Old School 7200 RPM Platters in Thunderbolt 3 Chassis

I’ve just graduated into the world of Thunderbolt 3 with a new 2018 Mac Mini, but I’ve got several old school 3 TB drives, standard issue 7200 RPM 3.5, notably in my 3,1 Mac Pro.

I’m considering an OWC empty four bay Thunderbolt 3 external drive enclosure, and I know the top speed specs for Thunderbolt 3 do not apply if I put these useful but pokey spinning platters in the chassis.

Question: what kind of read speed might I reasonably expect from old platters in a T3 chassis? This would be for VSL sample playback.

Don't expect the drive to be any faster just because you put it in a Thunderbolt enclosure.

A single drive is limited by it's own speed, so with spinning drives you might get maximum 180 MB/s if you're lucky.

The only way to make spinning drives faster is to use RAID setups with 2 or more drives that act as one fast drive.

OWC sells them.

A helpful response, and alarmingly fast. May I ask another question: what specific SSD drive would you recommend to go into the aforementioned enclosure to maximize read speed? And is it credible that this double-digit GB speed I read about for Thunderbolt 3 is a real-world possibility?

If optimally I’ve been poking along at 180 MB/s over the years, one can get a lot of orchestral mileage out of humble read speeds. That’s encouraging.

Thanks for this and your many other posts over the years.

“ OWC sells them.”

Yes, I have been considering this one:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB3IVKIT0GB/?utm_source=Criteo&utm_medium=shoppingengine&utm_campaign=Criteo

If you buy a Thunderbay enclosure from OWC, you can create a RAID system. This will give you substantially more speed, but not as fast as an SSD. In a Raid system files are written across all drives in little chunk. You will then always need the RAID system, because no one drive contains the file. The advantage is a lot more speed. There are several different RAID set-ups. You can choose which version of RAID you want. Raid 5 offers substantial speed increase, with the ability to recover and regenerate all data if one hard diver fails. The software is called Softraid. It is good in the fact of always checking intercity and health of drives. You will generally have adequate time to recover drive. Softraid will first start telling you of minor failures. Then is the time to take out the bad drive, put a new empty drive, and recover all data. Quite a lengthy proves. I think mine was like 12 hours. After 5 years one drive failed, I replaced and recovered all data. I keep my Kontakt libraries, a ton of other data, and back ups to Logic songs.

This is more than adequate for quite large songs. 100 plus tracks, 50+ being audio. You do not have to spend the money on SSDS. My RAIDS are Thunder bolt 2. and Thunderbolt 3 are substantial faster. The RAIDS are 24 Gig and 32 GIg. If you can afford to buy all SSD's that's great. But I'm surprised at how many people think they can only use SSD for Logic projects. My Mac system SSD is 1 TB. I create songs on that. And then move to RAIDS when finished. Yet the RAIDS have no problem playing 100+ tracks.

If you put in 7200 rpm drives as JBOD in an enclosure (just a bunch of Drives) they would all be independent single drives, and that of course would give you no speed increase.

I have also found OWC to be extremely helpful when I've had a problem.

Encouraging and constructive. Thanks angelonyc. I was just reading up on RAID, and it did seem that RAID 5 was best suited to my needs. My experience with OWC has been positive through the years. They know the audio / video market well.

“But I'm surprised at how many people think they can only use SSD for Logic projects.” Understood. The rub here is the Synchron VSL library. They specifically guide the user to SSD’s. Each note has (at least) five sampled microphones, times two for stereo, times (up to) eight velocities, played simultaneously if the user is cross-fading. My ancient Mac kept with with standard Vienna Instrument sounds, but Synchron was a bridge too far.

Like so many of us, we’ve got so many platter drives, it’s tight ( and economically unwise ) to not use them.

“This will give you substantially more speed, but not as fast as an SSD.” Right. The operative question is, can raided platters deliver speeds that are feasible with Synchron? Or do I upgrade the Mac Mini 2018 RAM ( almost as expensive< even at OWC ), blow up Synchron’s pre-load, and make up the difference from slower disk speed?

Had the Mac Mini 2018 offered a larger built-in SSD, this would not be an issue. But that maxes out at 2 TB, it can’t be upgraded, and my sample library has already absorbed 75% of that one and only drive.

Money, time, and experimentation will solve these issue. Thanks again.

SSDs are expensive but the best choice for heavy libraries if they use a TB 3 connection.

How much space do you need?

Reasonable future proofing would put me at a 3 TB SSD drive. Presently, my Vienna library is about 1.67 GB. I’d prefer it not be on my one and only Mac Mini SSD drive. If I put an SSD 3 TB drive into the Thunderbay 4 OWC enclosure, it probably wouldn’t even need to be raided.

If you have a particular brand of SSD, or if you know deep-in-the-weeds stuff germane to sample playback, I’d value your thoughts.

Needless to say, there are stand-alone Thunderblades out there ( up to 2.8 GB read speed ), but out of my price range. A Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with raided, re-purposed platters is really a way of buying time.

A Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with raided, re-purposed platters is really a way of buying time.

Until SSD prices go down, use the spinners you have (preferably the same specs and brand) for a RAID enclosure.

Use Stripe 0 for fastest performance.

You can use another USB external to backup everything.