Transitioning from Cheesegrater to Mac Studio: a few questions

[b mcgibney]

1. I want to keep using my two ACER x213w monitors as they are the biggest dual monitor setup that fits between my monitors and the resolution is better than my eyesight. I will probably save the HDMI port for a third larger monitor and use two of the ports at the back of the studio to drive my two monitors. Any recommendations for a USB3 to DVI adapter? Ostensibly some are better than others?

2. External storage: Being that I have been in the PT environment for over 20 years I have a lot of external drives. Some FW 400 and several that are FW 800 and USB2.0. I still have my original G4 and PTLE 001/002 to retrieve old client sessions (just happened today). However moving forward I would like some advice as to external storage and session file backup. Are SATA SSD's still valid or should I move to Nvme? Is there some sort of drive caddy I can use for B/U and swap SSd's or Nvme drives?

At this point I have mostly given up on trying to make any money on recording. I record for myself and for friends who make music I like. Also on a pension so not dripping in cash. I'm looking for suggestions for people like me who have a little more time and not huge cash.

3. Should I get some sort of a expansion dock? I have a lot of USB peripherals. Is Cal Digit the go-to here?

4.Moving to the Studio Mac: In the past I have just used migration assistant as I moved from G4 to Mac Pro 3,1 to Mac.Pro 5,1 Despite the fact I know it will probably take way longer I am thinking I should probably build up this Mac Studio one app and plugin at a time. I am surprised to find apps dating to early 2000's still on my current hard drives.

5. Any and all advice very much appreciated. FWIW I do own CCC from Bombich and it has been invaluable over the years.

Thanks everyone

B

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by b mcgibney

1. I want to keep using my two ACER x213w monitors as they are the biggest dual monitor setup that fits between my monitors and the resolution is better than my eyesight. I will probably save the HDMI port for a third larger monitor and use two of the ports at the back of the studio to drive my two monitors. Any recommendations for a USB3 to DVI adapter? Ostensibly some are better than others?

You don't actually mean USB3, you mean USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 or 4 to DVI... something that uses the displayport signaling capability on USB-C connectors.

There are a lot of adaptors available. You can just look on Amazon. Look for something that says Mac USC-C and Thunderbolt support may be a good idea.

2. External storage: Being that I have been in the PT environment for over 20 years I have a lot of external drives. Some FW 400 and several that are FW 800 and USB2.0. I still have my original G4 and PTLE 001/002 to retrieve old client sessions (just happened today). However moving forward I would like some advice as to external storage and session file backup. Are SATA SSD's still valid or should I move to Nvme? Is there some sort of drive caddy I can use for B/U and swap SSd's or Nvme drives?

As has been discussed to death on DUC, the internal NVMe SSD is blazingly fast on these studio drives, there is no way to connect any other storage to these computers that is in the same class. The best thing you can do for storage is to max out the internal SSD as much as you can afford (remembering the internal storage is not upgradable, at least today, they might be in future, but don't rely on "might"). The internal drive(s) can support system/boot, VI samples, and sessions. There is no need for additional drives.

For backup/recovery I would utilize a combination of USB-3 connected SSDs and USB-3 connected HDD. SSD for recovery (e.g. maybe a bootable clone) and HDD for archives. USB to save costs over the fastest Thunderbolt 3 drives. The Samsung T7 USB-3 SSD is an example of a nice very compact drive to back up to, it's reasonable cost and actually faster NVMe over USB, so faster than SATA but not as fast as NVMe over Thunderbolt. For longer term archival storage I prefer HDD, especially higher-end Western Digital external drives. Do not buy the Western Digital external consumer drives they are all crap cheap/slow 5,400 rpm or less drives that take forever to do a backup. Either buy a WD Black 7,200 rpm drive and put in your own enclosure or buy a SanDisk Pro (new Western Digital Brand that replaced G-Technology) and make sure you are looking at 7,200 RPM SanDisk Pro products, even that Pro line has some 5,400 RPM drives. If you already have those 7,200 rpm SATA HDD great, use them for archives (and maybe backups).

I doubt a drive chassis/dock is going to help you. You really only need one if you are going to have many drives connected at once.

All your old Firewire drives can be accessed by chaining together the Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/M...bolt-2-adapter) and the Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/M...rewire-adapter).

At this point I have mostly given up on trying to make any money on recording. I record for myself and for friends who make music I like. Also on a pension so not dripping in cash. I'm looking for suggestions for people like me who have a little more time and not huge cash.

Even with money being tight I would encourage you to try to put everything on the internal drives and only use external drives for data moving, backup, and archiving.

3. Should I get some sort of a expansion dock? I have a lot of USB peripherals. Is Cal Digit the go-to here?

I think OWC range of docks is the number one go-to with Cal Digit just behind.

Look at the OWC docks with a Mini Displayport port, then you can get a mini displayport to DVI cable for one of your monitors.

4.Moving to the Studio Mac: In the past I have just used migration assistant as I moved from G4 to Mac Pro 3,1 to Mac.Pro 5,1 Despite the fact I know it will probably take way longer I am thinking I should probably build up this Mac Studio one app and plugin at a time. I am surprised to find apps dating to early 2000's still on my current hard drives.

You know the answer here already, and don't need to ask. But if you screw up and get into a mess by using migration assassin I will make fun of you.

5. Any and all advice very much appreciated. FWIW I do own CCC from Bombich and it has been invaluable over the years.

You have to be very careful here. Apple has broken the way much backup/clone related stuff works with the new APFS (apple file system) and how it uses encryption etc. to provide fairly advanced trust and security capabilities to the system. But that all comes at the cost of CCC not being able to make clones of boot drives with all the features it has in the past, you can still clone boot drives, but don't have the ability to do incremental updates to the clones, or you can clone drives and be able to do incremental updates but then clone is no longer bootable. This has been well discussed on Bombich's web site. More notes here from me: http://duc.avid.com/showpost.php?p=2646618&postcount=28

[b mcgibney]

Thank you Darryl for that comprehensive response. Greatly appreciated including the humour. Brian

[albee1952]

Darryl covered pretty much everything(and I 100% agree that Migration Assistant would be a disaster). Back to one of your first comments about monitor screens, you could go quite a bit bigger if you think vertical instead of horizontal. Check my setup with a pair of 32" screens with a 22" on top that holds stuff I don't need to look at a lot. The bottom screen is laid back like the Slate MTi2, but its not a touchscreen(I went down that rabbit hole and then crawled back out)

[sw rec]

Totally off topic, Albee, but now ya got me wanting a couple of those lava lamps.

[b mcgibney]

Well surprise surprise. Expected date was October 3 but it showed up today. So far so good. Successfully connected my two monitors and my RME UFX. Downloading PT now. Thanks for all your support. FWIW it is quiet but not quiet enough for me so will eventually end up in the room outside the studio.
. Time to update the sig file

[thin ice]

Picking up on the comments about Migration Assistant, is it a bad idea if you use it to move from a system built from scratch just a year ago as well?

[Sardi]

I did it once, but that was a fresh install that was like a week old. Was totally fine.

My preference on a machine from a year ago would be fresh install of everything. Migration Assistant is fine for the user data.


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[b mcgibney]

For anybody that cares, to connect my two DVI monitors I bought 2 HDMI to DVI6 foot cables and on USB-C HDMI adapter. All from Best BUY. About 75 dollars Canadian. works fine

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by sw rec

Totally off topic, Albee, but now ya got me wanting a couple of those lava lamps.

And, they're plug ins