So I was trying out the External OWC 4M2 NVME Enclosure - it is thunderbolt 3 so of course can work with Mac Pro if you need more drives than it can fit inside, or if you need to move it around - like to another system, i.e Mac Studio.
One big advantage of the Mac Pro is having nearly silent internal possibilities for PCIe storage - and one of the drawbacks of this enclosure is a fairly annoying loud fan, has a high pitched noise.
Of course, NVME drives need to be cooled somehow - so you need either to replace the fan with a better one, or mcguyver some type of solution.
I much prefer NVME drives to SSD or other drives, because they're much faster, often much more silent, and prices have decreased dramatically recently - you can get a 2TB Samsung Pro for $120! It used to be nearly $300 last year, that's really crazy.
I decided the most elegant solution was to add heatsinks and thermal pads to each NVME in the enclosure - that's what is normally done on PC motherboards and similar, and should help. Plus, it's 0 noise.
It's good enough for what it is, but a few drawbacks compared to internal solutions for Mac Pro:
1. It's external, so obviously takes up an extra TB port, power cable, and desk space, albeit it's small in size
2. I think has a 2TB drive capacity only, so no 4TB NVME - unless some work, not sure on this one 100%
3. Each lane is limited to 700mb/s, so 2800mb/s raid 0 for 4 fast NVME is the top speed with TB3, compared to double that with an internal Mac Pro PCIe NVME card, and even more if it's the newer PCIe Gen 4 Mac Pro 2023.
For now, it's a decent solution with decent speeds - I transfer a lot of large video files, and work from the drive often, which sometimes can saturate regular SSD raid 0 speeds of 1500mb/s or under, so having nearly 2800mb/s is much better - and it keeps that speed with 4x Samsung Evo NVME drives even in a very large transfer. (Some cheaper NVME have a speed drop off in large transfers after their cache fills up, that's why I like the Evo, or the Pro versions are even better for sustained transfers)
One big advantage of the Mac Pro is having nearly silent internal possibilities for PCIe storage - and one of the drawbacks of this enclosure is a fairly annoying loud fan, has a high pitched noise.
Of course, NVME drives need to be cooled somehow - so you need either to replace the fan with a better one, or mcguyver some type of solution.
I much prefer NVME drives to SSD or other drives, because they're much faster, often much more silent, and prices have decreased dramatically recently - you can get a 2TB Samsung Pro for $120! It used to be nearly $300 last year, that's really crazy.
I decided the most elegant solution was to add heatsinks and thermal pads to each NVME in the enclosure - that's what is normally done on PC motherboards and similar, and should help. Plus, it's 0 noise.
It's good enough for what it is, but a few drawbacks compared to internal solutions for Mac Pro:
1. It's external, so obviously takes up an extra TB port, power cable, and desk space, albeit it's small in size
2. I think has a 2TB drive capacity only, so no 4TB NVME - unless some work, not sure on this one 100%
3. Each lane is limited to 700mb/s, so 2800mb/s raid 0 for 4 fast NVME is the top speed with TB3, compared to double that with an internal Mac Pro PCIe NVME card, and even more if it's the newer PCIe Gen 4 Mac Pro 2023.
For now, it's a decent solution with decent speeds - I transfer a lot of large video files, and work from the drive often, which sometimes can saturate regular SSD raid 0 speeds of 1500mb/s or under, so having nearly 2800mb/s is much better - and it keeps that speed with 4x Samsung Evo NVME drives even in a very large transfer. (Some cheaper NVME have a speed drop off in large transfers after their cache fills up, that's why I like the Evo, or the Pro versions are even better for sustained transfers)
