Since my Mantiz eGPU is working perfectly I decided to look at a little fast external storage. At first I considered using an external PCIe box with one of the following Amfeltec cards:
After I saw the price on these cards I decided to look around at other options and found a Netstor NA611TB3 for a much more reasonable price and decided to try it out with two 1TB Samsung 960 PRO NVMe SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration. It seems like a pretty well built device so I decided to put up a short review here.
The Netstor NA611TB3 comes nicely packaged in a sealed white box with a picture of the device on top and specs on the back. Packaging is reminiscent of Apple once opened with a cutout for the device itself on top and the power brick and cord in a compartment below. I would say the device itself is somewhat portable being a little larger than my hand as seen in the following picture:
The device itself is made out of aluminum with a rubber sleeve and looks to be well made. The enclosure accepts two NVMe M.2 SSD's of any length, has dual Thunderbolt 3 ports for daisy chaining, a small fan and a switch to turn off the fan if unneeded on the rear plate. Here is a picture of the rear of the device:
The device comes without SSD's but installation is a fairly simple process. Removing the two screws on the back plate allows an aluminum shelf to slide out that all internal components are attached to. Here are the guts after sliding out:
The SSD's need to be installed on the underside of the two sandwiched boards. Simply removing the four screws that retain the board and detaching the fan allows you to access the underside and insert the SSD's, there is a thermal blanket on the aluminum shelf that aids in cooling:
After SSD installation the device is truly plug and play with my 15" MacBook Pro running High Sierra 10.13.4. Once plugged into a Thunderbolt port the device shows up immediately in system report:
Opening Disk Manager the two SSD's show up as immediately available:
I then used the Mac RAID assistant to create a 2TB RAID 0 disk, very simple proccess:
Once attached the front panel has one power light that is orange when in standby and blue when attached and active. It also has independent lights for each SSD that flash white on activity:
Running a quick Black Magic Disk Benchmark made me realize it was going to be pretty tough to match the performance of my internal SSD. Here are the internal results:
After running the benchmark on the external Netstor device I was somewhat surprised. It is pretty darn close on read speed but slightly off on write speed. I'm assuming the write performance is affected by the software raid and this is just an initial benchmark, I have not tried any optimizations. Here are the Netstor results:
Conclusion. The Netstor seems like a very well built device and I now have 2TB of hot plug external storage that is fast enough to do direct audio recording and processing as well as 4k video editing. I'm sure performance can be improved a bit with some optimization but it is still pretty fast. I would still be interested in trying the quad Amfeltec board but will wait for NAND flash prices to come down a bit.
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
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@sprober , thank you for your review. I noticed the Black Magic write speed is half of the maximum of Thunderbolt 3's 22Gbps (2750MB/s), but your reads are OK.
This is a PCIe enclosure running PCIe firmware. We noticed another PCIe enclosure being used for GPUs is also giving this half-write performance (1386.15MiB/s writes, 2664.85MiB/s reads):
https://egpu.io/forums/builds/late-2016-15-mbp-tb-rp460-node-pro-gtx-1080-ti-fe-win-10-pro/
Consider these steps to try to improve performance:
1. trying to hotplug the enclosure after Apple firmware has booted to circumvent any link adjustments it may be doing.
2. asking netstor to provide a new firmware to enable full speed writes. Just last year this was required for some eGFX enclosures:
https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt-enclosures/alert-akitio-node-half-h2d-bandwidth-issue/
eGPU Setup 1.35 • eGPU Port Bandwidth Reference Table
2015 15" Dell Precision 7510 (Q M1000M) [6th,4C,H] + GTX 1080 Ti @32Gbps-M2 (ADT-Link R43SG) + Win10 1803 // compares M.2 vs TB3 performance inc unoptimized H-CPU BIOS [build link]
@nando4, thanks for the suggestions. I will definitely be working on optimizing the write performance.
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
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@sprober Thank you for the detailed review of this TB3 NVMe enclosure. You can try AJA System Test to see if it makes a difference with Write speed. If that shows the same, maybe try one drive at a time.
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2021 15" ASUS TUF Dash F15 [11th,4C,H] + RTX 3080 @ 32Gbps-TB4 (AORUS Gaming Box) + Win10 2004 // my 3rd RTX 3080 build [build link]
@itsage Thanks for the suggestion. I will definitely be testing the SSD's independently. I think the software RAID is part of the problem as it still only allows the HPFS format where APFS is allowed on individual drives and is designed specifically for SSD's. I will post those results when I have a chance.
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
.The software RAID feature in macOS is definitely not there yet. If you have Boot Camp to run Windows, that's a quick way to determine the max bandwidth on this NVMe enclosure.
• external graphics card builds
• best laptops for external GPU
• eGPU enclosure buyer's guide
2021 15" ASUS TUF Dash F15 [11th,4C,H] + RTX 3080 @ 32Gbps-TB4 (AORUS Gaming Box) + Win10 2004 // my 3rd RTX 3080 build [build link]
For a comparison, a couple of CrystalDiskMark tests with a single 512GB 960 PRO & NP631N & HL23T on Windows 10:
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Barefeats shows that NA611TB3 can reach 1938 MB/s 16GB sequential write speed:
http://barefeats.com/hard226.html
automate-eGPU EFI ● apple_set_os.efi
Mid 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro eGPU Master Thread
2018 13" MacBook Pro [8th,4C,U] + Radeon VII @ 32Gbps-TB3 (ASUS XG Station Pro) + Win10 1809 [build link]
Here are the results from AJA as suggested by itsage using 4k RED HD, 16 MB file size. I ran the test on the macbook internal SSD, the two 1 TB Samsung Pro 960 in the Netstor RAID 0 formatted HPFS, the 960 Pro's individually formatted APFS and just to check it out the two SSD's RAID 1 formatted HPFS. The RAID 0 does show by far the fastest numbers for the external SSD's especially for write and as you would expect RAID 1 has the read speed of RAID 0 but the write speed of the individuls.
Internal SSD:
Netstor RAID 0:
Netstor individual SSD formatted APFS:
And RAID 1 HPFS:
I'm going to have to look into how barefeats got that write speed as mine is a few hundred below that. I've contacted Netstor to see if there is a firmware update but haven't heard back from them yet.
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
.My mistake. 1938MB/s bar in the Barefeat's graph was "Netstor TB3 AHCI" - the NVMe result is below.
automate-eGPU EFI ● apple_set_os.efi
Mid 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro eGPU Master Thread
2018 13" MacBook Pro [8th,4C,U] + Radeon VII @ 32Gbps-TB3 (ASUS XG Station Pro) + Win10 1809 [build link]
@goalque I did find the response from Netstor in my spam folder thanks to your heads up. they explain the firmware update above applies to PCIe for GPU only and NVMe as we know it has no special firmware. The performance hit is due to Thunderbolt bottleneck and effects both read and write by the same percentage (Samsung specs for the 1TB 960 Pro are read speeds up to 3500MBs and sequential writes up to 2100MBs). They also provided their own test results below and as you can see my 960 Pro are beating their 960 Evo but they had the best results with the OCZ 400D so I may try a couple of Toshiba XG5 as I believe the OCZ used XG3's but Toshiba is now up to XG5.
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Samsung 960 EVO 1TB |
OCZ RD400 1TB |
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Installed on PC |
R: 3200 MB/s |
R: 2600 MB/s |
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Single NVME through TB3 |
R: 2300 MB/s |
R: 2400 MB/s |
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NA611TB with two NVMe RAID 0 |
R: 2400 MB/s |
R: 2400 MB/s |
As I said in my original conclusion the Netstor NA611TB is a well built device and I'm quite happy to have 2TB of fast hot plug storage that is certainly fast enough for my direct audio and video editing needs. I can add to that now that their support seems to be responsive and doing their best to satisfy your needs.
To do: Create my signature with system and expected eGPU configuration information to give context to my posts. I have no builds.
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