Monitor & Drive choices

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 9, 2022
2 replies
317 views

Been reading a fair bit here. Im getting ready to pull the trigger and invest in the items I need to transfer my working of LRC & PS over from my 2015 27" iMac to my new M1 14" Macbook Pro. Being used to a large screen, I want a large monitor to still work on but I am now more confused and worried then ever about choosing one that will have good color acuracy. The NEC and Eizo CS2731 both sound great but the price is daunting after buying a 3.5G MBP. I need to get printing done however, so it would be nice to have something close to what my iMac gives me now. Are there any other options out there now?

The other dilemma for me though concerns External Drives and how to connect them. My 4T HDD's are getting full and I was going to relace them with 6 or 8 T's. But now I'm thinking SSD's, although you cant get big ones it seems so I will need more than 2. The HDD's I use right now are actually bare internal WD Blacks which just sit in a 2 bay Thunderbolt dock on my desk. I was hoping to find a similar 4 bay (or bigger) Thunderbolt dock that I could sit 3 or 4 - 4T SSD's into, as I like working this way; plugging them in and out quickly, cloning them with their backup copies that I store in different places throughout the house. It's a quick and easy process that I'm used to. Anyway, I cant find a Thunderbolt dock with more bays than the cheap Rocketstor RS5212 (2 bay) which I have had for a decade. In fact I cant find any other Thunderbolt docks at all that you just click your bare drives into, which kind of seems a little strange considering how good it works. I did come across a USB3 - 4 bay but I dont think that will give me the transfer speeds I'm used to in accessing my Raw files. And thats why I'm here for opinions on that, and any other views on a better, more suitable solution or working setup with my new M1 MBP.

macOS

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Conrad_C

Community Expert

@Seaquence wrote:

The NEC and Eizo CS2731 both sound great but the price is daunting after buying a 3.5G MBP. I need to get printing done however, so it would be nice to have something close to what my iMac gives me now. Are there any other options out there now?

For displays that support hardware calibration and wide gamut, NEC and Eizo used to be the only game in town, bnt the options have improved.

If you just want wide gamut, there are many choices now that are well under $1000. If you check a model in advance for good uniformity and delta E at a site like Rtings, it should be pretty good after you generate a custom profile of it. If all that is true you should have a display more or less comparable to the iMac.

If you want wide gamut that (unlike an iMac display) also supports true hardware calibration, of course you start with NEC and Eizo, but there are more options now like the BenQ SW and Asus PA series.

What you want to look for in those brands is specifically their fine art or pro photo line. For example, NEC makes all kinds of displays from cheap home/office to color-critical. It helps that companies tend to use similar naming conventions for their pro photo lines that are pro color oriented or support hardware calibration, for example:
NEC PA series (as in PA272)

Eizo CG series (as in CG2420)

Asus PA series (as in PA27)

BenQ SW/PD series (as in SW240)

One way to drop the price significantly is to settle for 2K instead of 4K, since for photography, color accuracy means more than maximum display resolution. Another way is to settle for 24 inches diagonal instead of 27 inches or higher.

@Seaquence wrote:

The other dilemma for me though concerns External Drives and how to connect them.

For current Macs the choices are USB 3 or 4 or Thunderbolt 3 or 4, both through a USB-C port. Thunderbolt is potentially much faster, but for photography USB 3 is fast enough. Where you want to be careful is that the top speed of USB 3 depends on the specific version:

For SATA SSDs or hard drives (100-500 megabytes a second), USB 3 supporting up to 5 gigabits/sec is fast enough.
For affordable NVMe SSDs (up to 1000 MB/second), USB 3 supporting up to 10 Gb/sec is fine.
For the most expensive NVMe SSDs (over 1000 MB/sec), you should use Thunderbolt 3 or 4 (up to 40 Gb/sec), because USB 3/4 hardware supporting more than 10 Gb/sec is not yet common.

The first two are the most practical for photography. Thunderbolt is great if you can afford it, but overkill for photography. Remember that everything has to support the data rate you settle on…the drive, the enclosure, the port, and the cable. Anything supporting Thunderbolt is a lot more expensive than USB 3.

@Seaquence wrote:

…2 bay Thunderbolt dock on my desk. I was hoping to find a similar 4 bay (or bigger) Thunderbolt dock…as I like working this way

Yeah, I like using my 2-bay dock too. But because docks are considered occasional use (partly because internal drive connectors are not rated for high plug/unplug cycles), a dock with more than two bays is rare or nonexistent.

What I do is buy bare SSDs and put them into 10Gb/sec USB 3 enclosures, which can be found for under $20. I can still plug/unplug those freely using 10Gb/sec USB-C cables, since USB-C is designed for high plug/unplug cycles. If you need more USB-C ports to connect four at a time then get a 10Gb/sec or higher USB-C hub. Sure, all those cables are messier than a drive dock, but options here are limited.

S

SeaquenceAuthor

Known Participant

That's great info, Conrad! Thanks so much for replying. I will look into those screen options. And yes, the cable mess is rediculous enough behind my iMac. I was keen to keep the dock thing going without having to change drives but if I do go down the 4T SSD road I guess I can deal with having to swap out now and again to look for older stuff. Otherwise I'll just get two bigger HDD's again. From what I gather, drive type and transfer speed has little effect on LRC performance as long as your Cat, previews and Raw Cach are on your internal SSD, or even an external SSD, apparently.