APFS no more ?

[Darryl Ramm]

Hold off on that Sandisk.

1. The Extreme Pro are really targeted at Windows PCs and their performance relies on USB 3 Gen 2x2 (not Thunderbolt) which your Mac Studio does not support... it's up to USB 3 Gen 2 on the USBV side or Thunderbolt 3/4 (which the Sandisk Extreme Pro does not support).

2. The Sandisk Pro and Extreme Pro are currently *suspected* of having data loss problems. I've posted about this here recently.

For "SATA like" SSDs look at the Samsung T7, USB 3 Gen 2, they are faster than SATA since they implement NVMe over USB. But currently only up to 2TB per drive.

For Thunderbolt/NVMe/SSD drives look at putting Samsung 990 M.2 drives in a Thunderbolt expansion chassis or SSD enclosure (ideally one with cooling). I run ~12TB of those in Sonnet expansion chassis connected to my MBP.... most not any use related to Pro Tools.

[JoeTools1963]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Hold off on that Sandisk.

1. The Extreme Pro are really targeted at Windows PCs and their performance relies on USB 3 Gen 2x2 (not Thunderbolt) which your Mac Studio does not support... it's up to USB 3 Gen 2 on the USBV side or Thunderbolt 3/4 (which the Sandisk Extreme Pro does not support).

2. The Sandisk Pro and Extreme Pro are currently *suspected* of having data loss problems. I've posted about this here recently.

For "SATA like" SSDs look at the Samsung T7, USB 3 Gen 2, they are faster than SATA since they implement NVMe over USB. But currently only up to 2TB per drive.

For Thunderbolt/NVMe/SSD drives look at putting Samsung 990 M.2 drives in a Thunderbolt expansion chassis or SSD enclosure (ideally one with cooling). I run ~12TB of those in Sonnet expansion chassis connected to my MBP.... most not any use related to Pro Tools.

Thanks so much for the in-depth information. I truly appreciate it.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[basslik]

Can always rely on great info from DARRYL.



What I'm surprised is that I still use my OWC Accelsior E2 that surprises me it boots up faster and more responsive than my NVMe backup boot drive I have sidelined. I guess the raid thing is rock solid for the old AHCI protocol.

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

2. The Sandisk Pro and Extreme Pro are currently *suspected* of having data loss problems. I've posted about this here recently.

It's real, and it's been happening since January. SanDisk acknowledges the issue and claims that a firmware update will fix it, but they won't say when that's expected or whether it will fix both the 4TB (where issues are most prevalent) *and* the 2TB (where reports are far fewer) or just the 4TB.

I was close to pulling the trigger on one of these but opted for a competitor's drive instead. I'm kinda glad I did.

[basslik]

Good info Eric, thanks.

[smurfyou]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

It's real, and it's been happening since January. SanDisk acknowledges the issue and claims that a firmware update will fix it, but they won't say when that's expected or whether it will fix both the 4TB (where issues are most prevalent) *and* the 2TB (where reports are far fewer) or just the 4TB.

I was close to pulling the trigger on one of these but opted for a competitor's drive instead. I'm kinda glad I did.

Yes I have an associate who just recently confirmed this personally.

Don't know if it will turn me off permanently like Lacie and G-Tech did... But I've always favored Samsung and Intel for SSD anyway. WD for spinners.

[audiolex1]

Originally Posted by basslik

I see that the new release is now wanting to format to HFS + ?



One or more hard disk drives dedicated for audio record and playback, formatted HFS+ Journaled for Mac or NTFS

As far as I understand, APFS is meant for SSD drives and HFS+ journaled should be used for HHDs.

Maybe I am wrong, but I remember reading about why the APFS system was developed being specifically for SSD.

I've never experienced Pro Tools saying that APFS is not supported or anything. Are you getting such an error?

[SonicSloth]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Many of their storage recommendations are best just ignored. Sadly for new users sorting out which are best ignored, and which will hurt them is well, tough.

Curious if you could elaborate on some of these recommendations that should be ignored… I’ve always tried to follow their guidance where I can, so I’m wondering what might be fruitless.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Darryl Ramm]

What Avid largely does is not mention APFS, there are lots of places that HFS+ is mentioned, and only one or two that mention APFS, and for years after APFS as a thing lots of folks were using there was effectively no mention at all of APFS. As in the very example that started this thread. That sure as heck has lead to confusion about if APFS should be used, exactly as this thread asked.

Yes APFS is designed for NAND Flash/SSD drives, with features like modification log based writes specifically designed to avoid write amplification issues (you can google those terms for an explanation) that traditional filesystems suffer from with NAND Flash/SSD drives. And on top of all that APFS is just a really nice modern filesystem, influenced in part by Sun Microsystems' ZFS.

APFS can be used on HDD as well as SSD, even on HDD it has features like containers and snapshots that may make it more useful for some situations, especially for more technically sophisticated users, but it can have lower performance than HFS+ so probably best to avoid if you have to use HDD for an audio drive. But yikes, who would do that today vs on a SSD?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by SonicSloth

Curious if you could elaborate on some of these recommendations that should be ignored… I’ve always tried to follow their guidance where I can, so I’m wondering what might be fruitless.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Suggesting a dedicated drive is needed for audio is fairly brain-dead advice with modern SSDs, and has been so for around a decade. And Avid's recommendations have been badly written for even longer than that and still lead to people occasionally thinking they need a dedicated *external* drive as if somehow an external drive is magic.

On systems with modern NVMe/PCIe SSDs boot drives the likely best place start to consider putting audio and samples (if they fit) is just put them all on the internal boot SSD. This is even more so for Macs with very fast internal SSDs vs. on Macs where external SSDs are performance limited by slow Thunderbolt 3. There may be lots of good reasons to run additional drives, do things differently but the starting place, the most simple and frequently the best performing way is to do exactly the opposite of what Avid say to do (e.g. dedicated drive for audio, maybe also for samples).

The whole discussion/recommendation of a 7200 RPM HDD that is another case where that emphasizes folks thinking they need to have a HDD for audio use. Again, the end result is leaving customers to make what is often the worst choice.

And all mentions of HFS+ should be qualified as HDD only, and APFS used on SSD if on recent enough macOS/OS X versions. Important things that should also be pointed out in every one of those mentions are things like not using exFAT filesystems, because they can appear to work then run into problems (even better Pro Tools should just be detecting that case and warning about it). Lack of that super-clear call-out sure leads to folks wasting time with problems on exFAT.

How disk cache works could also be better documented/explained and that could also help people experiencing problems, and/or how to use disk cache to try to mitigate problems.