In the process of replacing spinning hard drives with SSD on our Macintosh systems.

All of the Macs are “ancient” coming from the spinning drive era.

USB3 disks have been performing at less than 100 MByte/second read and write speeds. Not adequate for doing audio work with many disk files. Overloads occur very easily.

Current tests (Blackmagic Disk Speed Test) on SanDisk Ultra 3D SSDs are very encouraging.

2013 iMac — APFS formatted — unencrypted — write at 320 Mbyte/second, read at 425 Mbyte/second.

2013 iMac — APFS formatted — encrypted — write at 240 Mbyte/second, read at 325 Mbyte/second.

My portable “system” with everything on it is encrypted. I will be using it for my studio work drive. Performance is fine for my purposes. I had moved the working files to a different machine on the network. Network disk performance was just above 100 Mbytes/second. I experienced no problems.

Eventual target is a 2TB NVMe drive on USB 3.1 protocols for the system/portable studio. Working disk will be SATA III drives. In 2TB sizes I am down to about $.10 per gigabyte.

Off-Line “tape” is still 1, 2, and 4TB spinning disks — portable — fast enough for archive — $.025 per gigabyte. Unlikely to get larger spinning disks. That would change the archiving process into a very long and difficult process.