Looking to add a 4TB external to a 2019 iMac

[radamo]

I have a 2019 iMac with a 1TB SSD. When I bought the machine I took a 4TB hard drive out of my PC and put it into an external bay. I have been using that for my photo and music collections. Accessing this drive is very slow... using Black Magic speed test I am getting about 155MB read and write speed. I have been thinking of adding a 4TB SSD with TB 3 connection. The Sabrent Rocket XTRM 4TB is $900. That is a bit more than I would like to spend. Are there other options that will give me decent speed and 4TB of storage?

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Hunter5117]

I have been looking for something similar. You can get an OWC enclosure plus a 4x 1tb SSD's and spend about $700. Not sure if the OWC box will work with less than the full 4 drives, if so you could start with 2x 2tb and leave room to expand. Of course, future expansion presents the challenge of re-raiding the drives if you are running them as an array but thats for you to figure out. It appears to be a soft raid rather than in hardware so it is likely possible to do any of these options.

 

[mj_]

You could get a 4 TB SATA III SSD instead of an NVMe SSD. It would still give you decent SSD speeds of around 500 MB/s and, most importantly, an SSD's random seek times, at roughly the cost. An internal SATA III SSD will set you back around $500 plus another $15-20 for a USB-C case.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"I took a 4TB hard drive out of my PC and put it into an external bay. I have been using that for my photo and music collections. Accessing this drive is very slow... using Black Magic speed test I am getting about 155MB read and write speed"

Is this drive a platter-based spinning hard drive?
If so, then the speeds you're getting aren't unusual.

But if it's used for storing music and photo files... how does it work in day-to-day usage?
Those kind of files don't really need "speed".

If you want faster speeds without spending a lot of money, I'd suggest:
- get a "bare" 2.5" SATA SSD
and
- get a USB3 external enclosure, something like this one:

SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)

SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)

tinyurl.com

(drive just snaps in, no tools needed)

Then use Disk Utility to initialize (erase) it to "Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format".

Now download either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.
Both are FREE to download and use for 30 days.
Use either app to "clone" the contents of the hard drive to the SSD.

This should give you read speeds around 430MBps.
That's 3+ times what you're seeing now, and should be fine for photo/music storage...

BUT... don't get rid of the old drive. Keep it to serve as a backup to the SSD.
Use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to "maintain it", and it will be AN EXACT COPY of the SSD... almost impossible to tell apart.

 

[Boyd01]

I got a Oyen Digital 4TB U32 Shadow external USB SSD from B&H Photo about 6 months ago as a media drive for the 2014 Mini that I use as an iTunes server, cost was about $580. It runs 24/7 and there have been no problems whatsoever, has been a big improvement over the old mechanical 4tb disk I was using previously. This is a USB 3 SSD however, not thunderbolt 3 (which isn't supported on my 2014 Mini). Here is what I get with the Blackmagic test, certainly a lot faster than your hard drive (I was getting about 170MB/sec with my old 4TB hard drive)

 

[radamo]

Great suggestions... I think I will go with an SSD and enclosure. For ~ $500 I can triple my speeds and make it much snappier when working with my photo collection without breaking the bank.