Upgrading Mac Studio - internal upgrade vs external drive

[maflynn]

As the poll states, we have two options outside of upgrading the storage at time of purchase. Both have the respective set of positives and negatives.

My initial option was to buy an external TB5 external 2TB drive for about $360, my out of pocket expenses will be 260 thanks to amazon gift cards. The other option is to replace the nands inside the studio. There's a number of companies that offer these now a days, but Polysoft seems the most reputable, and respectable.

The risks are fairly obvious in doing the internal upgrade - damaging something during the procedure, thus voiding your warrenty and having a dead Mac. Luke Miani illustrates this in the video below While it wasn't a nightmare situation, it does show how things can go south very quickly.

The downsides of external storage is that when the mac goes to sleep the TB devices disconnect. Not the end of the world but an annoyance. Dependong on the enclosure, heat can be an issue, and finally how easily can you integrate the external storage with your workflow, i.e., do you move your home folder (where maybe an OS update could give you some problems), or just using it for you data.

Costs:
2TB from Polysoft $379 vs.
2TB Sabrent drive 370 or
2TB OWC Ultra Envoy $350 or
2TB Acasis + 2TB SSD $360

 

[mcnallym]

I bought a sonnet enclosure, then a 4 port highpoint Mac OS supported nvme card. Then have

Mediastore - general storage and where copy recordings too
Fcp import - where transcode the recording to prores
Fcp library - where library resides
Fcp export - where export fcp to
Then transcode to Apple TV/h.265 on mediastore using handbrake and do the metadata import with iflicks.
Then import into iTunes library residing on nas share mounted at login.

Never had issue with enclosure dropping offline with sleep.

All that sits on the internal is the home directory, apps and the OS.
All the working storage is external.

Even if upgraded the internal storage or specced out the storage when bouht would still want the extra drives.

 

[pshufd]

As the poll states, we have two options outside of upgrading the storage at time of purchase. Both have the respective set of positives and negatives.

My initial option was to buy an external TB5 external 2TB drive for about $360, my out of pocket expenses will be 260 thanks to amazon gift cards. The other option is to replace the nands inside the studio. There's a number of companies that offer these now a days, but Polysoft seems the most reputable, and respectable.

The risks are fairly obvious in doing the internal upgrade - damaging something during the procedure, thus voiding your warrenty and having a dead Mac. Luke Miani illustrates this in the video below While it wasn't a nightmare situation, it does show how things can go south very quickly.

The downsides of external storage is that when the mac goes to sleep the TB devices disconnect. Not the end of the world but an annoyance. Dependong on the enclosure, heat can be an issue, and finally how easily can you integrate the external storage with your workflow, i.e., do you move your home folder (where maybe an OS update could give you some problems), or just using it for you data.

Costs:
2TB from Polysoft $379 vs.
2TB Sabrent drive 370 or
2TB OWC Ultra Envoy $350 or
2TB Acasis + 2TB SSD $360

OWC 1M2 $120, Samsung 990 Pro 4 TB $300 = $420.

I have my 1M2 directly connected to one of the back ports and it's available in the rest of the house all the time. It takes a bit of time to wake up the Studio when I connect to it when the Studio is asleep but I don't get disconnects and reconnects on it. This is running off of USB4 though, and not Thunderbolt. The drive supports USB3, USB4, Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, but, when connected to my Studio, it connects via USB4.

So it's possible that there is a Thunderbolt 5 issue but I'd expect there to be a thread on it somewhere given how long the M4 Pro mini has been out.

My setup is designed to be portable. I have similar setups between my Studio, MacBook Pro and iMac Pro and can just move the external SSD to one of the other machines if something happened to my Studio or it was busy for an extended period of time.

 

[maflynn]

All that sits on the internal is the home directory, apps and the OS.
All the working storage is external.

Yeah, I think that's probably the safest approach, and I think I can do something similar with my data needs

My setup is designed to be portable.

For me its really risk vs. reward. If an external drive gives you 90% of the level integration and ease of use as internal storage, then is it worth the risk of taking the studio apart. With TB5, you'll get near internal speeds, so there shouldn't be any noticeable latency. Less so, if we're just talking about data storage

The upgrading mac studio thread here and Apple Silicon Soldered SSD Upgrade Thread in Apple Silicon (Arm) Macs forum are quite active. So there's a segment of the membership who are fully committed to upgrading their internal storage.

 

[Ray2]

My OWC 1M2 does not skip a beat when my M2 Studio sleeps and wakes. With a 4tb WD SN850X it runs within 100mb/s of the 1tb internal. Runs cool though I thermal pasted a heat sink on the bottom as that’s where the controller is located. I like KISS.

Ordering right considers external storage options.

EDIT: I just remembered, I use Jettison to for the menu bar control. But it also remounts on wake. The externals may be ejecting and I don't know/see it.

 

[JSRinUK]

I’m prepared to wait for affordable TB5 drives to come along. For now, I’m making do with Crucial X9 Pro (using about 3TB over three drives). They don’t feel “slow” for my use-case and the amusing thing is that they’re not massively slower using the front USB ports as they are using the TB5 ports.

I guess I’m not doing what requires super-fast speeds.

I did make the decision that, for me, I wasn’t going lower than 1TB internal. Price for more is just nonsense, but less capacity will one day annoy me (just like 512GB does in my Surface Pro 6). If my use-case was just a “daily office machine” and nothing intensive or requiring space, I’d undoubtedly have gone for a base model of something.

 

[pshufd]

I’m prepared to wait for affordable TB5 drives to come along. For now, I’m making do with Crucial X9 Pro (using about 3TB over three drives). They don’t feel “slow” for my use-case and the amusing thing is that they’re not massively slower using the front USB ports as they are using the TB5 ports.

I guess I’m not doing what requires super-fast speeds.

I did make the decision that, for me, I wasn’t going lower than 1TB internal. Price for more is just nonsense, but less capacity will one day annoy me (just like 512GB does in my Surface Pro 6). If my use-case was just a “daily office machine” and nothing intensive or requiring space, I’d undoubtedly have gone for a base model of something.

At some point in the future, probably M5 or M6, the base models will have Thunderbolt 5 and the options and pricing should get a lot better. There are already those buying M4 base minis and running everything off TB4 or USB4 external drives, especially as the external drives are often faster than the internal drive. I see fast external storage becoming a more widespread thing.

I do not need 3000 MBps speeds as I was running a USB 3.1-1 external SSD before upgrading. But there are a few things that I do with video files where the speed is nice and saves me some time. I definitely don't need 14K MBps transfer rates but 8K video will near mainstream at some point in the future.

 

[JSRinUK]

At some point in the future, probably M5 or M6, the base models will have Thunderbolt 5 and the options and pricing should get a lot better. There are already those buying M4 base minis and running everything off TB4 or USB4 external drives, especially as the external drives are often faster than the internal drive. I see fast external storage becoming a more widespread thing.

I do not need 3000 MBps speeds as I was running a USB 3.1-1 external SSD before upgrading. But there are a few things that I do with video files where the speed is nice and saves me some time. I definitely don't need 14K MBps transfer rates but 8K video will near mainstream at some point in the future.

I’m still using a bunch of USB spinning drives (20TB and 8TB, and lower), and also some bus-powered spinners. I remember the change from 5,400RPM to 7,200RPM internals. I’m pleased with the progress of SSDs, but I feel that what I have is fast enough for what I do for now.

That said, I do have some rather meaty LLMs on my Crucial drives, and I wouldn’t object to them taking a little less time to load up!

 

[maflynn]

I finally settled on a solution - I opted for the OWC Ultra Envoy. I thought about internal vs. external (hence this thread), but the risks of opening up my shiny new (and fully functioning) Mac was far greater then benefit of having the internal storage upgraded.

 

[pshufd]

I finally settled on a solution - I opted for the OWC Ultra Envoy. I thought about internal vs. external (hence this thread), but the risks of opening up my shiny new (and fully functioning) Mac was far greater then benefit of having the internal storage upgraded.

I didn't realize that they were that expensive but I guess the SSD is matched to the enclosure.

 

[maflynn]

I didn't realize that they were that expensive but I guess the SSD is matched to the enclosure.

I think in another year the price will go down, I opted for the 2TB varient, and while I'm sure I could have gotten a TB3 with more capacity, I figured having an external drive having near the same speed as my internal drive will be a plus

 

[haralds]

The downsides of external storage is that when the mac goes to sleep the TB devices disconnect.

Mine don't disconnect. Neither does a USB-C drive in my dock.