External SSD storage for Mac

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IainD said:
Can anyone suggest a neat storage solution, not too expensive, that they have been pleased with? Is there a practical way to have Lightroom images spread over a few drives?
I would like to hear other people’s experience. I am tired of having cables draped everywhere to power my small forest of external spinner!s
Click to expand...

FWIW, I'll take a bit more general approach to your quwestion:

I use a Macbook Pro 16" M1 Max 64GB/2TB for job and hobby and it is the primary system for everything including image processing.
Being worried about cabels as well I chose to have a single cable setup, meaning that everathing connected to the Macbook is handled with one TB4 cable including charging the Macbook. Because I didn't need all the other stuff built in the large docks I use a CalDigit Element Hub.
Connected to it are
Because - probably as you - didn't want to spend the price Apple calls for the full 8 TB I looked at my workflow and came to the conclusion that I would use hte external disk as
  • primary backup device for time machine and
  • as an external archive for everything that doesn't need to stay on the internal SSD
In terms of image processing, this means
  • New NEF go on the internal SSD first
  • After the images have been finally processed
    • the NEFs including their sidecar files go in the external archive and
    • the exported processed images stay on the internal disk, so that I always have them with me.
The OWC allow to be bus-powered and is fed by the Element Hub, which provides planety of power to cope with a Macbook Pro and two SATA-SSD's.
Even with the two Studio Displays running parallel to the OWC on the Element Hub I get about 450 MB/s Write and 520 MB/s Read from the external device, whioch for my purpose is more than enough and lies within the capabilities of SATA-III-SSD's.

Yes, with the two SSD's it is not as cheap as comparable storage space with classic HDD's but this thing takes so little power, that you can even plug it directly to your Macbook and power it from there. I actually know someone carrying one of these as mobile backup and archive solution when going on lopng term leave for a projekct abroad.

If you prefer to actually work directly on the external disk for processing images there could be differences depending on the software you use. I know that some software might make your life complicated due toissues with catalogues etc.
In my case (using DXO PhotoLab) I can't find any significant drop in working performance when working on the internal disk or on the "slow" extrenal one.
But this is also depending on your RAM. If you do do big batch conversions and or large scale exports, smalller memory can lead to swap to your disk and in this case the spped of the used disk will matter.

If your new Macbook Pro happens to be one of the latest geberation with M4 Pro or Max, you might want to go a different path, because there you have TB5 available providing double the data bandwidth of TB4.
To utilize this to the maximum you would have to look for a TB5 hub/dock and it might even be worthwhile going for a SSD enclosure being able to take multiple NVMe SSD's to provide you with the required space as well as the required security level, while getting much higher read/write rates com pared to SATA-III-SSDs I use.
One example is the OWC ThunderBlade, that can take 4 or even 8 NVMe-SSD's depending on the model. Things like that are normally so fast that you don't have to worry about waiting for TB5 enclosures. The headroom TB5 provides will allow you to run a TB3 or TB4 storage device at almost full speed, no matter what else is needing bandwidth on your single cable from the computer to the "rest of the desk".

BTW, the only thing I still use my remaining classic HDDs for is creating outsourcable disk images of the volumes on my internal Macbook SSD and on the external devices on my desk, following the 3-2-1 principle:
  • Three backup copies
  • Two of these offline and
  • One being stored outside the house in a remote location.
All the best with desingning your new setup :)
 
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Hey, Iain

If you’re looking for an actual editing SSD, rather than just an external storage solution, you might consiuder OWC.
They make enclosures and SSDs specifically for day-in day-out use.
Drives like my T7 and T9 Shields from Samsung are not really designed for that.

OWC has a Mac Mini-sized hybrid drive that you can customize with your choice of SSD size and is Thunderbolt 4 connected.
An 8TB enclosure will cost you about half what an Apple 8TB internal SSD will cost.
There’s also an additional bay for a hard drive.

In typical photo editing workflow, once you’re at Thunderbolt 4 transfer speeds, the external SSD is not going to be your bottleneck. So you’ll have ample speed for performance.

OWC also have more aggressive editing drives such as the Thunderblade, which are a bit faster for video editing and will be about 1/3 cheaper than the Apple internal SSD. But I’d be surprised if you notice a speed difference.

See the Ministack here for US pricing:
eshop.macsales.com

OWC miniStack STX | Mac mini Thunderbolt Storage Solution

Expand your Mac mini’s potential with the OWC miniStack STX. These solutions offer Thunderbolt storage and additional connectivity for seamless performance.
eshop.macsales.com eshop.macsales.com
 
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threesixty said:
See the Ministack here for US pricing:
eshop.macsales.com

OWC miniStack STX | Mac mini Thunderbolt Storage Solution

Expand your Mac mini’s potential with the OWC miniStack STX. These solutions offer Thunderbolt storage and additional connectivity for seamless performance.
eshop.macsales.com eshop.macsales.com
Click to expand...

Yup, good point ! I missed out on this one. However, there's are one or two potential caveats:
  • When using the disks built in a serious manner, the integrated fan might be disturbing, depending on your desk setup.
  • Despite having a 150W power supply, it can provide maximum 60W for an attached Macbook
I have set up one of these for my photography friend using a Mac Studio and part from the above mentioned issues it works fine.
There is a Samsung SAT SSD as well as a PCIe disk installed and they are provided as two physical drives.

A review of this enclosure by c't - a well reknowned computer magazine here - showed that with the right NVMe SSD you can get it up to 2,5 GB/s read performance, which confirms my findings with the device I set up for my friend. It is good and certainly better than SATA-Speed, but is still far away from the up to 7,5 GB/s you can reach with PCIe 4.0 x 4 at max. The reason is that the Ministack doesn't take full advanteage of the four PCIe lanes for the PCIe SSD.
That said, in the same review they mentioned that they originally got the device with a PCIe SSD in it already (an OWC Aura) and with ths they only got read/write around 700 to 750 MB/s, i.e. slighly beyong SATA speed. So, if you wnat to got this way, I'd recommend to get an empty one and fill it with the right disks yourself.
 
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Yep.
From what I understand from lab testers, once the transfer speed is 1 GB/s or more, the SSD is no longer the performance rate limiting step for most tasks.
They found little gain when running off the fastest Mac internal SSDs versus a relatively modest external SSD.

I’m not sure how this plays out with video.

Fan noise is definitely an irritant to me. So I may pay a bit more for the Thunderblade, which has a bladed fanless heat sink.
(I’m about to upgrade my storage.)
 
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threesixty said:
Hey, Iain

If you’re looking for an actual editing SSD, rather than just an external storage solution, you might consiuder OWC.
They make enclosures and SSDs specifically for day-in day-out use.
Drives like my T7 and T9 Shields from Samsung are not really designed for that.

OWC has a Mac Mini-sized hybrid drive that you can customize with your choice of SSD size and is Thunderbolt 4 connected.
An 8TB enclosure will cost you about half what an Apple 8TB internal SSD will cost.
There’s also an additional bay for a hard drive.

In typical photo editing workflow, once you’re at Thunderbolt 4 transfer speeds, the external SSD is not going to be your bottleneck. So you’ll have ample speed for performance.

OWC also have more aggressive editing drives such as the Thunderblade, which are a bit faster for video editing and will be about 1/3 cheaper than the Apple internal SSD. But I’d be surprised if you notice a speed difference.

See the Ministack here for US pricing:
eshop.macsales.com

OWC miniStack STX | Mac mini Thunderbolt Storage Solution

Expand your Mac mini’s potential with the OWC miniStack STX. These solutions offer Thunderbolt storage and additional connectivity for seamless performance.
eshop.macsales.com eshop.macsales.com
Click to expand...
Wow thank you.
 
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IainD said:
I have been using an iMac Pro for photo things for about 5 years and it is showing its age. I have switched to a decent MacBook Pro 14 inch with 1Tb internal storage. I have all my images on a 10 Tb spinning disc externally, but it is slow and I would quite like to go with external ssd storage. I have a few Samsung 1 and 2 Tb drives and a 4 Tb, but my images occupy about 5 Tb.
Can anyone suggest a neat storage solution, not too expensive, that they have been pleased with? Is there a practical way to have Lightroom images spread over a few drives?
I would like to hear other people’s experience. I am tired of having cables draped everywhere to power my small forest of external spinner!s
Thank you.
i
Click to expand...
More than one copy or backup is important.
Everyone seems to find out one day when they lose all their files.
I'd bite the Bullitt and just get a bigger SSD drive...🦘
 
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All great info and now I’m inspired to take the next step to upgrading my storage and workflow. Recently, I’ve been thinking about a Synology NAS, but after considering @Woodpecker’s observations, and not needing networked storage (as far as I can tell), my thoughts are now the following set up, adding an OWC Thunderblade:
  • Current computer: MBP 16“ M3 (128 RAM, 2TB SSD)
  • Editing/storage: OWC Thunderblade 16TB (RAID 10)
  • Time Machine: LaCie D2 Pro 10TB USB 3.0 7200 HDD (own)
  • Hub: Caldigit T4 Elements hub (own)
  • Printer: Canon Pro 1000
  • Apps: LRC/PS, LR Mobile, Topaz Photo AI, Narrative (culling) - Also Tableau and some other data apps
  • LR Catalog: single catalog, stored on internal SSD
My next steps will be with respect to working with images in the field and at home. I have the Adobe Photography plan with 2TB of cloud storage via my iPad Pro, and I have a mix of old and new images in LRC, many of were originally managed in Aperture or even iPhoto. (I never used Bridge, other than dinking around with it.) Currently, most of my images are stored on the LaCie (which I’ll convert to a Time Machine drive), with a few still scattered around my internal drive. I’ve been steadily fishing older RAW images out of Apple Photo and importing them into LRC.

My main challenges here are syncing the organization of images between mobile and desktop LR iterations, in addition to eliminating duplication, of which there are still quite a few. Ideally, I’d like to move a significantly great amount of older images out of Adobe’s cloud (I’m at about 90% capacity there) and have them live locally. I think I’ve finally got my head around how that works with SmartPreviews synced there (in the cloud) from LRC, and full-rez from my mobile LR. Syncing Collections v Albums is going to be a hair puller, as I have a lot of duplication after screwing up my syncing last year.

A nice thing about the OWC Thunderblade is that I can take it with me when I travel (often off-grid) vs an NAS. This will provide me less dependence on cloud storage. Most of my photography is landscape, wildlife, street, though I’m also getting into wedding/event photography which I’d prefer to work directly to LRC, rather than through mobile LR.

Okay, done rambling… maybe there are some helpful tidbits above, or at least enough so that others might not feel they are in such bad shape (as I am…).

Cheers.
 
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I am confused and don't understand the value of the Thunderblade. 4TB is listed at at$1,180. For 1/2 that price, you could buy two Hyper enclosures with 4TB each, both being portable and running at the same speed, using Carbon Copy Cloner to match them up if desired. OWC has a new similar item, with similar speed. I have the older version that is 1/2 the speed. The Mini Stax is only 1/2 the speed of my older version.

If part of your backup strategy is offsite storage this works well as Michael noted.
 
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My guess is that, if price is the sole driver, build-your-own with an inexexpensive enclosure is probably going to be an attractive option.
There’s always going to be an economy to that approach.
And you can definitely build an enclosure with very fast nominal transfer speeds.

But, once you’re at Thunderbolt 4 speeds, the testing I’ve seen shows little gain in work speed by ramping the SSD transfer rate any further.
So other factors begin to come into play.

The Thunderblade unit comes with a 3 yr warranty and various features of interest to professionals, not the least of which is a massive passive heat sink.

Still - if you’re looking for the cheapest way to build a fast 4TB SSD, a small build-your-own is likely going to come out on top.

I’m sure there are other interesting options out there too.
This is just one that I’ve seen that ticks all my boxes, from a reliable vendor I‘ve used before.
 
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Loosely to the subject at hand - I do all of my work off of a portable 4TB NVME based USB4 enclosure. I back up my catalog to a separate USB-C enclosure (1TB) as well, so I can seamlessly work between my MacBook Pro (M4 Pro) and new Mac Studio (M4 Max). Works great and keeps things consistent.
 
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Helo48 said:
Which makes more sense for backing up my photos: using an SSD drive or an HDD drive.
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It does not matter. What matters is that you have backups in more than one place. Ideally you should have at least three copies, with one offsite. All drives can and will fail at some point. Generally, SSD's are faster and smaller, but are not as large as HDD's. And SSD's give very little warning when they go bad. Trade-offs and decisions are part and parcel of storage.

--Ken
 
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Helo48 said:
Hi Ken
Thanks for the info. Of course, I have three copies, but I think the SSDs are too expensive and the storage space is still too small for just archiving.
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For my budget, the 4TB SSD's from Samsung, (especially when they go on sale), are about the limit of my budget. I have a number of 500GB, 1TB and 2TB units that I use, but I also have three spinners with 8-10 TB each. But my needs are modest compared to people who shoot a lot or shoot for a living. Video is a whole other beast for storage.

--Ken
 
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Replytoken said:
For my budget, the 4TB SSD's from Samsung, (especially when they go on sale), are about the limit of my budget. I have a number of 500GB, 1TB and 2TB units that I use, but I also have three spinners with 8-10 TB each. But my needs are modest compared to people who shoot a lot or shoot for a living. Video is a whole other beast for storage.

--Ken
Click to expand...
Ken, the new options with NVME DIY are in the same price range and much faster. I see a 4tb Samsung T7 shield on sale for 290. The Hyper enclosure on sale is 90, plus a 4TB NVMe in a range of 225-250. So a little more but much faster on a modern system. 3X on mine which does matter in LR.
 
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I make my living on a Mac, and after an unfortunate event several years ago that cost me a couple of weeks of work, I consulted with an expert in backup strategy. I've arrived at a very simple structure which has saved my bacon a number of times.

The only items on my startup SSD are applications and system files. Nothing else.

All working files are on a 16TB OWC four-bay enclosure, four 4TB spinners, RAID5. Connected by Thunderbolt, plenty fast for video and photo editing.

I back up my current system, apps and working files to a two-bay 8TB spinner enclosure using Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC allows me to create two basic partitions on the backup drives : one exclusively for the SSD, the other exclusively for working files. In the event of a failure, this makes it much easier for me to restore only apps and system files (in the event of an SSD failure or on a new machine), or to restore/find working files as necessary. I also use two inexpensive externals for Time Machine. TM is NOT archival--it merely gives you a way to restore a recent point of time in the event of a disaster.

I do NOT consider the above an archival system. CCC will allow you to create archival backups, but the files proliferate like rabbits and can become overwhelming, both in space consumed and restore time.

My archival system (storage of photos and videos) is quite simple: two OWC two-bay 6TB spinner enclosures. Why two enclosures? I once had an enclosure itself fail, which entirely wiped out the RAID structure I thought was infallible. So, it is not just a matter of having multiple backups, I don't fully trust a single enclosure, either.

I no longer use a RAID system on my archival backups. The consultant I worked with recommended JBOD (just a bunch of disks); keeping each drive completely independent for maximum security. Slow? Yes. And to make things even slower, these drives are all connected via old USB. But, I don't care. I simply drag and drop to each drive when permanently archiving new files. It runs in the background, and if it takes a couple of hours, it doesn't matter. While yes, transfer speed is critical when editing (thus my Thunderbolt enclosure), I see no reason to spend a lot of money for faster drives, faster connections, and newer enclosures when time is not of the essence.

I am NOT a fan of using SSDs for archival backups. As others have pointed out, they are expensive and limited in size. If money were no object (when is it not?) perhaps I'd reconsider; however, SSDs will eventually give up the ghost when written to enough times. I've lost three of them. Yes, spinners will eventually die too, but in my experience, they are longer lasting and--hopefully--provide some advance warning of impending doom. SSDs are great for startup drives, and great for temporary, limited file storage. I don't trust them for long-term storage or heavy use.

Take all this with a grain of salt. It is merely a structure which has worked well for me.
 
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BirdDogDad said:
I make my living on a Mac, and after an unfortunate event several years ago that cost me a couple of weeks of work, I consulted with an expert in backup strategy. I've arrived at a very simple structure which has saved my bacon a number of times.

The only items on my startup SSD are applications and system files. Nothing else.

All working files are on a 16TB OWC four-bay enclosure, four 4TB spinners, RAID5. Connected by Thunderbolt, plenty fast for video and photo editing.

I back up my current system, apps and working files to a two-bay 8TB spinner enclosure using Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC allows me to create two basic partitions on the backup drives : one exclusively for the SSD, the other exclusively for working files. In the event of a failure, this makes it much easier for me to restore only apps and system files (in the event of an SSD failure or on a new machine), or to restore/find working files as necessary. I also use two inexpensive externals for Time Machine. TM is NOT archival--it merely gives you a way to restore a recent point of time in the event of a disaster.

I do NOT consider the above an archival system. CCC will allow you to create archival backups, but the files proliferate like rabbits and can become overwhelming, both in space consumed and restore time.

My archival system (storage of photos and videos) is quite simple: two OWC two-bay 6TB spinner enclosures. Why two enclosures? I once had an enclosure itself fail, which entirely wiped out the RAID structure I thought was infallible. So, it is not just a matter of having multiple backups, I don't fully trust a single enclosure, either.

I no longer use a RAID system on my archival backups. The consultant I worked with recommended JBOD (just a bunch of disks); keeping each drive completely independent for maximum security. Slow? Yes. And to make things even slower, these drives are all connected via old USB. But, I don't care. I simply drag and drop to each drive when permanently archiving new files. It runs in the background, and if it takes a couple of hours, it doesn't matter. While yes, transfer speed is critical when editing (thus my Thunderbolt enclosure), I see no reason to spend a lot of money for faster drives, faster connections, and newer enclosures when time is not of the essence.

I am NOT a fan of using SSDs for archival backups. As others have pointed out, they are expensive and limited in size. If money were no object (when is it not?) perhaps I'd reconsider; however, SSDs will eventually give up the ghost when written to enough times. I've lost three of them. Yes, spinners will eventually die too, but in my experience, they are longer lasting and--hopefully--provide some advance warning of impending doom. SSDs are great for startup drives, and great for temporary, limited file storage. I don't trust them for long-term storage or heavy use.

Take all this with a grain of salt. It is merely a structure which has worked well for me.
Click to expand...
Hmm, I would quibble a bit with a couple of details here; In particular:

Yes, spinners will eventually die too, but in my experience, they are longer lasting and--hopefully--provide some advance warning of impending doom. SSDs are great for startup drives, and great for temporary, limited file storage. I don't trust them for long-term storage or heavy use
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Like most PCs and Macs now, my boot drive is an SSD, and it gets moderately heavy use when the machine is busy -- paging files, logs, etc. Plus the LR catalog I use when editing is on that drive, so more writes to it. (Your strategy of limiting what is on the startup disk is a good one; I don't do that, but I do place all personal data I care about other than photos in a separate directory structure on the system drive, so it is not spread out everywhere and is easy to find).

My photos are stored on a fast SSD in an external enclosure. This is only moderate use -- many large writes when importing new files, reads when doing editing, but few writes.

But I fully trust SSDs for heavy use; they are extensively used by industry, and that's been true for over a decade. An SSD, of course, is more expensive per byte than an HDD, but cheaper per I/O operations (one SSD can do the op count of many HDDs). I'd go so far as to say SSDs have taken over industry for high-performance applications. In addtion to the higher performance, they also use less electricity, a factor in large data centers.

I don't use SSDs for backups either; I don't need the higher write speed to store the data, nor the faster read speed to restore the backup, thus there is no benefit in paying the extra cost per byte of storage. I use a single HDD for backups (Time Machine) plus a cloud backup (the latter got better since I got a faster upload speed from my ISP). If I needed fast restore, I'd probably get a RAID solution (drive fails, backup still available, I just need to get the spare disk in there and rebuild the RAID) but I don't need fast restore (this is personal stuff, not a business) so an HDD is fine. If the backup HDD fails, I have the original data plus the cloud backup.

The consultant I worked with recommended JBOD (just a bunch of disks); keeping each drive completely independent for maximum security.
Click to expand...

I didn't quite understand the bit about security here, could you elaborate?

One problem with my single HDD for backup is that if it runs out of space, I'll have to replace with a new larger drive and start the backups over. I'll have the cloud backup and original copy, but there will be a window with no local backup.

If my boot drive fails, I'll have to reinstall the OS and restore things like LR catalogs from backup ... but that's okay. I can spend a day doing that. If the fast external SSD with the photos dies, I'll have to restore that from local backups, or (much slower) from the cloud since that's the bulk of the data.

If I had a home office setup (e.g running a small business in the house), I'd have RAID backups plus an up to date clone of the boot drive. And I'd have an entire backup computer sitting around plus a spare drive or two (cost of this extra hardware is not high in the context of a business). If the motherboard dies on your computer, your data won't do you any good until you get that fixed. Fortunately, nothing I am doing on my computer requires 24x7 availability.

I don't have an archival backup ... just the regular Time Machine and cloud backups. Again, for a business I might want a bit more, for personal use I think that sufficient.

This is one cloud services note on SSD versus HDD reliability (they have good data on HDD versus SSD reliability with boot drives):

Are Solid State Drives / SSDs More Reliable Than HDDs?

It's good to know the difference between HDDs and SSDs and understand how the different SSD technologies affect reliability.
www.backblaze.com www.backblaze.com
 
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Tim Robinson said:
Loosely to the subject at hand - I do all of my work off of a portable 4TB NVME based USB4 enclosure. I back up my catalog to a separate USB-C enclosure (1TB) as well, so I can seamlessly work between my MacBook Pro (M4 Pro) and new Mac Studio (M4 Max). Works great and keeps things consistent.
Click to expand...
To be clear, do you have the LR catalog and photos on the NVME, and just mount that drive on either the M4 Pro or the Mac Studio? If so, how do backups work?
 
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PhotoLover said:
To be clear, do you have the LR catalog and photos on the NVME, and just mount that drive on either the M4 Pro or the Mac Studio? If so, how do backups work?
Click to expand...
Essentially yes. I have a seperate 1TB usb-c drive for catalog backups. For photo backups I will copy off the sets to my NAS from the Mac Studio when I am home. If I’m traveling I’ll put them on a spare usb-c drive so I have a temporary backup until I get home.
 
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Without quoting some earlier posts, I’ll add that since my first HDD (a SCSI 20MB for my MacPlus — I didn’t partition this one), it‘s been my regular practice to create partitions on my spinners and populate each with a specific purpose (e.g., Clients, Personal, Apps), so if the directory on one were to become corrupted, the damage would be contained.

EDIT: I used to include one partition for Photoshop (SCRATCH)… that was before I got into LR.

That said, my most recent HDD failure was a 5-year-old 8TB Western Digital (I’m not meaning to disparage the brand here), with three partitions (one for TimeMachine), none of which I’ve been able to remount/recover. Most of the content is backed up elsewhere, either on TimeMachine or older drives, but I think I did lose some images that are important to me. (I’d welcome any recovery service recommendations…)
 
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PhotoLover said:
To be clear, do you have the LR catalog and photos on the NVME, and just mount that drive on either the M4 Pro or the Mac Studio? If so, how do backups work?
Click to expand...
I stoped using my NAS and put my catalog on an NVME with back up to both the NAS and another spinning drive. Carbon Copy does all the work on a schedule. I even have a separate NVME that I keep in my car and backup to once a week. CCC starts and soon as it sees it mounted. Also keep a spinning drive off site which I update every couple of months.
 
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