I have an Akitio thunderbolt3 quad bay with four 8TB drives in it. ALl my photos are on a 8TB Samsung SSD in one of the bays. It is super fast and photos are backed up via RAID. The 3 other bays have seagate NAS Drives for backup.
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External Hard Drives for "live" working
- Thread starter Doomrider74
- Start date
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mdingel
New member
I didn't read every word in this post, but I did search for "cable" and I see only SandyW mentions it. Along with the speed of the drive, the cable and computer USB port are just as important. I have used a Samsung T5 for about 4 years. (I do a direct copy backup to a drive I keep in a fire safe.) I was getting frustrated with speed so I did some research and found that not all USB-C cables are created equally. I purchased one that supports USB C 3.2, ran a speed test and I believe it was 4 times faster than the cable I was using. My topaz processing dropped to 6 times faster.
Not an ad, this is just what I bought: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09Y915B8W/?tag=backcogaller-20
Not an ad, this is just what I bought: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09Y915B8W/?tag=backcogaller-20
I use a SanDisk Professional G-Raid 2, 12TB 2-Bay RAID Array:
Requires Thunderbolt 3.. I run it in RAID 1 configuration. Backed up to Backblaze.
Lightroom Catalog and scratch on internal SSD.
Requires Thunderbolt 3.. I run it in RAID 1 configuration. Backed up to Backblaze.
Lightroom Catalog and scratch on internal SSD.
Nick B.
Member
A somewhat related question. I have two NVMe drives in external enclosures. When I first connect them, I get about 1300 MB/s transfer speed. However, after random amounts ot time (minutes to hours), the speed drops to 200 MB/S and once went to around 40 MB/s. Ejecting the drive and re-connecting sometimes (but not always) restores the speed for a while. Powering off the drive (or re-booting the computer) doesn't consistently help. I have tried this on 2 iMacs (2017 vintage) and and Macbook Pro (M1, 2021 vintage) which has TB4 ports. Tried in multiple port connectrors, with and without a port extender. Various cables, both TB4 and TB3 approved. And tried more than one enclosure. On one computer, I even did a full OS re-install (for other reasons). OS is either Big Sur or Ventura. In every case, the random drop in transfer speed continues to occur. Happens with bpth drives. The Macbook Pro is somewhat more resistant to the issue but it does still occur.
Any thoughts?
Any thoughts?
My on-the road set-up.
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I use OWC Thunderbay IV system - 4 HDD, Raid 5 system w/ 4 16TB 7200 Drives. Write speed is 350 MB/s, read speed is 650 MB/s. Have a SSD attached via OWC Stack (or something like that), write 700 MB/s, read 790 MB/s. BTW - I am running a Mac Studo (M1 chip)
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that is a great way to secure the ssd. I used to put it in my lap but they get pretty hot.