So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.
Yes, this would be a significant and inexpensive upgrade for a boot drive for iMacs (EDIT: with TB3 ports) using the Fusion drive.
I've seen 1TB M2 drives for around the $150 mark on sale, so added to the cost of the enclosure ($80), this will make a astonishing difference to your use, especially if the HD part of your Fusion drive is a 5400rpm drive.
So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.
Yes, this would be a significant and inexpensive upgrade for a boot drive for iMacs (EDIT: with TB3 ports) using the Fusion drive.
I've seen 1TB M2 drives for around the $150 mark on sale, so added to the cost of the enclosure ($80), this will make a astonishing difference to your use, especially if the HD part of your Fusion drive is a 5400rpm drive.
This means iMac 2017's at the oldest, which means iMacs not that old. The problem is my Fusion installation on a late 2015 iMac still gets reasonable writes plus fast reads: 296-write/1272-read (limited things running). AJA System Test doesn't allow me to force the RW on the hard drive, which is a 7200rpm Seagate (hate Seagate drives). I'm not sure which drive, the SSD or HDD, is actually doing either the reads or the writes although I believe the read is being done from the SSD but the write should also be done on the SSD except when it fills up and pushes the data to the HDD. In other words, there's no easy way to compare Fusion drive RW speeds to single SSD or HDD speeds.
On a newer 21.5" iMac with a single 5400rpm HDD, I got MacSales Envoy Pro EX and used it as the boot drive and it was running in the high 1800's to low 2000's (at least) for both read and write. This compares to a snail speed of 50-100RW for the internal HDD. It was less expensive to get the standard iMac and add the external drive than to purchase a configured system (at the time).
The price is decent and cable mechanism is unique and interesting, but this is not the "first" BYOD 40Gbps TB3 NVMe M.2 enclosure on the market. Bring Your Own Drive solutions from Ineo, Trebleet, Avolusion, Shell Thunder, Yottamaster, Tekq, and others exist and have for months.
Yes, and those I have deemed as too unreliable, with quality issues, thermal issues, firmware issues, and sketchy compatibility issues with flavors of MacOS. I’ve been wanting an external, portable TB drive but nothing on the market provided me with a comfortable feeling.
hope this one does.
So, I have a 2014 iMac with Fusion drive. and i'm wondering if it would make sense to use something like the linked device above as a boot drive.
I had a HDD-only 2014 Mac mini setup to optionally boot from an external SSD on USB 3. It was certainly much faster than the HDD but it had its share of problems related to performing macOS updates. The macOS updates override the boot disk selection and the Mac would download the huge update, usually >3 GB, do a soft reboot, start the update on the SSD, but then reboot to the original HDD, effectively aborting the update in progress. I could not get the Mac to react to the Option key press to manually select the boot drive. I’d always end up having to install the update on the HDD and then go back and install it on the SSD by doing a hard restart at the right point in the process where the Mac would respond to manual boot drive selection. The entire time the Startup disk shown in macOS was set to the SSD but was being ignored.
On my Mac mini the best solution was to convert my HDD-only mini to Fusion using a special board I found on Amazon for $17. It allowed me to put a large SSD into the Mini in the slot already in-place for Fusion based Minis. It took less than 5 minutes once I had the magic Torx bit that Apple uses. Converting the HDD + SSD into a single Fusion volume took another 5 minutes using a command line tool Apple provides in Recovery mode. Instead of the smallish SSD Apple uses with Fusion, I used a 500 GB SSD, but I see no reason why an even larger one wouldn’t work as well. If you really want SSD-only you can leave the drives split. The performance improvement going from HDD-only to a big-SSD based Fusion is amazing. Of course I had to do a full reinstall of Catalina and restore from Time Machine, but it turned a boat anchor into a very usable machine I can live with for a few more years.
At least for me, the upgrade hassles of booting from an external SSD were greater than the benefits I got by going to a Fusion setup, which you already have. If I already had a Fusion setup, especially on an iMac, I’m not sure I’d bother. I’m not sure what it takes to replace the small SSD that Apple uses in its Fusion setups with a much larger one in an iMac. If it was as easy as it is with the 2014 Mac mini, then I’d be tempted to do it. Also, the upgrade hassle I had with my Mini may not be a factor on other Macs.
My big question about this device is thermals. Modern SSDs can get very hot.
The Envoy's case is aluminum, but will there be a thermal pad or other solution for dissipating the SSD's heat to the case? And will it be enough for it to be reliable under stress?
I have a 2015 iMac and it only has TB2 along with a Fusion drive. ... I'm not sure if the Apple TB2 to TB3 adapter works as a powered port. I have the adapter but it's connected to a TB3 RAID, which is powered.
Apple's adapter does not deliver power, and the OWC device is bus-powered. You would need some kind of TB3 hub that can provide power. If your RAID has a pass-through port, you could probably use that, but you probably want it on a separate bus, to avoid taking bandwidth away from the RAID.
Why is this product speed-limited to 1553 megabytes per second when the SSD inside it can perform at twice that speed?
I'm guessing that the bridge chip isn't using the full 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Probably only using 2 lanes or PCIe version 2, either of which would cut the bandwidth in half.
Why is this product speed-limited to 1553 megabytes per second when the SSD inside it can perform at twice that speed?
I'm guessing that the bridge chip isn't using the full 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Probably only using 2 lanes or PCIe version 2, either of which would cut the bandwidth in half.
I was just going to say that it's probably only using two lanes. I was looking at their 4M2 (https://www.owcdigital.com/products/express-4m2) which is a TB3 box that takes four M2 NVMe blades with "up to 2800MB/s of mind-bending performance" — until I read that each slot only gets ~700Mbps because it's only one lane per blade. So you have to have four blades in RAID0 using their software to get full speed out of the box, (or two would get ~1400, three would get ~2100, etc) which was a no-go for me.
I'm looking for other options if anyone has suggestions. One reviewer I saw suggested you could get a TB3 PCIe breakout box and put in a PCIe card with four M2 sockets on it that provides a full four lanes to all, but that seems like a less than elegant solution.
Why is this product speed-limited to 1553 megabytes per second when the SSD inside it can perform at twice that speed?
I'm guessing that the bridge chip isn't using the full 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Probably only using 2 lanes or PCIe version 2, either of which would cut the bandwidth in half.
I was just going to say that it's probably only using two lanes. I was looking at their 4M2 (https://www.owcdigital.com/products/express-4m2) which is a TB3 box that takes four M2 NVMe blades with "up to 2800MB/s of mind-bending performance" — until I read that each slot only gets ~700Mbps because it's only one lane per blade. So you have to have four blades in RAID0 using their software to get full speed out of the box, (or two would get ~1400, three would get ~2100, etc) which was a no-go for me.
I'm looking for other options if anyone has suggestions. One reviewer I saw suggested you could get a TB3 PCIe breakout box and put in a PCIe card with four M2 sockets on it that provides a full four lanes to all, but that seems like a less than elegant solution.
Two lanes on this enclosure is correct.
The problem is, once you've got for a PCI-e enclosure, a PCI-E card, and the drives, you're in the ballpark of pricing for the Sabrent TB3 drives that can deliver about 3GB/sec, or the Plugable that I reviewed last year.
Why is this product speed-limited to 1553 megabytes per second when the SSD inside it can perform at twice that speed?
I'm guessing that the bridge chip isn't using the full 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Probably only using 2 lanes or PCIe version 2, either of which would cut the bandwidth in half.
I was just going to say that it's probably only using two lanes. I was looking at their 4M2 (https://www.owcdigital.com/products/express-4m2) which is a TB3 box that takes four M2 NVMe blades with "up to 2800MB/s of mind-bending performance" — until I read that each slot only gets ~700Mbps because it's only one lane per blade. So you have to have four blades in RAID0 using their software to get full speed out of the box, (or two would get ~1400, three would get ~2100, etc) which was a no-go for me.
I'm looking for other options if anyone has suggestions. One reviewer I saw suggested you could get a TB3 PCIe breakout box and put in a PCIe card with four M2 sockets on it that provides a full four lanes to all, but that seems like a less than elegant solution.
Two lanes on this enclosure is correct.
The problem is, once you've got for a PCI-e enclosure, a PCI-E card, and the drives, you're in the ballpark of pricing for the Sabrent TB3 drives that can deliver about 3GB/sec, or the Plugable that I reviewed last year.
Yeah, totally get that. The reason for the enclosure/card would be for something more like the 4M2 allowing for four drives, but being able to start with a single drive at full speed and expand to more blades later on given the limits of m2 storage sizes at this point — ie something a bit future-proof.
In the interim I'm probably going to just stick with single drives and USB 3.1gen2 enclosures as they're fast enough for video and cheap, and can always reuse the blades later. I'm trying to think of best options for bulk external storage that's still relatively fast but quiet, so exploring options. Maybe what I want isn't really available yet.
I had a HDD-only 2014 Mac mini setup to optionally boot from an external SSD on USB 3. It was certainly much faster than the HDD but it had its share of problems related to performing macOS updates. The macOS updates override the boot disk selection and the Mac would download the huge update, usually >3 GB, do a soft reboot, start the update on the SSD, but then reboot to the original HDD, effectively aborting the update in progress. I could not get the Mac to react to the Option key press to manually select the boot drive. I’d always end up having to install the update on the HDD and then go back and install it on the SSD by doing a hard restart at the right point in the process where the Mac would respond to manual boot drive selection. The entire time the Startup disk shown in macOS was set to the SSD but was being ignored.
Was this Catalina? I’m booting and seem to be updating from a Mojave SSD fine (T5j via USB3 on my 2014 iMac. Wondering if I will have problems down the line...
Comments
On a newer 21.5" iMac with a single 5400rpm HDD, I got MacSales Envoy Pro EX and used it as the boot drive and it was running in the high 1800's to low 2000's (at least) for both read and write. This compares to a snail speed of 50-100RW for the internal HDD. It was less expensive to get the standard iMac and add the external drive than to purchase a configured system (at the time).
On my Mac mini the best solution was to convert my HDD-only mini to Fusion using a special board I found on Amazon for $17. It allowed me to put a large SSD into the Mini in the slot already in-place for Fusion based Minis. It took less than 5 minutes once I had the magic Torx bit that Apple uses. Converting the HDD + SSD into a single Fusion volume took another 5 minutes using a command line tool Apple provides in Recovery mode. Instead of the smallish SSD Apple uses with Fusion, I used a 500 GB SSD, but I see no reason why an even larger one wouldn’t work as well. If you really want SSD-only you can leave the drives split. The performance improvement going from HDD-only to a big-SSD based Fusion is amazing. Of course I had to do a full reinstall of Catalina and restore from Time Machine, but it turned a boat anchor into a very usable machine I can live with for a few more years.
At least for me, the upgrade hassles of booting from an external SSD were greater than the benefits I got by going to a Fusion setup, which you already have. If I already had a Fusion setup, especially on an iMac, I’m not sure I’d bother. I’m not sure what it takes to replace the small SSD that Apple uses in its Fusion setups with a much larger one in an iMac. If it was as easy as it is with the 2014 Mac mini, then I’d be tempted to do it. Also, the upgrade hassle I had with my Mini may not be a factor on other Macs.
I'm looking for other options if anyone has suggestions. One reviewer I saw suggested you could get a TB3 PCIe breakout box and put in a PCIe card with four M2 sockets on it that provides a full four lanes to all, but that seems like a less than elegant solution.
The problem is, once you've got for a PCI-e enclosure, a PCI-E card, and the drives, you're in the ballpark of pricing for the Sabrent TB3 drives that can deliver about 3GB/sec, or the Plugable that I reviewed last year.
In the interim I'm probably going to just stick with single drives and USB 3.1gen2 enclosures as they're fast enough for video and cheap, and can always reuse the blades later. I'm trying to think of best options for bulk external storage that's still relatively fast but quiet, so exploring options. Maybe what I want isn't really available yet.