Apple M2 Mac Studio - is 32 GB RAM enough???

[Pablo Irrazabal]

Hi, I have a question for Mac Studio owners, I'm on a Hackintosh right now (specs below) with 64 Gigs of Ram, I'm mixing a 5.1 movie and activity monitor shows that Pro Tools is using 30 Gigs of RAM.
I was wondering if the same session would run fine on a 32 Gb M2 Mac Studio, Thanks!

[Darryl Ramm]

Hi welcome to DUC.

Uh maybe, but nobody can say for sure. And you are screwed if the Mac needs more than 32 GB you can't upgrade. And what happens in 3 years or the next larger project you get. So I personally would just be by buying 64 GB (or more).

What exactly are you looking at in Activity Monitor?

And what you are looking at is probably not actually telling you how much memory Pro Tools really needs, it may be overstating that significantly. Demand paged operating systems will let apps grow and consume almost all memory before starting to page parts of them out. You can look at Activity Monitor Memory Pressure chart as you start and use Pro Tools, if it's mostly green then macOS is not working hard to page out memory so may just be over counting what is needed. What is memory pressure showing on your Mac as you work in Pro Tools?

You may not know how little memory you can get away with until you run in a systems with less memory and see some memory pressure on the system, and let the system page out unneeded parts of apps. Or run benchmarks/tests by deconfiguring some of the systems memory or using tools like memory_pressure(1).

But assume it is telling you something, or setting an upper limit... you then need memory for the operating system and it's associated programs. And that's going to be several GB.

And be careful of all the discussion you hear on the interwebs about Apple silicon Macs using less memory then Intel Max, or having super fast paging to SSD that it does not need as much memory... you should not rely on this. If your routinely low on memory demand paging to those SSDs can wear them out (it can be orders of magnitude more IO that normal disk use) and very latency sensitive apps like Pro Tools can have problems with some of it being paged out/in, even if the paging is so fast that other apps might not "notice".

[its2loud]

Darryl is providing some me good advice here.

I recently purchased the Mac Studio M2 Max with 64GB of RAM and I have not regretted the bump up for a second.

I also recommend going to the 1TB internal SSD.

[JFreak]

I have 2TB on my Mini M1 and that is not too much

[smurfyou]

Originally Posted by its2loud

Darryl is providing some me good advice here.

I recently purchased the Mac Studio M2 Max with 64GB of RAM and I have not regretted the bump up for a second.

I also recommend going to the 1TB internal SSD.

I'm looking at exactly that, M2 Max 64GB / 1TB.

You happy with it?

[dr sound]

Will,
I have Two M1 Studio's with 64 gig of Ram and 2Tb .
That is the perfect set up.
Huge Atmos sessions with all the latest immersive verbs
running Rosetta at this time and the system is rock solid
and running without breaking a sweat!
You'll be very happy!

[creativecontrol]

64GB RAM would be my suggestion. You can't add it later. I have a Mac Studio Max with the above options and it's fabulous.

best,


Jeff

[smurfyou]

Originally Posted by dr sound

Will,
I have Two M1 Studio's with 64 gig of Ram and 2Tb .
That is the perfect set up.
Huge Atmos sessions with all the latest immersive verbs
running Rosetta at this time and the system is rock solid
and running without breaking a sweat!
You'll be very happy!

Thanks for the rec Marti! Finally moving past Intel

[Darryl Ramm]

As we talk about these new Macs and the amount of internal SSD. If you want fast Thunderbolt/PCIe SSD I just wanted to point out to potential purchasers the issues some folks run into with bus powered SSDs/enclosures and drives disconnecting due to power management issues in these Macs. A problem that has been mentioned in multiple threads, but recently this one: https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=425872.

If you can afford the Apple penalty tax it and the internal SSD that's maybe the best option.

Or you can use external SSD that are not bus powered, my preference there is for Samsung 980 Pro or 990 Pro M.2 SSD in Sonnet (or other brand) Thunderbolt 3 enclosures. Do not combine that with HDX of HD Native cards in the same enclosure that's known to cause problems (or I'd speculate don't combine on the same Thunderbolt bus).

You might be able to around the drives disconnecting in some case, possibly by using lower power SSDs like say the the Samsung T7, and/or powered hubs and/or disabling monitor power off etc.. but don't *assume* these will always work.

[its2loud]

Originally Posted by smurfyou

I'm looking at exactly that, M2 Max 64GB / 1TB.

You happy with it?

Very happy with it. It's everything I want and need out of my system.

Like Darryl mentions. If you can afford it. Load up on the internal SSD. If you have huge sound libraries, VI, etc.

I had to keep within a budget so I chose to use external SSD and the speeds are just fine. I never run into issues with external drives. Mind you, I'm not using enclosures.