SSD in USB-C enclosure as a working drive for both Windows and Mac?

tldr: Is exFAT the best formatting type for external USB-C SSD as a work drive used between both Windows and Mac?

I primarily use a Windows PC with Ryzen+2080ti for blender modeling at work. I recently purchased a Macbook Pro 16" with the M pro chip as a travel/remote work computer. I have a fast WD black sn750 nVME 2tb drive and a purchased an external USB-C enclosure to house it in (this one)–it promises 20Gbps = 2.5GB/s transfer rate via Macbook’s USB-C/thunderbolt port. I assume this would be plenty fast enough so I can work directly off it without needing to transfer the blender file to the computer main drives (mac drive is only 500gb so I want to avoid clogging it with my blender files).

My questions are:

  1. Is exFAT the best formatting type so that this drive will work well and allow full/fast transfer speeds and be reliable as an external work drive? If not, how best to format this so that I can use it as a work drive and jump between working on the Windows machine to my Mac and back?
  2. Is 20Gbps = 2.5GB/s transfer rate sufficient as a work drive?
  3. I’ll have to buy a USB-C pcie card so I can plug the external drive into my windows machine. Any specific card types to get?
  4. Any tips or other things to note when working on blender files between Windows and Mac?

Thank you.

1 yes, unless you want to buy an NTFS reading app for the Mac.

  1. Yes.

  2. Why don’t you just get an inexpensive cable?

  3. Make sure you have the same addons installed on both machines.

Thanks midphase.
2. The reason is that I’m assuming a USC to USB-C cable to connect the drive to my computer wont allow as fast a transfer as a dedicated USB-C to pcie… but Im not sure.

Thank you again.

Do you feel that the drive read/write speed is going to be a bottleneck when using Blender?

Thats what Im trying to figure out.

USB-C is just the connector. The speed is USB-2, 3, 3.1, 3.2 see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C… So i assum you ryzen does have at least 3.1 ? So just as @Midphase said: Buy a USB- Type A to USB-C adapter cable… (not the cheapest and not with gold on the coating :wink: )

Basically on your typical Blender project, after the initial project is loaded in, there isn’t much drive activity aside from the final render files being written to the drive (slowly…because it’s a render), and possibly some cache files if you bake your physics and animation.

Drive speed and bus speed come into play in situations where a lot of data has to be written and read in real time very quickly, like for instance for video editing or audio work.

I did end up formatting the drive to exFAT with a 512k allocation, but the download speed test on the mac showed only 900mb/s (compared to the 20Gbps = 2,500mb/s advertised on the enclosure). The same drive on the PC showed 35mb/s transfer when I transferred a 500mb file to it. When I transfer the same file to my second identical m.2 drive that is connected to the motherboard via a pcie card, the transfer is instantaneous. Not sure what to do to get a faster transfer speed for this drive on both mac and pc? Any ideas?

The exFAT with 512k allocation in this 20Gbps enclosure is giving me only 35mb/s transfer on windows and 900mb/s on PC, while the same drive on my PC pcie board is much faster. What to do. Just get a cheapo drive and keep my m.2 drive on the pcie on my motherboard?

Maybe try this guy and see if NTFS gives you faster transfer speeds?

Maybe ill give this a shot and see how it goes. Im wondering if there are any consequences to using this enclosure as my primary work drive plugged in externally via usb-c? Any consequences to using it externally vs having the m.2 nvme plugged into the motherboard via pcie?

Regarding speed… it depends: if you look at specifications (and also wikipedia) there is:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-rate_units):

  • gigabit per second (symbol Gbit/s or Gb/s, often abbreviated “Gbps”) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to:
    1,000,000,000,000 bits per second
  • gigabyte per second (GB/s) (can be abbreviated as GBps) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to:
    8,000,000,000 bits per second

then there is Wikipedi for M.2/NVM/PCI/USB…

for example implemented conncetion via M.2 PCI 3 and using 1x 2x 4x 8x 16x

  • 3.0 0.985 GB/s 1.969 GB/s 3.938 GB/s 7.877 GB/s 15.754 GB/s

and USB 3.1 released in July 2013 has two variants. USB 3.1 Gen 1 and SuperSpeed+ transfer mode under the label of USB 3.1 Gen 2 . SuperSpeed+ doubles the maximum to 10 Gbit/s

And the length and quality of an USB cable influences the transfer quality/speed.

or in short:
direct connection is faster than transcoding to any USB/lightning standard and back again…