I'm using a two-bay hard drive docking station (toaster) which connnects by USB-C at 5gbps (in theory) to my Macbook. Could this be slowing down my video processing at all? Does it matter if I use a 7200 or 5400 hard drive? What else is under my control here?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.6
I've been very impressed with the Crucial X9 Pro. If you still get beachballs with an SSD, then we'd need you to post an https://etrecheck.com report to diagnose other issues.
You can check how the drives perform by running BlackMagic Disk Speed Test.
The limiting factor is almost certainly the drives themselves, especially a 5400rpm hard drive is extremely slow.
Even both drives at the same time would not saturate the bus.
If you are serious about working with video, do consider getting yourself an external SSD, and reuse those hard drives as backup. A single 1TB external SSD would not be that expensive, and would greatly outperform the HD.
Thanks. After stress testing my drives I am now in the SSD market. Had no idea the price had come down so much in the past few years.
Two questions now:
piedralibre wrote:
Two questions now:
1 - Are there meaningful differences between SATA SSD (loaded into a Wavlink Toaster connecting to MacBook by USB-C) vs. an external SSD connected directly to MacBook with USB-C?
2 - Are there meaningful performance differences between the different sizes of SSD? The 1TB X9 Pro vs the 4TB X9 Pro for example.
A SATA SSD has a theoretical througput of 6Gbp/s (the speed of the SATA bus) so if loaded into a Wavlink Toaster you would be limited by the 5Gbps throughput of the Wavlink Toaster.
You must check the technical specs of the external SSD you are considering. Many are actually a SATA SSD inside a USB enclosure ... if the enclosure supports 10Gbp/s or 20Gbp/s USB but internally it has a SATA SSD you would be limited to the 6Gbps speed of the internal SATA bus.
Note that the Crucial X9 is spec'd at 1050MB/s, which is 8.2Gbp/s ... but its USB interface is USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gb/s) so even it is limited by the internal speed of the SSD itself. (Don't get me wrong, 8.2 Gb/s is still faster than 6 or 5 Gb/s, I'm just illustrating the need to understand the actual specs.)
There are differences that can be measured in the performance of different size SSDs - but you would be very hard pressed to notice it in real life.
MacSales.com
Ok great to know. If after getting a good SSD (any suggestions on good price/performance options?) I continue getting semi-regular beachballs I can rule safely out the toaster (and after trying with a few different cables) as the cause?
SATA SSD are limited by the SATA bus, so they won't be able to have throughput above 500MBps, but that is still a lot more than traditional hard drives.
Drives like the X9 will be about twice as fast, when connected to a USB-C port on a recent mac.
SSD and USB 3 minimum for data speed.
Hard Drive Docking Stations and Video Processing
