One of the biggest complaints from those ordering Apple Macs is having to load the machine from purchase, because Apple do not offer the option to update things like hard drive and memory after the event. What if you make a mistake and buy the wrong specification?

However, there is a possible solution for those who want to increase drive space after the event. Even better, it cost less than half what Apple charge you to get the same storage.

The way to do it is with a Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330. It’s a drive that fits snuggly in the SDXC card slot of your MacBook Pro and delivers read speeds of up to 95MB/s and write speeds of up to 75MB/s. This is not an SD card, it’s a custom designed card.

Before I investigated this option I wondered if the speeds would be troublesome for those of us working in audio. Compared to the internal MacBook Pro drive it’s like comparing a bike with a Ferrari, however is this one of those moments when speed is relative and the speed is more than suitable for use in audio work? Let’s put this in context, a typical 7200 RPM HDD will deliver a read/write speed of 80-160MB/s, a 5400rpm drive had speeds of around 75MB/s. Many people were recording on drives like this for years without issue.

I decided to purchase one and put it to the test. First, I ran the Black Magic Speed Test, an excellent application for running a stress test on a drive. It reported that the Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330 does hit the specs it claims. As you can see it reports that it will work with quite a lot of video specs. For this reason audio file loads should be a breeze.

In The Real World

So far we’re talking theory, so I decided to put the Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330 to some real world tests.

The first thing I did was run three of the Studio One demo sessions to the test. I dragged them all to the drive and then opened them and hit play. All of them played fine, when I opened them from the Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330, drive activity reported no more than 2%.

I then opened a busy session “Turn the World Around” which has about 20 tracks of audio and decided to check both read and write. I created 16 new mono audio tracks and placed them in record. Recording went without a hitch, the disc activity monitor topped out at 10%.

I then moved on to Pro Tools and opened the “Low Roar” demo session, featuring around 50 tracks with plugins. Again, that played without issue. I repeated the same test I conducted using Studio One and added a further 16 mono tracks to record, taking the session to nearly 70 tracks with busses and master output. It recorded again without issue, with the disk activity running around 10%.

I also moved the contents of EZDrummer 3 to the Transcend drive and that again opened and played without any issue.

Not All Is Lost

I want to be clear, the Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330 is a workaround. In a perfect world you would buy a MacBook Pro with a drive that has the capacity required to undertake all tasks. With that said, most professionals don’t use the internal drives for their media storage, I’m one of those people, and have around 10 drives hanging off my Mac in the studio.

With that said, we don’t always find ourselves in the perfect world. We either run out of storage on our internal drive, or we don’t want to hang an external drive off our MacBook, especially when travelling.

If you find yourself in one of those situations then the Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330 is more than capable of mixing and recording tasks without breaking a sweat. It also costs about half that of the additional 2TB internal MacBook drive, if you buy it with your Mac. Granted it’s not the high speed drive you get, but it’s sufficient for a wide range of creative tasks.

Fail!

One question some will ask is about drive failure. I have no data on these drives to be able to comment. To be honest, I always consider the possibility of failure with every drive I buy. Therefore every drive in my studio is backed up, this will be no exception. I advise doing this with all drives, there’s no such thing as a crash proof drive.

Summary

I want to repeat, to remove any doubt of what I’m saying to the reader. The Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330 is a compromise and a workaround. However, some MacBook owners may have buyers remorse on the size of their internal drive, the Transcend 1TB Jetdrive Lite 330 is a smart solution for a variety of storage tasks. Even better, the drive comes in a variety of sizes; 128gb, 256gb, 512gb and 1TB.

If you don’t care about aesthetics and hanging other drives off your Mac when travelling then there are faster and less costly solutions. If you do want a sleek ‘integrated’ solution then this is one of them. You pay the money, you take the choice. Worth checking out.