Hello all, I have a Maiwo k1717 with an SN 850X and I just bought another SN 850X on sale for $550. Would everyone agree it makes sense to buy another Maiwo 1717 for $45 instead of buying a new/expensive $300 TB5 enclosure for the purpose 4k video editing? I'm not sure if anything I do would utilize the TB5 speeds at the moment on my M4 MBP Pro, so I think it's best to just run the 40Gbps enclosures for a year and wait for the TB5 enclosures to come down in price. Let me know your thoughts on any new TB5 enclosures that might be worth the upgrade.
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Thunderbolt 3 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosures
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Hello Black Diesel,
Just went through the same decision last week. Adding another external enclosure brought a new issue. To recap what enclosures I am using:
~2@ 8TB WD 850X Black in an Acacias 405ProMax Dual Drive Docking Station w/fan set up as a 16TB DU RAID 0. This is used for photography Data storage. Read speed is 2,8xx, Write is 2,5xx MB/s. This unit has a 100 watt standard size USB-C wall plug for power.
~2@ 4TB WD 850X Black in 2 Maiwo K1717 enclosures set up as a 8TB Disk Utility RAID 0. This is used for all other Data storage. When these are attached to 2 TB ports on my M2 Studio Max, Read speed is 5,4xx and Write speed is 3,3xx.
Because the Dual drive unit with 8TB SSD’s has a (super quiet) fan, it is running 5 to 7 C lower than the Maiwo 4TB SSD enclosures do. Last week I added an additional singe 8TB WD 850X Black @$530 to be my external start up drive for my M2 Studio Max. For an enclosure I almost bought another K1717, but knowing the 8TB WD Black run a bit hotter, I instead decided to get an enclosure with a fan and a On/Off switch for it. I went with the Acacias 405Pro M1 at $93. This enclosure is bus powered. Read speeds are 2,8xx and Write speeds are almost identical. I chose longevity of the 8TB SSD's, by running bit cooler, vs a slightly quicker speed.
I hooked up the new enclosure to the M2 Studio and it would not appear on my desktop! After a bit of research, it seems the M2/M4 Mac Studios, just like the new M4 Mac mini, have a somewhat limited ability to run more than 2 USB4 or TB 4/5 enclosures via bus power. My Acacias Dual Drive unit has its own power source, but the Studio still would not recognize the new 3rd drive. I switched the drives around and It would work if I unhooked the 2 Maiwo RAID units and went with the 16TB (powered) Dual drive RAID, the new 8TB in the Acacias 405Pro w/fan and an older Acacias 405 enclosure with a Crucial P3 4TB I use for startup on my 14” M1 MBP. So I can get 3 external enclosures, 1 a dual drive powered RAID, to work off the Studio ports.
The power limitation issue has a few threads on it here at MR, and in all cases adding a powered TB4 or TB5 hub has solved the issue. I have a couple year old OWC TB4 powered hub, which I attached the Maiwo 8TB RAID drives and 1 of my 27” displays to, and now all drives are recognized and working fine. However since the Hub splits 1 TB4 port into 3 the R/W speeds can drop in half, but with 2 working in a RAID 0 assembly, the R/W speeds are back up to 2,7xx-2,9XX MB/s. But not as fast as when both were hooked up to the Studio TB4 ports direct.
As it is now, all 4 of my external enclosures R&W speeds are performing very close to one another, around 29xx- 2,5xx R/W, which is just fine for me. I really don’t need faster right now as is still sooo much faster than my old HDD RAID units. Down the line I want to see a TB5 enclosure/hub that can accept 4 NVM’e 8TB drives (32TB total) and maintain the super high TB/5 speeds. When that happens then I will buy a new Mac Studio with TB5 ports and the TB/5 enclosure. But until then I am happy with my setup.
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