Best drive options - 2013 MacPro PT Ultimate

[Howardk]

Hi

Currently building a Pro Tools Ultimate system with HDX Cards using a Mac Pro 2013. My existing systems are Mac Pro 2010/2012s. Hoping for more gas for VIs with the 2013.

I upgraded a used quad core 2013 Mac Pro to a 10 core (only took an hour, processor ~ $150 on eBay, need to peel off a label hiding torx 4 heads for the spring retainer, why Apple?), and upped RAM to 64GB.

Looking for a Sonnet Echo Express III-D PCIe Thunderbolt 2 chassis. . . hard to come by, and I hear the Thunderbolt 3 version is trouble with the TB2<>TB3 adapter. . . so I am on the prowl. Also I see Sonnet has a new chassis coming out next month, so I should find a solution one way or the other, fingers crossed.

Only a 500GB blade in this 2013 Mac Pro, which is enough for the system disk, but that is it.

In addition for the system drive, I need space for:
a) active sessions (1TB, currently use ~ 600GB)
b) sample library (2TB, currently use ~ 1.1 TB)
c) clones of Mac OS System disks (2x500GB, currently using ~ 400GB due to d) sample Library bloat and general file system clean up required)
e) testing scratch/temp space for audio/video temp/download/imports/cleanups, etc. . . (5-10TB)

I was thinking I should replace the internal with a 1TB and make it 2 Partitions (1st for production, 2nd for Mac OS / Pro Tools variant/testing). . . I like to have a safe sandbox, especially once a system is in production, so I can test/experiment with OS or PT config variants . . . it is not like I can just slide different Mac OS drives in/out on a sled like my 2010/2012 Mac Pros.

Maybe a 2TB internal would be better, then I could have the Mac OS system variants and Samples on that SSD as well, and use an external for the Mac OS Clones/Sandbox, but I do like when the sample are easily moveable to another computer.

I am new to the 2013 Mac Pro and I don't know which blades are best, or the differences between. I would think there are good options out there. . . I see these drive blades get pricey from OWC/Mac sales. . . . I hear some are OS limited. . . at this point I am on Mojave and plan to move onward when the time is right.

Since I will be replacing the existing SSD blad, I could make it my sessions drive and just do more house cleaning to keep under 500GB. . . but with track freeze and commit by sessions drive has been bloating like crazy. I would need a Thunderbolt 2 or USB3 external case, but would not like to hobble the drive or at least get most of its' performance. Hoping there are fairly priced Thunderbolt 2 cases to recycle this internal drive, but the Thunderbolt 2 gear is disappearing fast, unfortunately.

I just purchased an OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini TB3 (will use the Apple TB2<>TB3 Adapter). . . I am not expecting it to scream, but it should be faster on this Mac than with the 2010/2012 Mac Pros. I will load the thunder bay Mini up with existing SSDs for current sessions, Samples, etc. . . my scratch space will be a 3.5" 6TB HDD in a USB external. Hoping this will work ok until I find ways to economically move assets to faster access storage. . .

Right now I am looking for thoughts on:
1) economical good performance options for 1TB or 2TB internal blades for these Trash Can Mac Pros and
2) good value Thunderbolt 2 external blade chassis to recycle existing system blade.

You insights and experience are appreciated as I mull this over to figure out best go forward.

Thanks. . .

Howard

[Darryl Ramm]

How about some size info? How large are your sample? Sessions? Are you having any performance issues running them?

Have you got the memory maxed so you can run everything from the disk cache? (set to a size to fully cache the sessions., not set to "normal").

You only need to partition drives to install additional bootable operating systems. If you don't need to do that then don't make things unnecessarily more complex for yourself. And you can boot off external drives, included external NVMe SSDs... and over Thunderbolt 2 if done well each of those drives can be as fast as an internal 4 x PCIe 2 SSD.

Nobody really calls what you are calling a "blade". They are SSDs or M2 SSD etc.

These trashcans are unfortunately awful computers for working with modern PCIe based SSD storage.

Yes you should start by maxing out the internal SSD. Contact OWC and see what they can offer. The internal SSD is Apple proprietary, looks like M.2 but is not. These early Trashcans do provide 4 x PCIe 2 to the card although your card is likely only 2 x PCIe 2. So take that out and toss it, replace with the largest 4 x PCIe 2 (or 3) NVMe SSD OWC can sell you compatible with that Mac. Your existing internal card is ~1/4 the PCIe bandwidth of standard 4 x PCIe 3 M.2 cards. Again me, I would not mess around, get the NVMe drives from OWC, they will require a minimum OS level that supports NMVe. But so will can practically external NVMe drives (esp. if you want to boot off a clone for recovery and it's a NVMe SSD.. just get it all working with NVMe drives everywhere). For that internal SSD I would by from OWC, as large NVMe was you can get... for other M.2 drives in external docks or caddys I would buy Samsung 970 Evo, not from OWC.

Then you can think about what external storage you can use. With NVMe drives a Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter may not necessarily work check the vendors says it does (like OWC says it does work with the 4M2).

For future NVMe M.2 based external storage....

BTW the OWC 4M2 box is meh. It's a cheap (PCIe-switchless) design intended to work with RAID software to combine four M.2 cards. AFAIK it hard allocates one PCIe lane to each card. And given the trashcan is only Thunderbolt 2 it will fan out to 4 x PCIe 2 lanes, so you only get one PCIe 2 lane to service each M.2 drive (so the drive have only 1/8th the physical bandwidth they would have in a 4 x PCIe 3 slot). You get back increased aggregate performance if you stripe with RAID, but I'd not be racing to do that--it's a great way to increase complexity and decrease reliability. Remember a Thunderbolt 2 bus only delivers 4 x PCIe 2 lanes of IO performance. You have three separate Thunderbolt 2 busses on the trashcan (two Thunderbolt 2 ports share each bus).... so if I was doing this and wanted to max the IO performance I'd actually get single M.2 SSD to Thunderbolt encloses and attach as many as needed to separate Thunderbolt busses. You need to make sure each enclosure is claimed to work with a Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter. I would not be buying anything based on SATA drives, that's last decade's technology and cost/GB is not vastly cheaper than what is possible with M.2.

And doing stuff to get the most IO performance here likely won't affect Pro Tools running...you should be running with disk cache anyhow... but it might help make large sessions load faster, VIs (that don't steam) preload faster, make backups run faster, etc.

[JFreak]

Buy a Sintech M.2 adapter and you have tons of options for 2TB drives (I use Intel p660). If you want 4TB unfortunately the only option is OWC drive that is out of stock and can only be bought second hand.

I have been waiting for 4TB options but so far haven't found anything else.

[Ashford]

With my 2013 Mac Pro I use a Magma 3 slot PCIe Thunderbolt 2 chassis. The nVME I use is a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo in a StarTech M2 PCIe adaptor. Works perfectly.

The 2013 Mac Pro Only works at PCIe 2 bus speeds which limits it to 2000MB/s transfer rates, so you can get away with a nVME that is compatible with this, meaning you do not have to buy the most expensive nVME, just one that supports 1500 to 2000 MB/s transfer rates. My 970 Evo is overkill and spec'ed higher than the Mac Pro bus speed.

[Howardk]

Thanks for the info guys, I will read more carefully later...

[Howardk]

Just a quick drop by right now... will this do the trick for the internal SSD, along with the appropriate Sintech adapter?
Western Digital 2TB WD Blue SN550 NVMe Internal SSD - Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s, M.2 2280, 3D NAND, Up to 2,600 MB/s - WDS200T2B0C

https://www.amazon.ca/Blue-SN550-1TB-NVMe-Internal/dp/B08K4NP5DQ?th=1&psc=1

Do we have to worry about trim with this setup?

[Howardk]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

How about some size info? How large are your sample? Sessions? Are you having any performance issues running them?

Have you got the memory maxed so you can run everything from the disk cache? (set to a size to fully cache the sessions., not set to "normal").

Hi Darryl

This 2013 Mac Pro test system I am just putting together has 64GB RAM as does my 2012 Mac Pro Production System. I have not started testing the 2013.

Yes I do cache the time line, at this point it is all music, so short timeline. Speed of opening sessions is important to me because it saves a lot of time when making quick mix tweaks at the end of a project, or looking at past work to fish out a VI patch or similar sleuthing. Backups happen at night to slow local NAS system and BackBlaze, so speed not an issue for BUs.

Performance on my current 2012 Mac Pro is marginal at best. CPU are never taxed, but it still halts from time to time, even with 1024 buffer, so there is a hidden log jam going on. It has never been great, even with minimal plugins installed, it just does not like to run much AAX native but it is worse now, so I may have a plugin culprit, time for more sleuthing again, which I am way weary of... too much time on that kind of work....

My sessions are all over the map, from nothing but audio, to a combo of mostly audio with a bit of VIs, to a whole bunch of VIs. Track freeze/commit are helping me keep sane. Also problems with delay compensation often cause headaches... but I have found workarounds for the most part.

Click on my Profile for System config info.

Thanks...

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Howardk

Just a quick drop by right now... will this do the trick for the internal SSD, along with the appropriate Sintech adapter?
Western Digital 2TB WD Blue SN550 NVMe Internal SSD - Gen3 x4 PCIe 8Gb/s, M.2 2280, 3D NAND, Up to 2,600 MB/s - WDS200T2B0C

https://www.amazon.ca/Blue-SN550-1TB-NVMe-Internal/dp/B08K4NP5DQ?th=1&psc=1

Do we have to worry about trim with this setup?

I personally would look at a Samsung 970 Evo, just have a preference for Samsung... all these NVMe drives should generally work with the adapter that Janne mentioned... and Samsung being the largest vendor by far means those drives will hopefully tend to get used/tested well. But I have no experience using that adapter with any M.2 SSD.

Yes you can enable Trim with these third party NVMe drives. How much that helps with performance you may never notice for normal use, it can help in corner cases, and it also helps reduce cell wear. How APFS helps avoid write amplification means it's maybe less important than in the past, but I would still turn it on. Just "sudo trimforce enable" on any modern macOS release is all you need to do. Because that enables Trim on all drives, you do need to make sure you don't have say any old drives with known broken Trim behavior. All modern drives from major vendors should all be find... but another reasons I like to go with the market leader Samsung.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Howardk

Hi Darryl

This 2013 Mac Pro test system I am just putting together has 64GB RAM as does my 2012 Mac Pro Production System. I have not started testing the 2013.

Yes I do cache the time line, at this point it is all music, so short timeline. Speed of opening sessions is important to me because it saves a lot of time when making quick mix tweaks at the end of a project, or looking at past work to fish out a VI patch or similar sleuthing. Backups happen at night to slow local NAS system and BackBlaze, so speed not an issue for BUs.

Performance on my current 2012 Mac Pro is marginal at best. CPU are never taxed, but it still halts from time to time, even with 1024 buffer, so there is a hidden log jam going on. It has never been great, even with minimal plugins installed, it just does not like to run much AAX native but it is worse now, so I may have a plugin culprit, time for more sleuthing again, which I am way weary of... too much time on that kind of work....

My sessions are all over the map, from nothing but audio, to a combo of mostly audio with a bit of VIs, to a whole bunch of VIs. Track freeze/commit are helping me keep sane. Also problems with delay compensation often cause headaches... but I have found workarounds for the most part.

Great you understand the potential plugin issues, failure at such large IO buffer makes plugins more a suspect, hopefully you are have you had a chance to compare problematic session on the Cheesegrater with the Trashcan (just running native.... like do you even need HDX? But I get why HDX may make sense). And you. can also exclude the interface/driver by testing with built-in output. I think you already did that IIRC.

I know you've posted stuff before but I can't recall if you have disabled spindump and tailspin? And always check that disk cache is set to a size and is fully caching your sessions (the disk cache meter goes green before starting)... I always forget to reenable disk cache after trashing prefs.

[Howardk]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I know you've posted stuff before but I can't recall if you have disabled spindump and tailspin? And always check that disk cache is set to a size and is fully caching your sessions (the disk cache meter goes green before starting)... I always forget to reenable disk cache after trashing prefs.

I have the system usage meter on my right monitor and keep an eye on Cache/CPU/HDX Cards. . . so I know where things are at.

I am not aware of disabling spindump and tailspin. Not something I have noticed in my reading/googling.

The only real reason I need HDX is for reduced latency when tracking and headphone monitoring. Also, I do get a bit crazy when mixing certain projects, when the track count and DSP plugins stack up. Furthermore I like to leave tracks liquid as I can. Commit/freeze, while very useful, feel a bit like handcuffs when I am I doing final finer eq/comp/distortion tweaks. . . so I prefer to leave tracks fully active if I can. These wishes, plus the issues I have with AAX Native resources feeling sketchy on HDX systems. . .

I have not started any testing on the 2013 Mac Pro yet. Just updated the processor and waiting for gear to arrive. I would like to get a new internal SSD and build from that first.