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33Ledjent33

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 6, 2015
12
0
Hello dear users!

BEWARE this post is long-ish..

I decided to step up my music production game and I am slowly planning on selling my good ol' Tower Mac Pro 2008. I recently bought an iMac 2015 that was on sale locally on Gumtree. Beautiful machine with 64GB Ram, i7 processor, 2tb fusion inside and 4gb graphics card.

In my life when I change something I am doing that for good. Meaning that my old Mac Pro has already 2.5TB data inside and I need more space for my new iMac, the thing is that I really need speed as well. I am using a lot of virtual instruments that are quite heavy on ram and definitely space. We're talking about Superior Drummer 3, Albion One, 8Dio, Komplete etc.

I am looking for the best solution in here and I was really thinking of getting an external chassis that can hold NVMe m.2 SSDs. the iMac that I have has obviously Thunderbolt 2 and USB3 connections but I have a few questions:

1. Getting external enclosures is quite risky as you can spend so much money and not really getting expected results. What I mean by that - potential bottlenecks. In case of NVMe, we eliminate the SATAIII bottleneck by using the enclosure via TB2 which give us 20Gbps. Should I be aware of any other potential bottlenecks than SATAIII?

2. If there's a potential of using the chassis to at least double the speed of normal SATA 550mb/s SSD, what chassis do you recommend? I would love to being able to stick two separate m.2 1TB sticks and use one of them for more speed demanding libraries and the other for the OS itself. Then the internal 2tb fusion would be used for the general storage.

3. Is this too much in general? Is it way too complicated and expensive for whatever I want to do? Should I just go with SATAIII SSD external Chassis? If yes, then would you use it via TB2 or USB3? I am asking this because USB speeds fluctuate and Thunderbolt is more stable and consistent.

And this is kind of general question about thunderbolt or USB3.0.

4. If for example I decided to go for a thunderbolt 2 chassis that holds lets say.. two m.2 SSDs, am I going technically get only half of the transfer speed on each SSD or the transfer remains the same no matter what?

Thank you for your time, take care!
 
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