Nvme Enclosures

Grug said:
I just picked up a pair of Envoy Express enclosures from OWC (which were just released). Really tidy little units, quite a bit less expensive than the Orico options and the cable is replaceable (so if it gets damaged somehow, you can literally just open the enclosure and replace the cable with a new one):

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/envoy-express/thunderbolt-3
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I saw that enclosure and was considering it. They had a sale on their site for $68 ($79 on bh). I didn't like that the cable was attached but I see you say it could be replaced. The other thing that turned me off I was watching a review of all in one drives and on of the links that I posted above and both said it had poor performance. Even though it was a different device it didn't instill confidence that their enclosure would be good. It also didn't look like it could dissipate heat well. Anyway hope it works well for you and please let us know how it turns out.

ahalpert said:
Holy s*%t that's a good price. You have piqued my interest
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I think $250 is the current norm for 2tb. evo plus was selling for the same price but it was on sale on bh. Sometimes it's hard to tell if things are really on sale on BH or just that the retailer has permanently lowered the price.
 
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Grug said:
I just picked up a pair of Envoy Express enclosures from OWC (which were just released). Really tidy little units, quite a bit less expensive than the Orico options and the cable is replaceable (so if it gets damaged somehow, you can literally just open the enclosure and replace the cable with a new one):

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/envoy-express/thunderbolt-3
Click to expand...

Isn't that performance spec slower than the max read/write for most of these drives?
 
jbregar said:
I have one loaded with HP 2TB NVMe sticks. It works really well. About 2200MB/s write, 2400MB/s read over Thunderbolt 3. I'm running it RAID 0 for one 8TB volume. RAID 0 is obviously risky, but I have good and regular backups.

It's small enough to be easily portable if you care about that... but I generally use bus-powered SSDs for portable stuff.

View attachment 141510
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Thanks JB! Great feedback and thank you for experience. That sounds like exactly what I want to do. Was bouncing between this or the Thunderblade but the Thunderblade is a fixed 8TB
that costs considerably more, whereas with the housing, as the drives get cheaper and larger, I could swap potentially out the 2TB M2 NVMEs for 4TB and end up with a 16TB? But the Thunderblade is passively cooled
whereas the RAID housing uses a fan. Do you find the fan pretty quiet? My regular spinning drive OWC RAIDS are pretty noisy, although I am sure a portion of that are the spinning
drives themselves and not just the fan noise.

Those data rates mean I could edit a three camera UHD multicam clip in ProRes 422 no problem, which would be sweet or even a Cinema RAW Light multicam clip. I wouldn't care about portability,
I just spent yesterday in a hotel room a few hundred miles from here editing an EPK package that ran on the networks last night for Macys and Make-A-Wish. I lugged my 27" iMac and a 12TB spinning drive
RAID with me, no big deal. I hate editing on laptops.

It's funny, I was on the phone with the agency producer in NYC and he kept saying, "Wow, you are flying with all of these files you have to compress
and Hightail to us, you must have a fast laptop." I just laughed, yes, a 10 core i9 27" laptop.
 
puredrifting said:
Thanks JB! Great feedback and thank you for experience. That sounds like exactly what I want to do. Was bouncing between this or the Thunderblade but the Thunderblade is a fixed 8TB
that costs considerably more, whereas with the housing, as the drives get cheaper and larger, I could swap potentially out the 2TB M2 NVMEs for 4TB and end up with a 16TB? But the Thunderblade is passively cooled
whereas the RAID housing uses a fan. Do you find the fan pretty quiet? My regular spinning drive OWC RAIDS are pretty noisy, although I am sure a portion of that are the spinning
drives themselves and not just the fan noise.

Those data rates mean I could edit a three camera UHD multicam clip in ProRes 422 no problem, which would be sweet or even a Cinema RAW Light multicam clip. I wouldn't care about portability,
I just spent yesterday in a hotel room a few hundred miles from here editing an EPK package that ran on the networks last night for Macys and Make-A-Wish. I lugged my 27" iMac and a 12TB spinning drive
RAID with me, no big deal. I hate editing on laptops.

It's funny, I was on the phone with the agency producer in NYC and he kept saying, "Wow, you are flying with all of these files you have to compress
and Hightail to us, you must have a fast laptop." I just laughed, yes, a 10 core i9 27" laptop.
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I have no complaints about the fan. I had to replace the one in the OWC PCIe box I’m using for the SAS card for my LTO drive, but this one is relatively quiet.

Man, I wouldn’t want to travel an iMac, you’re more bad ass than I am! The 4M2 is about the same size as a 3.5” external USB disk (single drive)... then the power brick. Compared to a spinny disk RAID, its minuscule.
 
Peter C. said:
I saw that enclosure and was considering it. They had a sale on their site for $68 ($79 on bh). I didn't like that the cable was attached but I see you say it could be replaced. The other thing that turned me off I was watching a review of all in one drives and on of the links that I posted above and both said it had poor performance. Even though it was a different device it didn't instill confidence that their enclosure would be good. I also didn't look like it could dissipate heat well. Anyway hope it works well for you and please let us know how it turns out.
Click to expand...

ahalpert said:
Isn't that performance spec slower than the max read/write for most of these drives?
Click to expand...

I spent a day or so looking at all of the available bus-powered DIY M.2 TB3 enclosures, and as far as I could tell, performance speeds seemed to be pretty consistent across the board, 1500MB/s writes seemed to be about as high as any would go for a single drive. On that basis I settled on the OWC simply because it was the cheapest of the bunch (and I've had good experience with OWC customer support) - something that's often very difficult to get with mainstream peripheral manufacturers.

The speeds are comfortably faster than any card media can transfer to them anyway, so as shuttle drives, the performance is more than sufficient.
 
Lots of nice info in this thread.

Based on the OP going for the Mac Mini and 1TB of storage, I wonder at one point would it have been best to upgrade to the 2TB of Apple's storage for the extra $400 and most likely have the best performance possible in house.

And then consider any extra capacity on the side.
 
jbregar said:
I have no complaints about the fan. I had to replace the one in the OWC PCIe box I’m using for the SAS card for my LTO drive, but this one is relatively quiet.

Man, I wouldn’t want to travel an iMac, you’re more bad ass than I am! The 4M2 is about the same size as a 3.5” external USB disk (single drive)... then the power brick. Compared to a spinny disk RAID, its minuscule.
Click to expand...

I drove there. iMac in the trunk of my little car with some Duvetyne to protect the screen. Carried it to the room at a Residence Inn 50', no big deal. iMacs don't really weigh that much.
So worth it to me to have the screen real estate. Editing with a 13" or 15" screen and that's it? No more for me. Actually lugging the RAID was more of a PITA, in a box with lots of
packing paper to cushion it.

Good feedback, that sounds like it will work well for me. I'm ordering one tonight with the same HP sticks.
 
Nice. I've got a relatively cheap Gator case for monitors for my livestream setup that might work well for an iMac. The biggest problem with the iMac and monitor cases is the stands stick out so far.

I think you'll be happy with the 4M2... I certainly am and I'm kind of picky about my storage gear.

Offloading a CFExpress card through my Sonnet card reader and that 4M2 RAID is stupid fast. It moves like 1.2GB/s... a full 512GB card dumps in less than 10 minutes.
 
jbregar said:
Nice. I've got a relatively cheap Gator case for monitors for my livestream setup that might work well for an iMac. The biggest problem with the iMac and monitor cases is the stands stick out so far.

I think you'll be happy with the 4M2... I certainly am and I'm kind of picky about my storage gear.

Offloading a CFExpress card through my Sonnet card reader and that 4M2 RAID is stupid fast. It moves like 1.2GB/s... a full 512GB card dumps in less than 10 minutes.
Click to expand...

Very cool, that sounds like it would be perfect for downloading Cinema RAW Light files. I'm looking forward to having truly a truly fast RAID.
 
Looks like the glyph atom pro has a speed advantage over other bus-powered enclosures except for long, sustained transfers? Might be a better editing drive?
 
ahalpert said:
Looks like the glyph atom pro has a speed advantage over other bus-powered enclosures except for long, sustained transfers? Might be a better editing drive?
Click to expand...

That's the one that seems to stand above the others from my experience. Wish they were less expensive.
 
jbregar said:
I think you'll be happy with the 4M2... It moves like 1.2GB/s...
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I'm sorry to be annoying, but how is that better than a $20 enclosure (example), which is rated at 10 Gbps (1.25 GB/sec.)

Tangentially, USB 4 is out and will have the same speeds as Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps, 5 GB/sec.). I don't know when USB 4 enclosures will appear, but I think they should soon.
 
combatentropy said:
I'm sorry to be annoying, but how is that better than a $20 enclosure (example), which is rated at 10 Gbps (1.25 GB/sec.)

Tangentially, USB 4 is out and will have the same speeds as Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps, 5 GB/sec.). I don't know when USB 4 enclosures will appear, but I think they should soon.
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Not better, more capacity. Largest single M2 NVME I can find is 4TB. I need 8TB, at least and I can expand this one to 16TB when the prices on the 4TB drives comes down.
 
combatentropy said:
I'm sorry to be annoying, but how is that better than a $20 enclosure (example), which is rated at 10 Gbps (1.25 GB/sec.)

Tangentially, USB 4 is out and will have the same speeds as Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps, 5 GB/sec.). I don't know when USB 4 enclosures will appear, but I think they should soon.
Click to expand...

The 1.2GB/s is limited by the speed of my CFExpress cards. The drive itself can write well over 2GB/s and that limit is actually Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 is only four lanes of PCIe... so each drive only gets one lane of PCIe for transfer. One of the reasons it's not necessary to fill the 4M2 with the top of the line fastest M2 blades.

Also, like Dan said... one 8TB volume is more useful to me than two 4TB (or four 2TB) volumes.

The 4M2 also tends to keep up it's performance for longer. This is from the 9to5mac review of the 4M2... you can see how the Samsung X5 (which is just an NVMe drive in an enclosure, essentially) hits a wall and throttles its performance down... while the 4M2 doesn't.

OWC-4M2-vs-Samsung-X5-54GB-FCP-X.jpeg


Finally, I'd rather have one box taking up one of my 4 Thunderbolt/USB-C ports than four boxes taking up all four ports. Especially since the 4M2 has a pass-through port for daisy-chaining more stuff.
 
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