Run everything from Internal Drive vs External Drive

[Eneco]

Hey there,

I'm in for buying a Mac Studio and as additional storage is expensive as always with Apple, I was wondering if it is worth the money. I'm a composer and run lots of sample based virtual instruments, which require a good 4k random read speed to keep the loading times small and prevent hiccups during playback.

So far I've been told, that everything except the OS and applications should be on separate drives (project files / samples / media etc.), because having just one drive do the heavy lifting throttles its performance. Is that still the case or are Apple's new drives so fast, that it doesn't matter anymore and having one drive with everything on it is just fine?

Right now I have all my samples and project files stored on different PCIe NVME blades in my old Mac Pro 5,1. But since I can't put the blades in the Mac Studio, I'm down to using only the internal drive or use external ones. Will it be an improvement to have my samples and project files all on the same internal drive compared to spreading it on external ones?

 

[ronm99]

If you can afford it, putting everything on internal drives will definitely be superior. These new SSDs are so amazingly fast. That being said, if you want to save money, you’ll probably be fine with some SSD external drives as well.

 

[Fishrrman]

How much storage in terms of gigabytes are we talking about...?

 

[mcnallym]

I went external route.

Sonnet enclosure, highpoint card and 2 x 1TB WD Black and 2 x 2TB WD Black.

Still have two slots left in enclosure if need more and the total cost was around 1500 so about the same as going for the 4tb internal.

However I intend he machine to last till won’t get updates and the external SSD easier to replace then the internal.

Was talking in Apple Store with one of there guys and he reckons should last me 10 years, to which I said as long as Apple supports and provides updates then not a problem for me, however they do have a habit of not providing latest fcp x updates or other apps unless on the newer OS.

Was why swapped from mini 2009 to a 2018 as was working fine but stopped on the updates.

 

[4sallypat]

I am cheap & old fashioned so I use the old TB2 SSD 1TB external LaCie drives to shuttle between devices since I have tons of them.

Works with all my older as well as current machines: 2015 12" rMB, 2015 15" MBP, 2018 Mac Mini, M1 Mini (traded in), 2017 iMac 4K, and my current Mac Studio Max base w/ TB3-TB2 adapter.

 

[Eneco]

If you can afford it, putting everything on internal drives will definitely be superior. These new SSDs are so amazingly fast. That being said, if you want to save money, you’ll probably be fine with some SSD external drives as well.

Even though the OS keeps the drive constantly busy and blocks some of its bandwith?

How much storage in terms of gigabytes are we talking about...?

Projects files and the sample libraries come at around 1,6 TB in total.

I went external route.

Sonnet enclosure, highpoint card and 2 x 1TB WD Black and 2 x 2TB WD Black.

Still have two slots left in enclosure if need more and the total cost was around 1500 so about the same as going for the 4tb internal.

With "Sonnet enclosure" you mean an external PCIe box like the Echo Express SE IIIe? Did you run any performance tests against the internal drive with your setup?

 

[AlteMac]

Coming from a 2013MP, this is not new to me. With several terabytes of photo files, I use the internal drive solely to run programs and occasional temporary storage. Everything else is external with photos divided among 3 SSDs. Even very large photo files transfer very quickly so speed is a nonissue (I do not do video; if I did I would use the internal only for work in progress and save everything externally). I don't know how you could run one of these desktops without at least an external drive for Time Machine or some other backup anyhow. I am a maniac about backups, so there is also a CCC clone, and an additional external that backs up the photo files and is used to sync with another box at another location.

 

[F-Train]

I don't think that this is a performance issue. It's a matter of whether you're OK with being tied to the umbilical cord of external drives or want to cut the cord, except for backup, and are prepared to pay to do it. I've ordered a 2TB drive because it lets me do the latter. The new computer will replace the base Max that I had from March 18th until April 1st.

On cost, my conclusion was that it makes financial sense and reduced hassle sense to pay Apple rather than purchase third party external components up to 2TB. At 4TB, external enclosures are definitely cheaper, which makes the decision harder.

Of my sample libraries, I may load up to about 1TB onto the internal drive. I'm thinking about Spitfire's BBC Symphony Orchestra and some smaller libraries, including one piano library, in particular. On the Spitfire library, I have a choice between loading the full Pro Library (~630GB) and the much smaller "Core".

You may find this video by Spitfire's Dan Keen helpful. He went with a MacBook Pro/Max with 2TB of storage:

A Music Producer's Review

In the video, he refers to a composition that he was working on with composer Gary Barlow for a UK TV show. This is the video that he made about that collaboration. The music that they were working on is played through with Logic at 26:00. Keen would have done his own work on the composition on his MacBook, and Barlow says in the video that he does all of his composing on a laptop:

The Making of Ant and Dec's 'Limitless' Theme Tune | Gary Barlow ft Dan Keen

 

[ronm99]

Even though the OS keeps the drive constantly busy and blocks some of its bandwith?

Yes … this is much less of an issue with SSDs. A traditional hard drive has a moving part (head) that needs to move around the platter to access the disk. Files are typically stored contiguously, so it is inefficient if the drive is forced to move back and forth between accessing different files (you can hear the hard drive making a lot of noise when this happens). With an SSD, there are no moving parts, so simultaneous accesses to the drive are much less of a problem. So thrashing is not really a problem with SSDs, and the SSDs Apple are using now are just insanely fast.

 

[AlteMac]

Regarding performance, if you are running everything from one internal drive, with no "umbilical cord" then you have to assume you are sending all your data to the cloud in some fashion for backup. Doesn't that impact performance? I'd frankly rather have an umbilical to a Time Machine drive. If we were talking about a laptop where portability was important, then I could see how one would want to avoid external drives, but not with a desktop.

 

[F-Train]

Regarding performance, if you are running everything from one internal drive, with no "umbilical cord" then you have to assume you are sending all your data to the cloud in some fashion for backup.

I introduced the term in post #8 and I've edited that post to make it clear that I'm talking about cutting out external storage as a feeder to my internal workspace. I'm not talking about using cloud storage for backup. I should have been clearer. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, Time Machine and spinning hard drives for backup. They do their own thing.

I concluded that the only reason to use external drives with the Mac Studio, for my needs, is to save money. Up to 2TB the saving, and issues with external storage, especially NVMe storage (e.g. more cables, potentially temperamental connections, heat management, throttling, much slower read and write speeds), made buying the storage from Apple attractive.

I should add that I'll be moving my Mac Studio at times (one of the attractions is that it's fairly light and will easily fit in an overhead bin) and that the less "stuff" that I have to move with it the better.

As a general proposition, I think that people are buying external drives to save money over paying for more internal storage, not because they're in love with external drives. For me, the cost saving up to 2TB is not large enough to go external.

 

[F-Train]

With "Sonnet enclosure" you mean an external PCIe box like the Echo Express SE IIIe? Did you run any performance tests against the internal drive with your setup?

Read and write performance is limited by the capacity of the Thunderbolt 4/3 ports and is significantly less than what the internal drive will give you. The only way to improve on this is to use more than one external enclosure, each connected to its own Thunderbolt 4/3 port, and operated collectively as software RAID 0. Have a look at this thread, which I started as part of working through this issue myself: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...2-external-storage-read-write-speeds.2340127/

A fellow called @albertjs wrote in that thread, and in another, about his results when using four separate enclosures in RAID 0. Interesting, but very, very expensive.

That thread, additional reading and some arithmetic on cost of external enclosures and NVMe M.2 SSDs convinced me that the best option, for me, was to pay Apple.

I would probably go with Samsung T7 drives if I hadn't decided to order 2TB of internal storage. My experience is that the T7 drives work quite well with sample libraries, and at current prices they're cost-effective. I have some T7 drives as it is, and will use them when convenient.

 

[Sirmausalot]

I run 4k prores and other media of an external RAID HDD disk array running off USB3. For video, external is really the only way to go and if I'm not seeing any bottle necks with video files on spinning disks, external SSDs will be more than fine.

 

[F-Train]

I run 4k prores and other media of an external RAID HDD disk array running off USB3. For video, external is really the only way to go and if I'm not seeing any bottle necks with video files on spinning disks, external SSDs will be more than fine.

I think that anybody using sample libraries knows that external SSDs will work. That's why I mentioned Samsung T7 drives. It comes down to relative cost, SSD options and trade-offs.

Re video... Until now, I've done the editing of my Blackmagic Cinema Camera footage from external drives, although not from spinning hard drives. One of the reasons that I've ordered 2TB of internal storage is that I want to bring that footage inboard for editing. It's going to simplify my life, and I believe that it will improve the performance of Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve, which I use for editing and colour grading respectively. I very much look forward to the change. But I'm not editing hours of footage at a time, where of course external storage is a necessary part of the workflow.

 

[Mr Screech]

Since ssd's, especially nvme, the whole separating of os/programs and work files is largely unnecessary. This is a remnant of the hdd-era with only a few hundred i/o's.

You should be absolutely fine using an external nvme bootdrive, 2.5gb/s and 500k+ i/o.
Though be mindful that some drivers won't install because you're not using the internal drive.
I've yet to get my steinberg to work on my external bootdisk with an M1 macbook pro, due to security settings acting weirdly. (maybe this has been resolved in the last few months, I haven't tried again)

Also keep a mind on cache usage. You don't want to exhaust the amount of TBW too fast. Check how fast your cache should be, I doubt it needs to be gb/s. In that case even a usb3 connected sata ssd will be sufficient. In other words, off load slower read/writes from your main nvme to have it last longer.

 

[Eneco]

I don't think that this is a performance issue. It's a matter of whether you're OK with being tied to the umbilical cord of external drives or want to cut the cord, except for backup, and are prepared to pay to do it.

You may find this video by Spitfire's Dan Keen helpful. He went with a MacBook Pro/Max with 2TB of storage:

Thanks for all the insight. I totally feel you. I also don't like lots of cables and peripherals on my Mac. That's what I love about my old Mac Pro: One box with everything inside.

I introduced the term in post #8 and I've edited that post to make it clear that I'm talking about cutting out external storage as a feeder to my internal workspace. I'm not talking about using cloud storage for backup. I should have been clearer. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, Time Machine and spinning hard drives for backup. They do their own thing.

As a general proposition, I think that people are buying external drives to save money over paying for more internal storage, not because they're in love with external drives. For me, the cost saving up to 2TB is not large enough to go external.

I will also use a different drive for TM backup and will only use the internal drive for sample playback and project files alongside the OS.

Since ssd's, especially nvme, the whole separating of os/programs and work files is largely unnecessary. This is a remnant of the hdd-era with only a few hundred i/o's.

I get that feeling too now.

 

[Sirmausalot]

I think that anybody using sample libraries knows that external SSDs will work. That's why I mentioned Samsung T7 drives. It comes down to relative cost, SSD options and trade-offs.

Re video... Until now, I've done the editing of my Blackmagic Cinema Camera footage from external drives, although not from spinning hard drives. One of the reasons that I've ordered 2TB of internal storage is that I want to bring that footage inboard for editing. It's going to simplify my life, and I believe that it will improve the performance of Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve, which I use for editing and colour grading respectively. I very much look forward to the change. But I'm not editing hours of footage at a time, where of course external storage is a necessary part of the workflow.

I think you may see better encoding times. I hope someone runs some tests.

 

[PianoPro]

That's what I love about my old Mac Pro: One box with everything inside.

I will also use a different drive for TM backup

Always a good idea to have a TM backup on an external drive and avoid a single point of failure (power supply) that could take out your main SSD/HD drives and TM backup all at once. I always had both an internal and external TM backup drive. On the Studio I have external only of course.