Those with Mac Studios in Post-Prod - how much ram?

[npapaleo]

Actually, that’s a bit out dated. The best performance on a Mac will be the internal drive. There's been several threads discussing this topic and this has been the consensus.

Originally Posted by TrentWilliams

I'm pretty sure the advice is still to run your sessions on an external drive as so your internal is just running OS and Applications - and read/write duties are offloaded to the drive. *But it's been a while since I've thought about it.

[audiolex1]

TB5 nvme enclosures have only just come out a few months ago. You can get 6200MiBs with some of the enclosures recently released.


That's as fast if not faster than the internals.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by audiolex1

TB5 nvme enclosures have only just come out a few months ago. You can get 6200MiBs with some of the enclosures recently released.


That's as fast if not faster than the internals.

Have you found something faster than the Acasis TB501 Pro?

I think the devil is in the detail, more than anything. Apple’s SoC architecture prioritises efficiency and integration over downright speed. The result is often lower end machines and smaller internal drives have pretty average speeds, but higher end systems with larger drives are excruciatingly quick. An 8TB SSD in an M4 Max machine will get alarming close to 5-figures in speed tests.

[Cheesehead]

Actually, that’s a bit out dated. The best performance on a Mac will be the internal drive. There's been several threads discussing this topic and this has been the consensus.

I always get more issues running sessions on the internal drive, spinning beachballs and so forth. How are you using it?
Do you have a separate partition/container for the sessions, or do you just put them in a folder.

Sorry to be slightly off topic, intrigued.

[TrentWilliams]

Originally Posted by Cheesehead

I always get more issues running sessions on the internal drive, spinning beachballs and so forth. How are you using it?
Do you have a separate partition/container for the sessions, or do you just put them in a folder.

Sorry to be slightly off topic, intrigued.

I'm also intrigued - I've been running sessions on an external drive for 10 years, I didn't know the policy had changed.

[audiolex1]

Originally Posted by LDS

Have you found something faster than the Acasis TB501 Pro?

I think the devil is in the detail, more than anything. Apple’s SoC architecture prioritises efficiency and integration over downright speed. The result is often lower end machines and smaller internal drives have pretty average speeds, but higher end systems with larger drives are excruciatingly quick. An 8TB SSD in an M4 Max machine will get alarming close to 5-figures in speed tests.

The cache is where it is at. some can fall off quickly if it is a small cache.


So far the Acasis seems to be the fastest but TB5 on the latest apple machines won't recognize the newest V5 nvmes.


With an 8TB nvme hitting over 7k and costing about 600 dollars, I really don't see the need for spending an extra 1600 dollars for internal.


Maybe if you are running massive LLM's but in audio, even video its getting beyond overkill.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by TrentWilliams

I'm also intrigued - I've been running sessions on an external drive for 10 years, I didn't know the policy had changed.

This has been discussed on DUC many many hundreds of times.

Avid's "policy" did not change as much as many of us had been pointing out the absurdity of this out of date recommendation, starting oh around a decade ago, once Macs, especially MacBooks Pros started having fast internal SSDs. In many cases the external HDD or slow SSDs that folks were attaching to the Mac (or some PCs) were much slower than the internal SSD, which was capable of running the OS, sessions and samples all from that SSD and doing so better than involving external drives.

Avid has seemed seriously lost during much of this, no useful guidance even when this was clear to many of us, and they similarly sat on their hands with no official APFS support for way too long.

There can be many reasons to run on external drives, if it works for you then great. But the defacto simplest/easiest way for most folks to get started is just run things off the internal SSD, sessions, samples etc.

And in all this the devil is indeed in the details, Pro Tools disk cache and pre-loaded VI samples cure many sins, so even systems with underconfigured I/O can seem to run OK. And "SSD" or "HDD" does not mean much, in any of these conversations, what exact SSD or HDD and how is it connected. I/O performance of all these things can vary by orders of magnitude.

[TrentWilliams]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

This has been discussed on DUC many many hundreds of times.

Avid's "policy" did not change as much as many of us had been pointing out the absurdity of this out of date recommendation, starting oh around a decade ago, once Macs, especially MacBooks Pros started having fast internal SSDs. In many cases the external HDD or slow SSDs that folks were attaching to the Mac (or some PCs) were much slower than the internal SSD, which was capable of running the OS, sessions and samples all from that SSD and doing so better than involving external drives.

Avid has seemed seriously lost during much of this, no useful guidance even when this was clear to many of us, and they similarly sat on their hands with no official APFS support for way too long.

There can be many reasons to run on external drives, if it works for you then great. But the defacto simplest/easiest way for most folks to get started is just run things off the internal SSD, sessions, samples etc.

And in all this the devil is indeed in the details, Pro Tools disk cache and pre-loaded VI samples cure many sins, so even systems with underconfigured I/O can seem to run OK. And "SSD" or "HDD" does not mean much, in any of these conversations, what exact SSD or HDD and how is it connected. I/O performance of all these things can vary by orders of magnitude.

ah, cool - I guess I missed those hundreds of threads.

I have an 'audio drive' in raid 0 split across 4x Samsung 1TB 990 Pros for live sessions - works great, never had an issue with this config so I never thought to search for an issue with keeping data on an external. Thanks for the heads-up, when this new rig arrives I'll change my workflow and see if I notice a difference.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by audiolex1

The cache is where it is at. some can fall off quickly if it is a small cache.


So far the Acasis seems to be the fastest but TB5 on the latest apple machines won't recognize the newest V5 nvmes.


With an 8TB nvme hitting over 7k and costing about 600 dollars, I really don't see the need for spending an extra 1600 dollars for internal.


Maybe if you are running massive LLM's but in audio, even video its getting beyond overkill.

Yes external TB5 chassis and PCIe 4 or 5 NVMe M.2 drives looks very interesting. I want to see more compatibility testing and real world experience with them. Sure would push me to wanting Thunderbolt 5 on any new Mac.

But going that route takes a bit more technical computer stuff folks might not want to have to deal with. I still encourage most users to consider starting with everything on the internal SSD if possible.

Beyond just setting the system up with external SSDs...

I would stay away from RAID anything, it's not really needed and it adds another layer of complexity and possible failure or especially user induced errors.

You are responsible for firmware updates to those SSDs, internal Mac ones Apple does automatically. If nothing else just periodically check they don't have bugs fixed by updates.

Be aware that Apple Silicon Macs can't load kernel device drivers (kext) when booted from external drives. That includes the Avid HD Driver. This may never be an issue but you don't want to be discovering this when you try to boot an external backup clone. Personally I want enough space on the internal SSD to be able to have my production boot volume system as well as a test/recovery volume. I personally do, and keep sessions on the internal SSD, and if needing space push samples first to external storage, although for much stuff I have enough samples on my internal SSD. I'm a light user of VIs... and ironically a large user of data for other things, so I actually do have 12 TB+ to 24 TB+ of external storage connected at times. That includes stuff like virtual machine images for development work, some large photo and video libraries, and other things.

Full failure modes and recovery is a long separate discussion, and it's a rare event but modern Macs actually need to be able to use part of their internal SSD to boot off an external drive of any type. A totally dead internal SSD makes the system not bootable at all. While very unlikely it's mostly something to just be aware of should it ever happens to you... if you have really critical availability needs, you may want a spare Mac, ability to rent/buy a replacement and image to it etc., etc.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by TrentWilliams

ah, cool - I guess I missed those hundreds of threads.

I have an 'audio drive' in raid 0 split across 4x Samsung 1TB 990 Pros for live sessions - works great, never had an issue with this config so I never thought to search for an issue with keeping data on an external. Thanks for the heads-up, when this new rig arrives I'll change my workflow and see if I notice a difference.

Because the devil is in the details... What computer and chassis are the 990 Pros in? How many are in each chassis etc. If you are using PCIe slot cards what exact cards... The 990 Pro is a great PCIe 4 SSD, what I'm largely running.

Why RAID 0? I suspect you are unlikely to need RAID 0 for performance and if anything it's reducing your system reliability. It increases media failure likelihood, and increased complexity can lead to increased user admin errors. I'd hope even in most post/video applications a non-striped SSD would be fine, maybe point video off a separate SSD. Again disk cache hides many of the issues here so lots of stuff will work OK (disk cache is write through, so the time we see issues is where folks are trying to record lots of real-time audio tracks, and that's mostly going to hit folks recording to HDD). I know the appeal of just having large volumes can be nice, but just be careful it's not all for free.

And no I'm not saying "do it my way". Do it however works for you. There are many reasons for setting up storage that works for different folks. I just want folks to know the different potential tradeoffs/limitations.