I am going to use a Treblet unit with a M.2 SSD in it. I am using it now with my Mini M1 and see about 1700 MB/sec read. For network storage I used a Synology NAS with 24 TB of available storage.
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What external storage solutions are you going to use with the Mac Studio
- Thread starter Baja63
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I used to own a MacPro5,1 with 4x 3.5" HDDs. Then I moved to a hackintosh with 3x 3.5" HDD and 2x 2.5" SSDs. I wanted to keep using 3.5" HDDs when I replaced my hackintosh with a Mac Studio.
I had a Sans Digital 4 bay external enclosure with USB3 and eSATA sitting in the closet and thought that it would be a perfect fit for my new Mac Studio...
Using USB3, I would get a bunch of "Did not eject properly" notifications every time I woke the Mac Studio from sleep. I purchased an app called Jettison that was supposed to eject external drives right before the system goes to sleep but it only worked some of the times and I still got those notifications...
Then, I purchased a Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor to use with my enclosure. I no longer got the "Did not eject properly" notifications but performance would fall off a cliff on large file transfers...
Finally, I decided to just add the 4 HDDs to my NAS and set up a separate volume to use as dedicated storage for my Mac Studio. Performance over 10GBase-T has been excellent. No more "Did not eject properly" notifications.
I had a Sans Digital 4 bay external enclosure with USB3 and eSATA sitting in the closet and thought that it would be a perfect fit for my new Mac Studio...
Using USB3, I would get a bunch of "Did not eject properly" notifications every time I woke the Mac Studio from sleep. I purchased an app called Jettison that was supposed to eject external drives right before the system goes to sleep but it only worked some of the times and I still got those notifications...
Then, I purchased a Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor to use with my enclosure. I no longer got the "Did not eject properly" notifications but performance would fall off a cliff on large file transfers...
Finally, I decided to just add the 4 HDDs to my NAS and set up a separate volume to use as dedicated storage for my Mac Studio. Performance over 10GBase-T has been excellent. No more "Did not eject properly" notifications.
I bought a newer Acasis enclosure and another Sabrent Rocket Plus 4TB (this time the disk was 3/4 full already when I did the test), and I got essentially the same results as before, with write speeds hovering around 2800 MB, and read speeds around 2600 MB. The new Acasis enclosure is a little smaller and lighter, which is nice.
Acasis enclosure: https://www.acasis.com/products/aca...nderbolt-3-4-usb3-2-3-1-3-0-2-0-type-c-tbu405
Sabrent SSD: https://sabrent.com/products/sb-rkt4p-4tb
Acasis enclosure: https://www.acasis.com/products/aca...nderbolt-3-4-usb3-2-3-1-3-0-2-0-type-c-tbu405
Sabrent SSD: https://sabrent.com/products/sb-rkt4p-4tb
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After reading this thread I picked up an Orico enclosure and the performance with a 2 TB WD850 is about 2800 read and 2600 write. However, every time my Studio goes to sleep I get the disk not ejected properly message that a few others have reported. Trying to decide if I want to return it for something else or just not let the Mac go to sleep. I have an older 1 TB SATA SSD in a Mokin case hooked up as well and it never has the issue - very annoying.
I have a OWC USB 3 enclosure on a M1 mini that the drives will disconnect on their own. I never let my M1 Mini sleep since it is my server. So you may want to see if you have the problem if the Mac never sleeps. I was working with OWC tech support and they are saying it's Apples problem. I have some inteck single usb to SATA boxes that work great, also my OWC thunderbolt box is also fine. I will be replacing the OWC USB 3 with something more reliable either USBC or TB..
Hey, have you tried this:
Then check out system preferences to make sure the put hard drives to sleep option is disabled. That option appears again after being hidden by Apple for the last couple of OS versions. This was the solution from Sonnet support when I had dismounting issues using their PCI-E SSD Host cards.
Hey, have you tried this:
Then check out system preferences to make sure the put hard drives to sleep option is disabled. That option appears again after being hidden by Apple for the last couple of OS versions. This was the solution from Sonnet support when I had dismounting issues using their PCI-E SSD Host cards.
That's ******.
Well, All I can say is my Studio Ultra is connected to 2 x OWC Mercury Elite Dual Mini's fully populated with Samsung SSD's and I haven't experienced any issues since Ive had it. Maybe an option in the future if your NAS solution becomes unwieldy 🤷♂️
Actually, I never buy any external enclosure for serious performance that isn't OWC. Brand loyalty, blah blah, but Ive been implemented solutions from them for multiple systems over the last 9 years and have rarely had an issue. The 5 x always on 2013 Mac Pro's connected to Thunderbay's were just so robust.
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Over the weekend I got a OWC Gemini https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3DKP2D/. I have two WD RED 4TB drives as my Photo working drives. The unit is nice but I may send it back because my drives runs on the warm side, 40C. The fan is in the back and the drive bays are surrounded by metal so the fan is cooling the electronics and not the drives. My other OWC cases the same drives run at 28C. So for 24/7 I think I may want a cooler setup. Not sure what to look at next.
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40c sounds fine to me. My room gets hotter than 28 in summer sometimes. I’d probably be disabling the fan at those temps and seeing how much noise I could get rid of vs heat. But that’s just me, still remember having systems that were almost too hot to touch but kept working.
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This is the speed I’m getting for one of the drives inside my OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini. It’s just one of the drives in JBOD mode so the enclosure itself should have no trouble handling double that when both drives are running.
The drive itself, a Samsung 4tb SATA SSD EVO something or other from 2 1/2 years ago.
I’m getting roughly 20% worse throughput compared to when the drive was housed on a Sonnet PCI-E sata card inside a 2019 Mac Pro. Slower than I hoped but expected. Access times and “wake the **** up” times are what I’m mostly interested in at this point however but they’re harder stats to find.
Can anyone share any benchmarks running a Thunderbay or similar TB3 SATA SSD external setup in JBOD / non raid mode? Interesting in how my unit compares.
The drive itself, a Samsung 4tb SATA SSD EVO something or other from 2 1/2 years ago.
I’m getting roughly 20% worse throughput compared to when the drive was housed on a Sonnet PCI-E sata card inside a 2019 Mac Pro. Slower than I hoped but expected. Access times and “wake the **** up” times are what I’m mostly interested in at this point however but they’re harder stats to find.
Can anyone share any benchmarks running a Thunderbay or similar TB3 SATA SSD external setup in JBOD / non raid mode? Interesting in how my unit compares.
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Sequential speeds on my Crucial MX500 4TB are about where they should be in a Thunderbay 4. The weird quirk is that I only got full speed after chaining a monitor from that Thunderbay. Initial testing without the monitor was at ~80%. Random reads are also on target, but random writes are well below what the drive can do. That might be a macOS or AmorphousDiskMark limitation as the internal drive isn't much better.
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Thanks for this 🙏
I might have to pick up the Thunderbay 4 mini and test, I guessing my SSD’s themselves aren’t the cause of my low numbers compared to yours. Not looking forward to the fan however. Really bizarre behavior with the connected monitor though.
FWIW: I have two Toshiba MD05ACA800E 8-TB drives in my new-to-me OWC Thunderbay 4 (Thunderbolt 3) enclosure for which I have replaced the stock fan with a Noctual NF-A9 FLX using the slowest speed adapter. These drives are in Bay 1 and 4 (I have two SSDs in the other two bays) and the drives register 36°C and 34°C.
Seeing the temps of your drives, perhaps I should experiment with the middle speed adapter.
Update: middle speed adapter installed and the hard drive temps have not move at all in one hour of operation; exactly the same.
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Are you happy with the temperature of your drives. My unit is differentit's a 2 bay model. The two drives have beet between 36C and 40C the whole time. The fan on my unit is not loud at all and I think the fan only draws air over the electronics. From what I am reading anything from 25- to 45-degrees Celsius is safe.
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Given that A: the full-speed Sunon and the full-speed Noctua fans are louder than I would prefer and B: the low-speed Noctua adapter and mid-speed adapter both result in the same hard drive temp, there would seem to not much I could do so I'm going to stick with these.
I've removed the stock fan and it's backplate and replaced it with a with a 120MM low noise fan coupled with a Noctua NA-SRC7 to reduce RPMS and noise. The fan is attached to the back of the Thunderbay 4 using double sided foam tape and seems to do a good job at keeping the chassis cool. My logic was to use a larger fan at lower RPMs to move more air than a small fan at lower RPMs. From what I've been able to ascertain, the thunderbay 4 generates more noise from airflow moving through the chassis than from the fan itself. Hard disk placement may be another factor as I've placed my HDD's in bays 2 and 4 to allow for more airflow. Best luck to ya.
So for my storage at work I've been using a dual Drobo 5D and Areca RAID combo for years, upgrading from 10TB over the years to now roughly 36-40TB for projects including archives. For mass storage I still think 3.5" drives are a good choice, but not for high performance. For that SSDs do a much better job overall.
I am currently looking at building a new small but fast storage unit for use at home with our TB Mac. I don't want to use a NAS as they're too slow. So I did some research and I think a OWC NVMe enclosure coupled with Thunderbolt 3 seems like a good choice and so will be going with it along with some Samsung 980 PRO NVMes to bring it up to 8TB.
I am currently looking at building a new small but fast storage unit for use at home with our TB Mac. I don't want to use a NAS as they're too slow. So I did some research and I think a OWC NVMe enclosure coupled with Thunderbolt 3 seems like a good choice and so will be going with it along with some Samsung 980 PRO NVMes to bring it up to 8TB.
Can I ask how you are getting on with it? Are you using it in JBOD or a Raid mode? Any problems?
Has anyone here used one of the Icy Box (a.k.a. Raidsonic, also sold under Sabrent brand) 4 or 5-bay USB-C units like these:
sabrent.com
sabrent.com
For some use cases having the power buttons on each individual bay are appealing.
USB 3.2 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Tray-less Docking Station
USB 3.2 Type-C port with up to 10Gbps transfer speed 5 x SATA 6Gbps 3.5” hard drive bays High-quality aluminum for optimal heat dissipation and structural integrity Hot-Swappable with five independent on/off power switches Fully tray-less design with a key lock to prevent accidental bay opening
sabrent.com
USB 3.2 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Tray-Less Docking Station
USB 3.2 Type-C port with up to 10Gbps transfer speed. 4 x SATA 6Gbps 3.5” hard drive bays. High-quality aluminum for optimal heat dissipation and structural integrity. Hot-swappable with four independent on/off power switches. Fully tray-less design with a key lock to prevent accidental bay opening.
sabrent.com
I realise this is off topic etc but it's close (in my mind), apologies if too off topic
I've recently had a disk failure in my 17 disk RAID6 NAS setup used by my Studio Ultra and was wondering if anyone had anything to comment about whether I should change disk manufacturer/sub brand.
I've been using Seagate IronWolfs for 5+ years and really, they've been problem free (the recent 1 failure in 17 disks in 5+ years is way over spec) but the question is are the newer Exos more reliable (I know they're cheaper) or work as well. I'm not interested in any other brand (ie WD), just Seagate IronWolf or Exos and whether anyone has a recommendation
Many thanks
I've recently had a disk failure in my 17 disk RAID6 NAS setup used by my Studio Ultra and was wondering if anyone had anything to comment about whether I should change disk manufacturer/sub brand.
I've been using Seagate IronWolfs for 5+ years and really, they've been problem free (the recent 1 failure in 17 disks in 5+ years is way over spec) but the question is are the newer Exos more reliable (I know they're cheaper) or work as well. I'm not interested in any other brand (ie WD), just Seagate IronWolf or Exos and whether anyone has a recommendation
Many thanks