New Computer Migration + SSD?

I don't think drive speed is really an issue when using it in an external enclosure, even when using a 40Gbps TB4 or USB4 link. I've yet to see an NVMe enclosure that can actually deliver that speed. While searching for NVMe raid enclosures, I found one only to later discover that each NVMe drive only had a PCIe bandwidth of 8Gbps! What? That's barely faster than old school SATA SSDs.

I'm not saying faster enclosures don't exist, but in all the searching I've done, outside of something like the $20k iodyne Pro Data, I've never seen a single drive TB4 enclosure that could deliver faster than 3000MB/s. I have no idea why, it could be the PCIe controller in the enclosure, it could be a massive amount of overhead? I grew up in the days of IDE drives, so to me 3000MB/s is still pretty bonkers.

That's the one!

Interesting I looked at the Acasis one, I think the only reason I didn't get it is because Amazon pulled their usual shady business practices and raised the price up so they could mark it down for prime day. So I refused to buy it out of principle LOL I hate Amazon.

No worries, happy to help someone that wants help.

I have not looked at the P4 or P5, but I did a quick search because I was curious myself and found this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paOEKOUuuDc

There is of course a speed difference between the P3+ and P5+ plus, but I'm not sure you'd see it in an external enclosure. The max theoretical speed of TB4 is 40Gbps or 5,000MBs. Take some off for overhead, and some more off for PCIe to TB4 conversion inefficiencies etc... So speed wise I don't think there would be much of a difference between the two.

However, as @PoorFellow pointed out, it's not all about speed. The P5+ has a drive endurance of 600 TB written which is an insane amount. So you could fill a 4TB drive completely full, erase it and fill it up again 150 times. The P3+ has a drive endurance of 220 TB written... which doesn't sound like much when compared to 600TBW. So let me add some context.

My M2 Studio is fairly new and I got my P3+ at the same time because I planned from the very start to use external storage and not pay for Apple's overpriced internal storage. I don't recall exactly when I got it, but for arguments sake, let's say a nice even 6 months. Since then I've written just over 10TB to it. That's all of the Arturia v Collection 9, the full Ableton Live Suite, Cubase, NI Komplete Collector's edition, a half dozen Steam games etc... basically all the programs I want to have access to on a new computer. But other than updates, that's pretty much a one time deal, sure I might have to wipe my computer from time to time and reinstall stuff or restore from a timemachine backup. But I'm not doing that frequently.

But let's say I did. 10TB written in 6 months, so we'll call it 20TB in a year. I would have to wipe my computer twice a year and reinstall all of my software for 11 years before the P3+ would be near the end of it's designed life expectancy. Of course there would be updates and other stuff that would probably increase that average, but still... so maybe it's 8 years instead of 11. :shrug:

Sorry for the rant lol, my point is that outside of a datacenter I wouldn't worry about endurance too much. If you were running a PC and your motherboard had an on board PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe slot, I would say go for the P5+ if you can afford it.

I don't know how much the P5+ costs, I haven't checked, but unless it's like $10 or $20 more than the P3+, then in our situation it's probably not worth the extra cost. The TB4 link is going to be the main bottleneck.

Or if you got an extra $20k burning a hole in your pocket, grab yourself one of these. It has 2x TB4 ports for double the bandwidth LOL