External SSDs - how practical are they in reality?

[DankeBrutus]

From a quick bit of research the OWC Express 1M2 seems good

Anecdotally, I have purchased several OWC products and have never had a problem with any of them.

I have a 2TB OWC Thunderbolt enclosure plugged into my M4 mini. I don't recall a single instance of an unexpected disconnect or a "drive not safely ejected" notification. I also have a plain old USB enclosure with a 1TB SSD for a local Time Machine backup to go along with my network one. I've had that one disconnect a handful of times over the past 2-ish years.

 

[inventor7777]

I use a MoKiN 40Gbps NVMe enclosure and it works very well. However, under high sustained writes (like a 500GB copy) modern SSDs like the 9100 PRO get very hot, so keep that in mind.

 

[bzgnyc2]

Huh... I never knew that either. Good to know that it's just a warning, even though I hit Eject anyway.

I would continue to hit Eject before disconnecting any drive. Modern journaled filesystems such a JHFS+ and APFS are more resilient than previous PC and UNIX filesystems but they still aren't designed for random (to them) disconnects.

Recent example: intending to move one ejected drive to another system, accidentally unplugged an HDD with JHFS+. Plugged it back in and immediately ran Disk Aid. All good. Later doing some testing with it for unrelated reasons on another system, noticed that performance was down by 1/3rd (which is more painful with HDD than SSD). Ran First Aid, moved it back to the original system, repeated, etc. Still down by 1/3rd. More important than the actual performance was whether this was early signs of drive of failure? No indication elsewhere so tried one last thing: ran fsck_hfs at the command-line to rebuild the catalog btree. Performance instantly up 50% (i.e. returned to previous).

APFS is probably more robust but I am sure it's better to eject safely than not. Plus you never know when macOS, etc decides to write to a drive. If you haven't disabled Spotlight indexing, it could very well be scanning the drive and writing to its index when you yank it from the system. Which may only lead to a corrupted index that will be rebuilt automatically the next time it is plugged in but, again, best to always hit Eject like you were doing...

 

[boswald]

I would continue to hit Eject before disconnecting any drive. Modern journaled filesystems such a JHFS+ and APFS are more resilient than previous PC and UNIX filesystems but they still aren't designed for random (to them) disconnects.

Recent example: intending to move one ejected drive to another system, accidentally unplugged an HDD with JHFS+. Plugged it back in and immediately ran Disk Aid. All good. Later doing some testing with it for unrelated reasons on another system, noticed that performance was down by 1/3rd (which is more painful with HDD than SSD). Ran First Aid, moved it back to the original system, repeated, etc. Still down by 1/3rd. More important than the actual performance was whether this was early signs of drive of failure? No indication elsewhere so tried one last thing: ran fsck_hfs at the command-line to rebuild the catalog btree. Performance instantly up 50% (i.e. returned to previous).

APFS is probably more robust but I am sure it's better to eject safely than not. Plus you never know when macOS, etc decides to write to a drive. If you haven't disabled Spotlight indexing, it could very well be scanning the drive and writing to its index when you yank it from the system. Which may only lead to a corrupted index that will be rebuilt automatically the next time it is plugged in but, again, best to always hit Eject like you were doing...

Thanks for the information. Now it's even more important to me that I hit Eject whenever possible.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

Hi all,

This is a silly question, but I am keen to hear some real world views.
How well do external SSD enclosures work?

I'm thinking of getting a 40gbps one (tops out at 3,500mpbs speed) and chucking a 2TB nvme in.
Is it ok to just leave it plugged into the back on my M4 mini 24/7? Do you run into any issues waking up from/putting the Mac to sleep and the drive not waking up/sleeping, for example?

Thanks!

Unpopular opinion: I think they are far superior to internal units, especially with Apple silicon. The advancements in dats throughput have put USB4/TB4/TB5 near parallel. I have an OWC express 1M2 with a measly 2000 GB/s SSD and it still moves 100GB in 1m flat. The enclosure supports up to 6000 GB/s. The drive remains 1-2C under the internal unit thanks to its passive cooling fins. I moved up from the ZikeDrive 666 which was running the SSD at 60C! They get hot pushing all that data. My PC has a 2TB 6000 GB/s WD 850 that sits around 50C.

I have MacDrive installed so I can easily just yank the unit from the enclosure and slap it into the second bay for native transfer speeds (my Mac also acts as a file share across my home).

Outside of reaching parity with the internal SSD speeds, it also acts as a TM backup. I have sliced off a 1GB quota from the 4TB capacity for my backups. Piece of mind, blazing internal speeds, and a reliable, portable backup made me entirely rethink added more capacity to my Mac Studio! I feel like externals are a pro strat!

And OWC has earned a top spot in my books (though I can’t stand the LED on the front that’s as bright as the sun and always on, blinking when in use, but a sticker solved that real quick).

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

APFS is probably more robust but I am sure it's better to eject safely than not.

Yeah it really is. Almost no chance of data loss even if you yanked it during copy. Apfs was meant to solve a lot of those problems. But as you said, better safe than sorry and ejecting takes a second. Just good form.