crabbi Posted October 18, 2015 Share Posted October 18, 2015 Hi, does anyone here have experience (good or bad) of using a USB 3.0 adapter card with an external hard drive for Logic purposes? I have a Mac Pro Mid 2010 which isn't the fastest and I'm looking for faster transfer speeds. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CCTMusic Posted October 18, 2015 Share Posted October 18, 2015 Hi How much faster are you expecting USB 3 to be compared to the internal SATA (2) bus? I have a 2009 Pro fitted with an SSD and get >250 MB/s read and writes 7200 rpm HD's show in the order of 120MB/s For reference, an External SSD over USB 3 on my rMBP shows 252 MB/s read/write Tests using Blackmagic speed test app. hth CCT Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabbi Posted October 18, 2015 Author Share Posted October 18, 2015 Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure on the speeds, but on my travels I recently used a Seagate expansion external hard drive (USB 2.0) with my Macbook Pro & it ran like a dream compared to my Mac Pro at home which sometimes stutters to a halt when the CPU is overloaded. I figured running the Logic song & audio files on a similar external drive would stop the Mac Pro spluttering & faltering. Transferring files from the Seagate with my Macbook was also so much faster than at home on my Mac Pro. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
triplets Posted October 18, 2015 Share Posted October 18, 2015 The internal SATA connection of a mac pro is always faster than USB 3 and obviously 2. A 2010 mac pro should be fast enough. Is it a quad-core or an eight-core? Are you using many internal drives? If yes, are they all high performance 7200 rpm drives? Or are they energy saving "green" drives that spin down? It would be nice if you put the specs of your mac pro in your signature, that way it speeds up the helping process . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabbi Posted October 18, 2015 Author Share Posted October 18, 2015 Set up as follows: Mac Pro (Mid 2010) 2 x 2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 6 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Logic X on OSX Yosemite version 10.10.5 Yes, I have 3 other internal drives which are used for storage/back up. I don't think they are particularly high performance, but not necessarily 'green' either. 2 are listed as SATA drives & one as USB drive, Songs are always run from the Mac HD, not any of the 3 additional drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eric Cardenas Posted October 18, 2015 Share Posted October 18, 2015 The internal SATA connection of a mac pro is always faster than USB 3. This is actually incorrect. The older architecture of the Mac Pro only supports SATA 2 via its drive bays. Using the PCI bus in conjunction with USB 3 allows for more than a 60% increase in optimal conditions. The SATA connection is of course a more stable solution as you don't need any additional drivers. Using USB 3 has the advantage of being portal. If you want the absolute fastest drives for an old Mac Pro you can look for PCIe direct SSDs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
triplets Posted October 19, 2015 Share Posted October 19, 2015 Ok, to be clear then: A 2009 and 2010 mac pro has 3 Gigabits per second link speeds in their Sata connections. So if you put a PCIe USB card in them then it will use the PCI bus, which is 5 Gigabits a second. Is that correct? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CCTMusic Posted October 19, 2015 Share Posted October 19, 2015 Hi Songs are always run from the Mac HD, not any of the 3 additional drives. This is not the best approach (unless the MacHD is an SSD). Much better to have projects on a separate drive, samples on another drive or 2. CCT Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabbi Posted October 19, 2015 Author Share Posted October 19, 2015 Thanks everyone. So my best bet would be to get a PCIe USB 3.0 card and run my songs/audio from a reasonably fast external hard drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eric Cardenas Posted October 19, 2015 Share Posted October 19, 2015 Thanks everyone. So my best bet would be to get a PCIe USB 3.0 card and run my songs/audio from a reasonably fast external hard drive? If you want the absolute fastest that is! My recommendation based on performance/price ratio is to get a regular consumer SSD from Crucial or Samsung and use it in one of your internal SATA ports. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eric Cardenas Posted October 19, 2015 Share Posted October 19, 2015 A 2009 and 2010 mac pro has 3 Gigabits per second link speeds in their Sata connections. Correct! So if you put a PCIe USB card in them then it will use the PCI bus, which is 5 Gigabits a second. Is that correct? The PCI Express bus is 5 Gbit/s for one lane and the Mac Pro allocates the 24 lanes available in a 16, 1, 4, 4 configuration. If you use one of the 4x lanes you'll get a bandwidth of 20 Gbit/s USB 3 has a nominal bandwidth of 5.0 Gbit/s, this would be the bottle neck before hitting the drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crabbi Posted October 19, 2015 Author Share Posted October 19, 2015 My recommendation based on performance/price ratio is to get a regular consumer SSD from Crucial or Samsung and use it in one of your internal SATA ports. Thanks very much! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
triplets Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Yes, put the projects on that SSD. Your Mac Pro is powerful enough. You were having issues because you were playing everything from the system drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eric Cardenas Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Thanks very much! You're welcome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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