the Apple silicon machines and SSDs use very little energy. What's not to like?

What brand of enclosure are you using? I use the Sabrent EC-DFLT USB 3.0 which has good reviews and Seagate 18TB Hard DriveExos X18 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5"

 

[splifingate]

Guys - I've used an external HDD for over a year connected via TB4 to my Mac mini M2 and a keep drive spinning app but the overall performance of the machine is just poor. It freezes at times and the mouse cursor does that too and was looking to switch to just a NAS. How much of a performance decrease would I see by doing that on my 1gbps network? Thinking of TrueNAS. Since my computer only has a 256gb SSD, all large media files, etc would be on the NAS. The OS and all applications would continue run on the 256 SSDs

Thanks

It probably depends upon your LAN connection.

I have a Synology 922+ (four 14TiB WDs) NAS (Network Attached Storage) attached to my 1GiB local network, and I get ~200GiB/s ~100MiB/s [ edit: thx @marstan ] transfer to/from rates.

The Synology is just another Storage Space that operates in a reasonable manner, but I reserve its usage to archival/backup duties.

Have three TB4/USB4 External drives attached to my M2 Studio for when I really need auxiliary DAS (Direct Attached Storage) that operates without any subjective latency. They maintain transfer rates in the ~3KGiB/s range.

I do not, personally, use anything ≤2KGiB/s in a DAS capacity.

 

[etaleb]

What enclosures are you using to connect to your Studio?

 

[marstan]

What brand of enclosure are you using? I use the Sabrent EC-DFLT USB 3.0 which has good reviews and Seagate 18TB Hard DriveExos X18 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5"

I just got the OWC 1M2 and added a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD to it. Getting sustained ~3000+MB/s r/w. Faster than the internal SSD on the Macmini M2 Pro.

 

[etaleb]

Well mine is 7200 RPM but wondering if the enclosure really matters. I know OWC is top of the line but Sabrent should be able to do the job as well, this isn't new technology really

 

[marstan]

Well mine is 7200 RPM but wondering if the enclosure really matters. I know OWC is top of the line but Sabrent should be able to do the job as well, this isn't new technology really

Well, the OWC is for extremely fast USB4 nvme SSDs. For spinning drives I have a wide variety of USB 3.1 enclosures; they all work well at their limited speeds and none of them disconnect or cause mouse problems like you reported. What version of Mac OS are you on? Also look at your activity monitor for any processes that might be using excessive cpu cycles or memory.

 

[etaleb]

For the DAS, do any you have to use apps like Keep Driving spinning or Amphetamine or is your use of the connected drives so infrequent that you won't notice it? I use the drives constantly for media and other large files

 

[marstan]

It probably depends upon your LAN connection.

I have a Synology 922+ (four 14TiB WDs) NAS (Network Attached Storage) attached to my 1GiB local network, and I get ~200GiB/s transfer to/from rates.

The Synology is just another Storage Space that operates in a reasonable manner, but I reserve its usage to archival/backup duties.

Have three TB4/USB4 External drives attached to my M2 Studio for when I really need auxiliary DAS (Direct Attached Storage) that operates without any subjective latency. They maintain transfer rates in the ~3KGiB/s range.

I do not, personally, use anything ≤2KGiB/s in a DAS capacity.

So you are using a 10Gbps network?

 

[marstan]

For the DAS, do any you have to use apps like Keep Driving spinning or Amphetamine or is your use of the connected drives so infrequent that you won't notice it? I use the drives constantly for media and other large files

I no longer use spinning drives for live media production. That is all done via fast SSD now. But when I did use spinning drives for live work it was on my old Mac Pro tower using striped mirrored raid pairs (internal); no "keep drives spinning" type apps were used as I never let the drives sleep. You can set that in Mac OS but I recall there were some external drives that ignored that. Maybe that is your problem; the enclosure itself sleeping the drive at too short an interval without any control over it.

 

[TechnoMonk]

Invest in a good multi slot nvme m.2 thunderbolt enclosure. You can expand as needed and will be set for long time.

 

[SpotOnT]

Can you tell if the drives are infact staying awake?

The freeze you describe is what I associate with waiting for an external drive to spin up.

HDD are slow, so transferring larges files will take a while…but they shouldn’t cause anything to freeze/lockup.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I believe there are port management bug(s) in macOS since Big Sur... most notably resulting in the dreaded...

...so while I agree particularly with #15 about one cause, I wouldn't rule out some blame for macOS itself. While you may not be suffering from this widespread (but not every enclosure) problem, it may simply be because some enclosures are more tolerant of whatever is causing this than others... and your slow downs & delays may be some of this in play too.

I hold hope that someday Apple will get around to debugging this issue but it's been towards 5 years now. If they do re-embrace "just works" and fix it, I suspect your experience "as is" will improve as well.

In the meantime, #2 called it. If you want FASTer storage R/W, think m.2 and/or m.2 RAID in a thunderbolt enclosure. That should be fast enough for about any possible need for storage speed.

 

[FrozenShivers]

I have had a WD 14TB HDD attached to my macmini M2 Pro and never had a problem accessing it on demand or streaming from it let alone a mouse or disconnect problem. Get a different enclosure and/or HDD.

I am not a fan of NAS'. The expense, maintenance and power consumption and often proprietary hardware/software make them more trouble than they are worth. I have both direct attached storage and a NAS (albeit an old repurposed pentium tower running Unraid) that cost me nothing. The NAS works but it is slow so I only use it as another occasional backup device. I even use a direct attached HDD and SSD on my downstairs HTPC rather than stream from the wired main mac mini upstairs; just simpler, faster and no networking hassles.

I just got a very fast USB4 SSD external enclosure that is attached to my mac mini. I was stunned when I accessed it through wifi on my MacbookAir; order of magnitude faster than the old NAS. Put your money on a fast external ssd for your working data and use the spinners for archiving/backup/large data sets. Plus the Apple silicon machines and SSDs use very little energy. What's not to like?

You can make a NAS no problem with normal hardware, as many do. Again you can easily build a low power consumption NAS. If it isn't the best fit for your purpose then there's no problem with that at all as you should always choose what works best for you. Most of your NAS issues sound like you either don't really understand how to configure a NAS correctly for your requirements, which isn't an inherent issue with NAS themselves.

 

[Adora]

Guys - I've used an external HDD for over a year connected via TB4 to my Mac mini M2 and a keep drive spinning app but the overall performance of the machine is just poor. It freezes at times and the mouse cursor does that too and was looking to switch to just a NAS. How much of a performance decrease would I see by doing that on my 1gbps network? Thinking of TrueNAS. Since my computer only has a 256gb SSD, all large media files, etc would be on the NAS. The OS and all applications would continue run on the 256 SSDs

Thanks

If it's just a USB-Drive connected to a Thunderbolt port I would look in System Information if it is even using USB 3.0 and not 2.0. That could happen sometimes with the wrong cable, even if it supports much faster connections.

 

[leifp]

If it's just a USB-Drive connected to a Thunderbolt port I would look in System Information if it is even using USB 3.0 and not 2.0. That could happen sometimes with the wrong cable, even if it supports much faster connections.

I have made this error…

 

[leifp]

Personally, I prefer DAS or have in the past. However I switched to NAS a few years ago purely for convenience. Despite hating laptops, I have one and even occasionally use it as if it is one…

If you use a RAID setup you can increase speed and reliability. Since the OP seems to be a desktop user, and not sharing the drive, DAS is superior.

YMWV…

 

[DCIFRTHS]

I am using a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD for time machine backups. Am I the only one using an SSD for backups?

 

[twyles]

I am using a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD for time machine backups. Am I the only one using an SSD for backups?

No. I've got Time Machine writing to a 2Tb SSD on a Synology NAS and Carbon Copy Cloner doing a daily build to a local 1Tb SSD.

 

[Mactech20]

7200RPM drive is slow as a dog by today's standards. Most people don't remember what it was like to use a computer with a regular hard drive but things "freezing" Ie taking 3-10 seconds to launch an application was commonplace on my old 7200RPMS. Those were connected internally too, yours is through a sabrent external enclosure. The issue with your speed is 100000% the HD. If you want it to be faster, you need an SSD.

 

[marstan]

You can make a NAS no problem with normal hardware, as many do. Again you can easily build a low power consumption NAS. If it isn't the best fit for your purpose then there's no problem with that at all as you should always choose what works best for you. Most of your NAS issues sound like you either don't really understand how to configure a NAS correctly for your requirements, which isn't an inherent issue with NAS themselves.

I am no expert in NAS' but I understand them well enough to have concluded that they are not optimum for my situation.

One has to start by asking, "What is the problem to be solved?" For me it was how to stream audio and video to my downstairs HTPC without any audible noise. Ten years ago when I first set up an HTPC with a macmini I couldn't use direct attached spinning HDDs (all that was available at the time) for the HTPC because they were too noisy. So I just shared out a data drive over ethernet from my MacPro tower and later another macmini to the HTPC. Worked well enough with some occasional network disconnects. Today, we have large NAS type HDDs that are very quiet and, of course, SSDs which are completely silent. So I can simply attached them to my HTPC and get faster, more reliable streaming with no noise. And since it is all on my wired network it is easy to back up everything from my upstairs machine. So why would I add another NAS machine to my network when direct attached storage solves my original problem simpler, better and cheaper?

I fully appreciate that NAS's are appropriate for many situations, just not mine.

PS: I built a cheap NAS from an existing pentium pc tower I had on hand. Since it was a tower that could hold a lot of HDDs, I used it to pool all these 4TB spinners and 500GB SSDs I had laying around that were not very useful individually but combined in a pool very useful as another backup device. I still use it today but not as a NAS.

 

[smirking]

If it's just a USB-Drive connected to a Thunderbolt port I would look in System Information if it is even using USB 3.0 and not 2.0. That could happen sometimes with the wrong cable, even if it supports much faster connections.

This. I was going to suggest making sure the OP had the right cable. I had a network file storage drive that has always been frustratingly slow. While upgrading my wifi recently, I discovered why. I had it connected with a Cat 5 ethernet cable. 🤦‍♂️‍

I thought it was a Cat 6 cable for all of these years that I've been cursing that drive.