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

[audiolex1]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

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.

I have a partition for booting into incase something happens to my system, I can boot into the other and clone back easily.


I've been running sessions and samples off externals without issue. So for me, I didn't see any need to run intenally. As well, with the 990s in a TB5 enclosure running 7000 MiBs I can build one if needed.
And as you said if the internal goes, then you are dead in the water. I'd rather put the stress on something I can easily replace.


Currently, the Mac hardware will no recognize v5 of the nvme's. Only v4. Not sure if that is something firmware will address or if a newer version of TB5 hardware has to be built into newer models.


I don't understand the need for RAID anything anymore either. I know it is native in the Mac now, but haven't really seen a need.


Question. What else is would be kernal device drivers and how would I know if it was?

[Darryl Ramm]

I hear you, but I'm not worried per se about write wear on the internal SSDs for our typical uses, but I'm maybe more worried about catastrophic NAND or controller failure or maybe more likely a software/firmware bug vs wear on the NAND. In my day job sometimes touches on SSD with things like transactional databases etc. that can be an issue with just hammering the hell a drive. But that's so far removed from the peaceful lay-back use we make of them in audio apps.

The thing that does worry me with uses in pro audio, (and by no means addressed to you, I know you are on top of lots of stuff here) is more just basic house keeping. Keeping firmware up to date/avoiding known potential data loss issues. Folks having good backups and a plan on how to recover from failures, and being aware of corner cases like once I've mentioned here, or begin aware that incremental updates on macOS clones are no longer bootable etc. And hopefully folks are archiving to quality HDDs, SSDs are not long term archival storage, especially with drives powered off and data that is not begin accessed.

We live in magical times having access to such just stunningly fast storage (and yes even low cost stunningly fast if not from Apple... but I still will recommend Apple internal SSDs to lots of folks to consider).

BTW I'd love to hear any more experience you have with TB5 enclosures and SSDs. I need to move a bunch of stuff over there soon. But have multiple systems stuck on Intel Macs for complex (non DAW) reasons.

Originally Posted by audiolex1

Question. What else is would be kernal device drivers and how would I know if it was?

You can run kextsat and list all the kexts in your system, just ignore all the com.apple.* built-in ones. e.g. In Terminal

$ kextstat | grep -v com.apple

kext drivers might be installed for some high-performance devices (e.g. some exotic networking interfaces) or just old devices, networking, exotic I/O cards etc. Hopefully most audio stuff has migrated to use Driver Kit (user space) audio drivers. Avid HD Drivers are still kext, and who knows when this really might be a problem if Apple one day blocks all third party kext drivers.

[TrentWilliams]

Hey Darryl

Thanks for your replies - but you’ve completely derailed my post.

Can we keep it to discussing ram use requirements in the Mac Studio please.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by TrentWilliams

Hey Darryl

Thanks for your replies - but you’ve completely derailed my post.

Can we keep it to discussing ram use requirements in the Mac Studio please.

You got great answers from very knowledgeable post folks here working on these macs. What more info about memory do you need? As BScout pointed out pay attention to storage... are you configuring internal SSD or adding that external? This storage discussion is likely relevant for *you*.

If you are doing this work today the best guide for how much memory you need on these macs is how much memory you are using in your sessions today. Then factor in some more for ever increasing memory use. I've posted in the past on DUC how minimum memory needs can be non-obvious but how it can be measured if you want to do some testing. If nothing else what memory you have in your systems today is useful info, but might be a significant overestimate (modern OSes like macOS will tend to just fill up memory if there is no pressure on it to reduce memory use) and for large sessions disk caching it all may be overkill and use lots of memory unnecessarily (I think as BScout was warning about as well). And please don't listen to folks saying the Apple Silicon macs need less memory that Intel macs.

[smurfyou]

I think I'm around a year and a half now with my 64GB. Haven't regretted my decision.

Step up to 96GB if you like spending money and it makes you feel better.

I tend to not run other hungry programs whilst I'm using PT - others might want or need to.