What external storage solutions are you going to use with the Mac Studio

[transmaster]

What SSD drives would you consider in terms of optimal price / reliability ratio, dear experts?

Always Samsung they are available in up to 8 TB of capacity. I have 6 Samsung EVO's 250GB to 2TB some have been in use for 6 years with zero problems.

Memory & Storage Devices | Samsung US

Upgrade your devices with Samsung memory & storage solutions. Shop high-performance SSDs, memory cards, and flash drives for reliable and fast data transfers.

www.samsung.com

 

[transmaster]

For SD cards I use Sandisk and Samsung. I have Sandisk SD cards that are more than 10 years old going strong just no longer in a usable capacity.

 

[transmaster]

It just dawned on me that I have a SD card slot on the Mac Studio I have not stuffed yet. looks like a 512GB card is the largest I can get. Update! Sandisk has a 1TB SDCX Pro card, ordered and I will have it on the 24th.

 

[transmaster]

Here is a little bit of history for you. I just purchased a 1TB SD card for my Studio. You all know the size of an SDCX card. Here is a photo of the first 2.5 GB HDD, and IBM 3380 it was introduced in 1980. I have the motor off of one of these, it weighs 90 pounds.

 

[MediaGary]

Here is a little bit of history for you. I just purchased a 1TB SD card for my Studio. You all know the size of an SDCX card. Here is a photo of the first 2.5 GB HDD, and IBM 3380 it was introduced in 1980. I have the motor off of one of these, it weighs 90 pounds.


View attachment 2204916

Holy Flashback Batman! I was an IBM Customer Engineer, and this was one of the last products I worked on before I went into other jobs within the company.

 

[transmaster]

Here is another blast from the past. This is the cutest HDD ever made.

 

[chfilm]

I’m considering swapping my 2019 Mac Pro for a Mac Studio ‘23 but I currently have a sonnet 4x4 raid card with 4x 2TB Samsung Evos installed plus an extra 2TB on a single pci Adapter.
Im willing to sacrifice that single blade but the other four would be great to keep together in some external raid enclosure with TB4- I’m aware of the loss in speed but 2500mb/s should still be enough honestly. Any thoughts?

 

[transmaster]

I’m considering swapping my 2019 Mac Pro for a Mac Studio ‘23 but I currently have a sonnet 4x4 raid card with 4x 2TB Samsung Evos installed plus an extra 2TB on a single pci Adapter.
Im willing to sacrifice that single blade but the other four would be great to keep together in some external raid enclosure with TB4- I’m aware of the loss in speed but 2500mb/s should still be enough honestly. Any thoughts?

Just get a Seagate Hub, I have a 14 TB version of it on My Mac Studio works great. You can do what I now would have done had I had the knowledge at the time. The Seagate is formatted in exFat so both a Mac, and a PC can read and write it. But now since I am only going to use this drive on the MS I should have formatted it in APFS. Too late now I have about 10GB's loaded on it. Samsung has it SSD's on sale and the 8TB SSD is $449.99. I have a 4TB version formatted in APFS in an external case and it is considerably faster than the Seagate. You cannot plug it directly into the MS but plugged in via a power USB hub is works great. Of course you could simply put your SSD's in external enclosures Like I did with the 4TB SSD.

 

[Melbourne Park]

test

 

[Melbourne Park]

Will my 2 year old HighPoint raid card (which is in my classic mac 5,1) work well in an external PCI box hung off a Mac Studio? Currently its got two 2TB NVME cards in raid format ... the Raid is run by the Mac's Disk utility. The classic still boots from an internal SSD.

Will a Studio's disk utility run an external Raid? Even if it did, would the bottleneck of the thunderbolt port make RAID speed not worthwhile?

I doubt the card is worth much and also who would buy used NVME cards (although they still have 3 years of warranty)? Versus spend a heck of a lot of money for extra hard disk capacity in the Mac Studio, and then maybe going to a NAS ... I have quite a lot of spinning drives in the Classic.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

I have an Acasis thunderbolt enclosure with a Samsung EVO 970. It runs way too hot: 155°F. I doubt whether this will be reliable in the long term. Samsung told me that their Ssds are only internally in the computer supported.

 

[dimme]

Acasis thunderbolt enclosure

That just near the higher end of the opening temperature, so you have little room. I using a OWC thunderbay4 mini. It's slower because it used SATA drives but it has a fan and keeps my disk at 21C.

 

[Fravin]

View attachment 2204916

Who is the guy pictured? Is he still alive?

 

[Shamgar]

Will my 2 year old HighPoint raid card (which is in my classic mac 5,1) work well in an external PCI box hung off a Mac Studio? Currently its got two 2TB NVME cards in raid format ... the Raid is run by the Mac's Disk utility. The classic still boots from an internal SSD.

Will a Studio's disk utility run an external Raid? Even if it did, would the bottleneck of the thunderbolt port make RAID speed not worthwhile?

Anything in a Thunderbolt enclosure will report back to the Mac as a proper PCIe device. From a hardware level, the RAID card would continue to work but I can't vouch for any drivers being Apple Silicon compatible. I have a two NVMe drives in a RAID 0 in a Sabrent Dual Enclosure over thunderbolt with the array being managed by macOS. So that works, and I would recommend getting a drive enclosure rather than a PCIe chassis in your case for cost and simplicity.

My external NVMe drives are actually slowed down by being in RAID as the Thunderbolt bus is a bottleneck and they have to deal with RAID overhead. They would be faster as separate drives in separate enclosures. I already had the drives from my previous hackintosh and this was a solution intended for capacity and good enough performance.

 

[Melbourne Park]

Anything in a Thunderbolt enclosure will report back to the Mac as a proper PCIe device. From a hardware level, the RAID card would continue to work but I can't vouch for any drivers being Apple Silicon compatible. I have a two NVMe drives in a RAID 0 in a Sabrent Dual Enclosure over thunderbolt with the array being managed by macOS. So that works, and I would recommend getting a drive enclosure rather than a PCIe chassis in your case for cost and simplicity.

My external NVMe drives are actually slowed down by being in RAID as the Thunderbolt bus is a bottleneck and they have to deal with RAID overhead. They would be faster as separate drives in separate enclosures. I already had the drives from my previous hackintosh and this was a solution intended for capacity and good enough performance.

Thanks for the reply.

My RAID card is High Point SSD7101A-1 and it is compatible with even the current OS. In order to do so Highpoint has new drivers. I think encryption though is a problem (which isn't an issue for me).

I guess I'll check prices. My card is still sold but it has been superseded. I presume it might be worth a little bit. Highpoint say:

"HighPoint Thunderbolt 3 products, such as the RocketStor 6661A PCIe Expansion chassis and RocketStor 6662A Hardware RAID Enclosure, require x4 lanes to perform optimally. These devices are capable of delivering up to 2800MB/s of transfer performance using a Thunderbolt 3 connection. "

Highpoint stresses not to use a T-4 enclosure as they are slower for data.

But the cost of their PCI adapter is in my dollars, $Au608. While a single T-3 NVME drive enclosure, seems to be around $180, for a brand I have not heard of. Presuming my RAID card is worth nothing, with a cost of three external no name branded T-3 enclosures costing me $Au540 (Australian dollars) I think I'd be better off with a PCI t-3 enclosure, and then trial whether RAID was worthwhile.

In my Australian situation, I could add another 2 TB NVME cards I(so an extra 4TB) to the RAID card (which already has 4TB) in its (new) external enclosure, for $Au340.

So for me to get 8 TB (but maybe RAID would work poorly) would cost me $Au950. And of course some hassle. Plus OS upgrade issues too. Meanwhile the Apple solution for me would cost $Au2,200. Less the cost of me selling the card I have and its two NVME 2 TB cards. If I got $500 the 2 x 2TB cards and the card itself, then the overall cost for me would be an extra $Au750 to get 8TB inside the Apple Studio. Despite it costing a heap for memory. As shown below.

Apple's storage costs a lot more. Using NVME cards, the cost per TB for me is around $Au88 per TB. In comparison, Apple charges

The cost for me with a Studio using its (very fast though) internal drive options are:
1 TB: $Au200 - Price per TB is $Au200 v $Au88 per TB (WD Black NVME M2 770 $Au88)
2 TB: $Au600 - Price per TB is $Au300 v $Au88 per TB (WD Black NVME M2 770 $Au176)
4 TB $Au1,000 - Price per TB is $Au250 v $Au88 per TB (WD Black NVMEs M2 770 $Au350)
8 TB $Au2,200 - Price per TB is $Au275 v $Au88 per TB (WD Black NVMEs M2 770 $Au700)

In my case I suspect I'm better to get worse CPU performance and have more disk capacity. After all the base m2 Studio will be a lot faster than my 5,1 Mac Pro ...

But gee ... going to Windows would save me a lot ... I could pop my card in and add some cards for $Au350 and therefor save $Au1,850. I imagine the computer would cost less too ...

 

[Middleman-77]

Anything in a Thunderbolt enclosure will report back to the Mac as a proper PCIe device. From a hardware level, the RAID card would continue to work but I can't vouch for any drivers being Apple Silicon compatible. I have a two NVMe drives in a RAID 0 in a Sabrent Dual Enclosure over thunderbolt with the array being managed by macOS. So that works, and I would recommend getting a drive enclosure rather than a PCIe chassis in your case for cost and simplicity.

My external NVMe drives are actually slowed down by being in RAID as the Thunderbolt bus is a bottleneck and they have to deal with RAID overhead. They would be faster as separate drives in separate enclosures. I already had the drives from my previous hackintosh and this was a solution intended for capacity and good enough performance.

A relative of mine bought an Areca 8TB TB4 RAID unit last year for his Mac Studio. It works totally fine under Monterey, so I would say yes the drivers (for Areca at least) work fine under Apple Silicon. As for Highpoint, it would be interesting to see if they will release new drivers for their existing range of cards for the 2023 Mac Pro.

 

[JWSpaceMan]

I wish there was a way to sync an external storage device to my iCloud. From what I can tell it is not currently possible. Am I missing something?

 

[mjoshi123]

I wish there was a way to sync an external storage device to my iCloud. From what I can tell it is not currently possible. Am I missing something?

What will be cost of getting iCloud for 12TB drive sync ? Do you think it will be practical solution ? I keep two drives attached and do CCC job of copying from drive A to Drive B everyweek, this way in case of failure on drive 1 there is drive 2 to work with, yes in case of house burns down or something catastrophic thing happens to my area I wont have any data from external drives, but for most important data that is in my documents/pictures folder (only family pics) I can always sync it to my OneDrive as Office 365 provides me with 1TB of online storage and that is sufficient for it. For rest of client work, most of work that is delivered stays online on my smugmug gallery. So iCloud - although good, it can become pricey for storing larger amount of data.

 

[transmaster]

People I know in California who have a safe deposit boxes at the bank it is where they keep backups to their external backup drives. What they do depending on the season in every couple of weeks or once a month they swap out the drive in the safe deposit box for one that is updated. They started doing this before cloud storage and they see no reason to change.

 

[JWSpaceMan]

What will be cost of getting iCloud for 12TB drive sync ? Do you think it will be practical solution ? I keep two drives attached and do CCC job of copying from drive A to Drive B everyweek, this way in case of failure on drive 1 there is drive 2 to work with, yes in case of house burns down or something catastrophic thing happens to my area I wont have any data from external drives, but for most important data that is in my documents/pictures folder (only family pics) I can always sync it to my OneDrive as Office 365 provides me with 1TB of online storage and that is sufficient for it. For rest of client work, most of work that is delivered stays online on my smugmug gallery. So iCloud - although good, it can become pricey for storing larger amount of data.

To my knowledge, it is not possible to get that much iCloud storage currently, even if you wanted it. And, yes, it would certainly be pricey if it were available. I do think it is long past due for Apple to bump the tiers on their iCloud pricing (increase the free storage starter allocation significantly and likewise bump the caps on the $1/mo, $3/mo, and $10/mo subscriptions). Adding the ability to stack plans to achieve any desired amount of storage would also be good for certain users.

My own problem is somewhat the opposite though. I do currently pay for the iCloud 2TB tier, and it is actually plenty of storage at the moment. It lets me keep my files up to date across several devices, so that I can work on projects seamlessly at the office, on my laptop, or at home. This is great, and has transformed how I work. But, some of my machines don't have enough storage to locally track my full iCloud subscription. The dynamic downloading works pretty well, but I really prefer to have local copies, and have plenty of external USB drive space to hold them. At the same time, there is additional cloud storage that I'm paying for which exceeds my main work file synchronization needs.

So, there are several related things I would like to be able to do: 1) keep the local copy of my main iCloud folder on an external drive on certain machines. 2) stipulate other locations (besides iCloud Drive, Documents, Desktop) that should synchronize with my cloud storage. 3) stipulate per-machine whether these other archives should appear locally and where the local copy is located on the physical disk if so.

If some or all of that can actually already be done (via symlinks or whatever) I would love to know about it.

 

[Melbourne Park]

A relative of mine bought an Areca 8TB TB4 RAID unit last year for his Mac Studio. It works totally fine under Monterey, so I would say yes the drivers (for Areca at least) work fine under Apple Silicon. As for Highpoint, it would be interesting to see if they will release new drivers for their existing range of cards for the 2023 Mac Pro.

Anything in a Thunderbolt enclosure will report back to the Mac as a proper PCIe device. From a hardware level, the RAID card would continue to work but I can't vouch for any drivers being Apple Silicon compatible. I have a two NVMe drives in a RAID 0 in a Sabrent Dual Enclosure over thunderbolt with the array being managed by macOS. So that works, and I would recommend getting a drive enclosure rather than a PCIe chassis in your case for cost and simplicity.

My external NVMe drives are actually slowed down by being in RAID as the Thunderbolt bus is a bottleneck and they have to deal with RAID overhead. They would be faster as separate drives in separate enclosures. I already had the drives from my previous hackintosh and this was a solution intended for capacity and good enough performance.

I contacted High Point who got back very quickly.

They confirmed that their highest speed with an external enclosure (they sell a RS6661A external Thunderbolt 3 PCI adapter) with the SSD7101A-1 RAID card was 2800 Mb/sec. The bottleneck being due to Thunderbolt. They did not recommend using the Apple RAID software - rather recommended using their own. So that would work OK I guess. Hence I don't think the Mac itself would slow down when using an external RAID PCI Card enclosure with a RAID card like the SSD7101A-1.

They did not confirm that their High Point SSD7101A-1 RAID card would work in the new Mac Pro. I have since asked them whether the new Mac Pro will handle the SSD7101A-1 RAID card - but I did tell them I was not going to buy such a Mac Pro!! They did say the 2019 Mac Pro works ... but did not say if the 8,1 M processor version works ... I presume they do not yet know.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

I have an Acasis thunderbolt enclosure with a Samsung EVO 970. It runs way too hot: 155°F. I doubt whether this will be reliable in the long term. Samsung told me that their Ssds are only internally in the computer supported.

I now use a Samsung 980 Pro instead of the EVO 970 plus in the Acasis. Temperature was significantly lower after putting the enclosure on the Mac Studio. It is now not hot anymore. Problem solved.

 

[crazyhorse90210]

RAID 0, 2x: TEAMGROUP T-Force CARDEA Zero Z440 2TB in ACASIS TBU401 Enclosures
Total cost was $378 (no sales tax in OR).

This is on an M2 Studio.

Internal seems kinda slow now (M2 Internal SSD):

Just went back to the M1 Studio and am getting intended results on the Internal SSD.

Did Apple split the SSD up on the M1 and not on the M2 like the MacBooks???

 

[Pressure]

RAID 0, 2x: TEAMGROUP T-Force CARDEA Zero Z440 2TB in ACASIS TBU401 Enclosures
Total cost was $378 (no sales tax in OR).

This is on an M2 Studio.
View attachment 2228952View attachment 2228948

Internal seems kinda slow now (M2 Internal SSD):


View attachment 2228953View attachment 2228954

Just went back to the M1 Studio and am getting intended results on the Internal SSD.

Did Apple split the SSD up on the M1 and not on the M2 like the MacBooks???

View attachment 2228963View attachment 2228962

Yes, they use bigger capacity NAND chips but fewer. You can see it doesn't matter in any real workflows as the two last lines show you. Random read and write are basically the same.

 

[handheldgames]

I contacted High Point who got back very quickly.

They confirmed that their highest speed with an external enclosure (they sell a RS6661A external Thunderbolt 3 PCI adapter) with the SSD7101A-1 RAID card was 2800 Mb/sec. The bottleneck being due to Thunderbolt. They did not recommend using the Apple RAID software - rather recommended using their own. So that would work OK I guess. Hence I don't think the Mac itself would slow down when using an external RAID PCI Card enclosure with a RAID card like the SSD7101A-1.

They did not confirm that their High Point SSD7101A-1 RAID card would work in the new Mac Pro. I have since asked them whether the new Mac Pro will handle the SSD7101A-1 RAID card - but I did tell them I was not going to buy such a Mac Pro!! They did say the 2019 Mac Pro works ... but did not say if the 8,1 M processor version works ... I presume they do not yet know.

I use the SSD7101A-1 from a 5,1 Mac Pro with the Mac Studio using an TB3 x16 EGPU enclosure. The OWC Node Titan TB3 Enclosure, based on the JHL-7440 Chipset, has large file top speeds are higher than the Sonnet Breakaway Box that uses the JHL-6540 chipset. Although... there is a small percentage drop on small files.