New Mac Pro setup with OWC Ram and Accelsior SSD with New Mac Pro

[louisenslinproduce]

HI Guys


Heard some conflicting comments, but I cant justify paying Apple Prices for Ram and SSD. Is the OWC stuff good, reliable and properly compatible? I mainly do Post production 80%, Music composition 15% and 5% music production ( ecording mixing and producing albums)



My plan, after some research is and questions posed here. Some feedback would be greatly appreciated as this is quite a big investment. I usually do a big upgrade every 6-7 years. Last was the trashcan mac with a million breakout boxes and drives. So excited to have an All-In-one system again.



- NMP 16 core Base model but 1 or 2 TB internal Apple SSD for system files, apps documents and stuff


- 192 OWC Ram


- 2 x 8Tb OWC PCI-E Accelsior SSD Partitioned (Can it be partitioned as below, struggling to find info regarding this? )
-- 4TB Audio drive
-- 4TB Video drive
-- 6TB VI Samples drive
-- 2TB SFX/Loops/Midi drive


- Promise Pegasus J2i 8TB With Additional 8TB so 16Tb Partitioned as below

-- 8TB Daily Backup drive (I always make daily duplicates of the days work)

-- 8TB Production Music drive (Offline when not connected to internet)


- Black Magic 4k Decklink mini monitor 4K Handeling Video playback out protools



I currently have a HDX 1 setup, and considering getting another HDX card. Im sure theres space inside the Mac? If I add the second HDX card I would need 5 x PCIE slots. ( the standard apple Radeon Pro 580X with 8GB of GDDR5 memory display card i presume is 16 x full length?)



So thats 6 x PCIE Slots all together as the Promise pegasus is not PCIE



The OWC SSD and BM Decklink card are all half length 8x and the HDX is Full Length 16x


- So The HDX x 2



I'll retain my 2 x 32 TB external Raid Deep Archive drives where I archive all my work, duplicated.



What do you guys think? I considered the 24 Core machine, but for Audio and especially ProTools, its seems like the 16 core runs better with the higher core speed vs the higher core count? Some seem to agree and some not?



I dont know if the $4000 jump from 16 core to 24 core would be felt in real life, maybe someone could comment if it does, any 24 core and 16 core users out there?


This machine and setup is going to have to last and perform for the next 7-ish years....


Thanks

[Marsdy]

I don’t think you need to worry about OWC. Very reliable and dependable in my experience at least.

About to order OWC RAM and Accelsior storage here too and the same Mac Pro!

I had thought about the Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card but it seems unavailable at the moment and delivery keeps being put back. Also it has a fan. It’s faster than the Accelsior but I’m not sure I’d notice!

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Marsdy

I don’t think you need to worry about OWC. Very reliable and dependable in my experience at least.

About to order OWC RAM and Accelsior storage here too and the same Mac Pro!

I had thought about the Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card but it seems unavailable at the moment and delivery keeps being put back. Also it has a fan. It’s faster than the Accelsior but I’m not sure I’d notice!

Been dealing with OWC for ages - good people. Keep in mind that here in the US most states are under some form of lockdown and California is pretty strict in that deal. Meaning that support is generally working from home so response times will be slow. Another is shipping departments are also going to be slow. Hopefully you don't need anything right quick.

As to partitioning ssd's - I wouldn't do it as there's no real reason to do so. Just create folders for stuff instead. If you use Carbon Copy Cloner for backups it's easy to tell it what to copy and to where. A problem with partitions in OSX is if you have two or more partitions and you want to wipe out the first one and use the whole drive for what's in the second - that can't be done (at least not in OSX 10.13.6 - Catalina might be different).

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by musicman691

As to partitioning ssd's - I wouldn't do it as there's no real reason to do so. Just create folders for stuff instead.

... or take advantage of APFS features and create many volumes. You can have a dozen one terabyte volumes on one terabyte storage, so long as the combined used space stays within physical limits

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by JFreak

... or take advantage of APFS features and create many volumes. You can have a dozen one terabyte volumes on one terabyte storage, so long as the combined used space stays within physical limits

I keep forgetting about that; still have the 'old system' stuck in my grey matter. It boggles my mind how that can be done

[louisenslinproduce]

The APFS feature sound good. I have alos never used it. CI alsway just used partition drives since forever. Currently I have3 x Glyph TB drives partitioned as per my suggestion above.


So what you are saying I can just create different volumes as suggested above, accross the 2 x 8Tb, and they will mount, look and act like a separate drive ,as in the partitioned ones I currently have?


Then re Ram, I saw that OWC do R-Dimm Ram, and accoridng to Apple, that linmits you to 192Gb ( which I want for now)


But a company called Nemix Ram sell R-Dimm and LR Dimm. The LR Dim you can use to the max of the machine capability, Prices very similar. Ever seen heard or used them? Maybe go up to 384 GB with LR Dimm?


https://www.nemixram.com/apple-memor...384gb_6_x_64gb

[JFreak]

Yes, don't get confused about different names with APFS.

Partitioning as in the oldskool concept makes a permanent decision about what part of the drive belongs to this and that volume. And volumes are the ones that you mount on your OS.

APFS and SSD thing is "partitioning" the whole drive to one "container" and then add several volumes to that container. Volume sizes combined may exceed the total size of your drive capacity and it will work flawlessly so long as your stuff stays within physical limits of your drive.

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by louisenslinproduce

The APFS feature sound good. I have alos never used it. CI alsway just used partition drives since forever. Currently I have3 x Glyph TB drives partitioned as per my suggestion above.


So what you are saying I can just create different volumes as suggested above, accross the 2 x 8Tb, and they will mount, look and act like a separate drive ,as in the partitioned ones I currently have?


Then re Ram, I saw that OWC do R-Dimm Ram, and accoridng to Apple, that linmits you to 192Gb ( which I want for now)


But a company called Nemix Ram sell R-Dimm and LR Dimm. The LR Dim you can use to the max of the machine capability, Prices very similar. Ever seen heard or used them? Maybe go up to 384 GB with LR Dimm?


https://www.nemixram.com/apple-memor...384gb_6_x_64gb

I’m pretty sure that the Accelsior’s appear as 8Tb drives because they are in fact four separate 2Tb m.2 drives arranged in a RAID array. That’s why they are so fast. I think each card can be configured anyway you want. Just think of it as four m.2 drives on one card. You’d need to confirm this with OWC but that’s my understanding.

OWC sell both RDIMM and LRDIMM. LRDIMM can go up to the max capacity of the nMP as you say but its actually slightly slower than RDIM. You can’t mix RAM types.

Apple says you can have as much as 768GB of standard RDIM

Twelve physical DIMM slots, two DIMMs per channel, located on the backside of the main logic board (MLB) provide easy access and simple upgrades. 8-, 12-, and 16-core processors support up to 768GB of memory using industry- standard DDR4 ECC DIMMs; the 24- and 28-core processors support up to 1.5TB of memory using twelve 128GB LR-DIMMs. The 8-core Xeon runs memory at 2666MHz (PC4-19200); all other processors operate at 2933MHz

This is from here:
https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/pdf/Ma...r_Feb_2020.pdf

[chadjhughes]

I'm running two OWC / Other World Computing 8TB Accelsior 4M2 PCIe M.2 NVMe SSD drives Under 2020.3 HD Ultimate and Catalina 10.15.3 on my New Mac Pro 2019 w/ 192 MB RAM and the OWC Drives are amazingly fast and no issues. You will want to have customer support on the line after you fire up the drives for the first time. Unless they fixed the issues on the latest driver release. They had to walk me through a few tricky steps. After that no issues. Running both striped.

[johnnyv]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Yes, don't get confused about different names with APFS.

Partitioning as in the oldskool concept makes a permanent decision about what part of the drive belongs to this and that volume. And volumes are the ones that you mount on your OS.

APFS and SSD thing is "partitioning" the whole drive to one "container" and then add several volumes to that container. Volume sizes combined may exceed the total size of your drive capacity and it will work flawlessly so long as your stuff stays within physical limits of your drive.

Janne, using Volumes, can you have two bootable volumes or are multiple boot abilities limited to actual partitioning?