Hey All,

I purchased an OWC Thunderbay Mini today - it's a 4 (SSD) drive enclosure which has thunderbolt 2 ports for my late 2011 macbook... it's yet to arrive...

I wanted to buy it before it sells out because it's becoming near impossible to get these thunderbolt 2 drives in Europe and it was at a good sale price too.

On the other hand though, I was wondering if I'll use this much... I mean, I already have a 2TB internal SSD installed... and that's been just over half used now... but out of this TB I have installed so many programs installed... I won't list them!

But I guess I will get some performance improvements just running off a hard drive SSD/Thunderbolt... the last time I wrote a song I kept getting the system overload message...

I'm not sure... Do you think they are good investments?

 

I would be surprised if you get any performance improvements

 

Always nice to have a dedicated sample/data/content drive, work drive (the one that gets trashed and replaced frequently), app drive, and a backup drive. Plus the OS drive itself. There will be performance improvements in some situations but also much better reliability and peace of mind that everything won't go to hell. Always split your stuff up between several drives if you are going to do serious work.

 

Your Macbook is a lot more recent than 2011, I guess. I hope.

I don't know exactly what year TB2 was introduced, but I do know a 2011 doesn't have TB2. It does have a mini DisplayPort, which looks like a TB port, but isn't.

 

That's wrong, MBP15 from early 2011 up to early 2013 have got TB1 port(s) with 10GB/s. I own an early 2011 myself, using a TB docking station with USB3 to attach external SSD and HDD.

That's most likely due to CPU overload as the 2011 models are quite dated now. So faster drives won't help much.

 

@OBKenobi I appreciate the positivity/advice. Actually, over the past few hours I've actually realised I was a fool to think my 2TB internal drive I have would suffice... so I think it was a wise purchase... but I have to do some capacity planning...

@Myfanwy Thank you also.. Just to mention I recently done an 16GB RAM upgrade which has helped... not the worst specs although its old... I think to be fair alot of could come down to amateur/bad technique too (not bouncing midi files, not disabling plugins, buses... stuff like that) and just mistakes... I finished it and that counts

I'm going to post a new thread in this forum about RAID

 

Yep. You're right. Forgot they came sooner on the 15". Sorry.

 

Good investment. Usable in the future too.

You may remember from another of your posts that I am one of the people who advises a small OS drive and to have all libraries and a scratch disk externally.
The reason laptops ship with smaller OS drives than 2TB is because they are the drive we are most likely to have to replace at some point.
When I put the pieces together of CCC and various OWC gear, I partitioned a 1TB with a 500GB partition for the cloned bootable OS, and the rest was Library for Kontakt. And I put another 1TB in a caddy in the SuperDrive position.
This is just my stage system for keyboard work, and will always suffice.
But with your CPU from 2011, you will always have to bounce tracks to audio to complete something.
Yet what you are doing is making the most out of your system, which is a logical and good thing to do.