What's the Best Mac and hardware for a new upgrade?

[CodaMan]

I am ready to replace my 'trash can' 2013 Power Mac mac with something new. I interface with Avid HD/IO interface and an Avid HD Native Thunderbolt Interface 9100. I use 16 I/O but typically record 12 tracks in at the most. Mostly we are a post production studio with a control room and a live room.

I assume I will have to replace the HD Native? As the newer macs are a different Thunderbolt. I also have at least 10 devices including external drives, CD burner, etc interfaced through a USB hub. So what do you recommend I do for the best transition to a new machine? What mac, what interface. Can I keep my HD I/O hardware? Am I ok with a mac mini? An Imac? (but I will miss my 32" monitor), a Power Book? I am hoping to not have to spend 7K for a new Power Mac.

Currently -
Power Mac 2013 (Trash can) OS Big Sur, PT Ultimate version 21.7.0.127, with HD Interface 9100, usb hub. Monitor 2K HDMI.

[Darryl Ramm]

Your HD Thunderbolt works on Thunderbolt 3 and 4 with an adapter, as long as a driver is available for the operating system (the driver does not care about Thunderbolt versions). Thunderbolt is not the issue, an entirely different CPU architecture is.

Now is not the time to upgrade. Apple is in the middle of a migration to Apple silicon/Arm/M1 based systems. Major disruptions now and will continue for a while until finally Pro Tools and plugins and iLok and maybe more are all native M1 apps. Currently none of them are. Latest macOS BigSur has issues even on Intel based Macs. So if you have to ask basic questions like this you are probably not a candidate to move now. If you desperately need more power or capacity maybe upgrade the the CPU/memory/SSD in your trashcan or look at used Macs or the remaining few Intel Macs Apple sells, but if you don't *need* that now you will be wasting money vs. waiting for what I guess is a year or two for a lot of this to shake out.

[nst7]

As mentioned, your best bet is to get the Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 Adapter which is $49 (you can get them at Best Buy as well as the Apple store and other places).

This has worked great for me and my HD Native Thunderbolt unit. I use it with two recent model Macs - The August 2020 Intel iMac 27", and the new M1 Max MacBook Pro.

As for interfaces, keeping your HD IO is probably a good option. There are very few interfaces with only 12 inputs. Most of them are 16 or 8 (and lower).

[CodaMan]

Thank you and thank you again. You probably saved my considerable downtime and trouble. I don't need it now and I will look into what it will take to upgrade my Power Mac, if possible. I seem to get spinning wheels, however when saving but I seemed to resolve it by unplugging various external drives. That's why I was wondering about a USB interface, which I didn't explain well. Is there a robust USB hub you might recommend? Or is a hub a hub? I wonder when too many USB connections becomes an issue, if ever.

[JFreak]

"Best" for now would be Mac Pro 7,1 because software is not yet Apple Silicon ready.

So in my opinion, if you can wait a little longer, really your best option would to wait at least until PT software (and iLok) are Apple Silicon native, and even then if you are used to the trashcan you would currently have to settle for 16GB memory of Mac Mini M1, or buy a laptop that has M1pro/max processor. Apple Silicon equivalent of trashcan is surely being released as the last of the lineup, when things actually are ready for it.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by CodaMan

upgrade my Power Mac

PowerMac was the name used for PPC-era workstations. Yours is Mac Pro that uses Intel processor. Current trend is Apple Silicon, but the transition has just started and is far from over.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by CodaMan

Thank you and thank you again. You probably saved my considerable downtime and trouble. I don't need it now and I will look into what it will take to upgrade my Power Mac, if possible. I seem to get spinning wheels, however when saving but I seemed to resolve it by unplugging various external drives. That's why I was wondering about a USB interface, which I didn't explain well. Is there a robust USB hub you might recommend? Or is a hub a hub? I wonder when too many USB connections becomes an issue, if ever.

I seriously do suggest you stay where you are now on the trashcan until the Apple Silicon migration is mostly sorted out, but unfortunately the Trashcan was an terrible product from I/O storage expansion point of view. So stupidly designed that I can't believe Apple ever shipped this crap (give me a few beers and I'll really let you know what I think). And while there are now stunning PCIe/NVMe based SSD drives for Thunderbolt 3/4 these are not backwards compatible with the Thunderbolt 2 on the Trashcan. I'm not aware of vendors still making nice Thunderbolt 2 PCIe/NVMe drives that are directly compatible with the Trashcan, I think Sonnet did briefly.

The trashcan has a single internal SSD slot. It's kinda like an M.2 SSD card but it's or course Apple proprietary, you can purchase upgrades from places like OWC. And this is where you should often start for planning IO upgrades. Make this SSD as large as you can, and run your sessions and maybe samples on that drive. If you are currently running on external HDD or SATA SSDs running everything internal should be much faster. And forget out of date advice about not running stuff ont he same drive, that no longer applies, and running on the same drive here often gives the best performance. It's just embarrassing ghat Acid still gets IO recommendations so badly wrong.

And if you can't fit stuff on an upgraded internal drive your other good options start with USB external SATA SSDs, like with the very compact Samsung T5 and T7 drives (OK technically the T7 can do NVMe over USB not SATA)--compact enough that which you might fix these to the back of a monitor etc. Other options include adding PCIe expansion chassis with internal SATA or maybe PCIe drives... but I'd not go there first.

BTW the trashcans have internal SSD with 4 x PCIe 2 lanes, I think some of the internal SSDs might have early on had 2 x PCIe 4 lanes or somehow else were crippled more in performance, but pretty sure the the system always provided 4 x PCIe 3 lanes to that SSD card. Pretty sad when current PCIe/NMVe cards are 4 x PCIe 4 and Apple could have at least easily provided 4 x PCIe 3 lanes to that card, but they instead they biased the PCIe lane use towards GPUs and then made the GPU performance terrible with poor thermal design that they really never provided GPU updates for. Not that all pro users care about GPUs to start with, most here sure don't. Just all an around awful design and optimization points for any pro users.

Depending on how much external storage etc. you end up with it may well end up it is not that you want to think about a USB hub. More you might be better off connecting storage directly through a USB converter (e.g. an Apple Thunderbolt to USB adapter) onto your Thunderbolt ports/busses and spreading display and storage and other loads across the three Thunderbolt busses in that box. But again start by trying to move your storage onto the internal SSD.

[CodaMan]

Darryl,

Way appreciate your quick detail to me. That clears up a lot. Just one last question, In the meantime, I think I will always have a number of USB items to connect to this computer and about 8 of them are through an older powered hub. Is there any reason to upgrade that hub or should i just assume that the issues I may be having with spinning wheels are more related to your detail and the SSD bottleneck.

[Darryl Ramm]

Uh what do you expect people to say? You have what exact USB hub? With what exact devices connected to it? You are getting what exact problems (only beachalls?) exactly when? And you have done exactly what troubleshooting? (starting with the slew of standard troubleshooting).

I would start by excluding software problems/incompatibilities.

[JFreak]

There is always bottleneck somewhere. If you have spinners, that is the most likely bottleneck. Still, your USB hub will become a bottleneck if you feed multiple full speed SSD's into it.