Mac Pro upgrade advice

[insch]

Anyone have a view on running everything off one internal SSD? I had always thought that media and audio libraries etc should be running on a separate drive to the application. Is that old school and less efficient? I guess back in the days when drives would struggle to output data fast enough? An SSD is a different beast.

[mikehalloran]

Anyone have a view on running everything off one internal SSD? I had always thought that media and audio libraries etc should be running on a separate drive to the application. Is that old school and less efficient? I guess back in the days when drives would struggle to output data fast enough? An SSD is a different beast.

Yes. Running everything on the System drive is the best and how Apple has designed things to work.

Running everything on separate drives was the better way through the G4. SATA changed that in the G5 and NVMe SSDs upped the ante with the 4 lane bus in 2015. The MP 6.1 never saw this upgrade, though.

Current T2 Macs with RAID 0 internal SSD pairs are the fastest of all. There is no advantage to separate drives although many apps like Apple Music/iTunes can be streamed from an external to save space with no performance hit.

Time Machine should be run on an external and a mechanical HDD (up to 18 TB) is still great for that. I run my Time Machine drives over Ethernet which has many advantages including never going to sleep.

[HCMarkus]

guess there is no idea when any next generation AS Mac Pros might emerge? At some point I will need to take the plunge.

Apple Silicon Mac Pros are not expected until at least 2022.

Before you dismiss anything, take a look at the video performance the current M1 is providing... seriously powerful. And the M1X may double the number of GPU cores to 16. I don't know your specific needs, but it appears the integrated GPU Apple is producing may suffice for many, especially once the M1X is available. And the software is already there... Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premier and DaVinci Resolve all Native M1.

[Michael Canavan]

guess there is no idea when any next generation AS Mac Pros might emerge? At some point I will need to take the plunge.

Apple Silicon Mac Pros are not expected until at least 2022.

Before you dismiss anything, take a look at the video performance the current M1 is providing... seriously powerful. And the M1X may double the number of GPU cores to 16. I don't know your specific needs, but it appears the integrated GPU Apple is producing may suffice for many, especially once the M1X is available. And the software is already there... Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premier and DaVinci Resolve all Native M1.

The Apple Silicon transition was announced as taking two years. It was announced in Jun 2020. The first AS macs were introduced in November 2020. So depending on how you read it Mac Pros (and/or iMac Pros), will be announced before 6-22 or 11-22. It makes total sense to wait until last for the most powerful AS chips. It's really a matter of how much chip and general shortages have affected Apple. With their buying power I would guess not as much as other companies.

The other question is do you need the Mac Pro? The current M1 Mac mini beats all but the latest current round of Mac Pros.
This is telling:
Mac Pro (Late 2019)
Intel Xeon W-3223 @ 3.5 GHz (8 cores)\
Multi Core score- 7992
Single Core ---1015

Mac mini (Late 2020)
Apple M1 @ 3.2 GHz (8 cores)
Multi Core score 7416
Single Core 1711

The single core score IMO more than makes up for the paltry difference in multi core. The price is more than 6 times higher for the Mac Pro, more than enough savings with the Mini to use peripherals to get extra drives etc.

Think about what this is going to look like in the next round of Apple Silicon.

I fully expect the next chip (everyone seems to think 8 performance 2 efficiency cores), to go into the 14-16" Macbook Pros, a possible Mac Mini Pro and the "mid range" iMac. At least 16GB graphics if not a 32GB option.

I also think for music anyway, this is going to be more than enough, the Mac Pro and iMac Pro with the third generation of Apple Silicon will be prohibitively expensive and probably total overkill until some plug in developer writes a new hungry synth or mastering suite. What I would love to see anyway is a return to the Mac Server design, throw a powerful one space now quiet, server mac into a rack, then use the next iteration of the Macbook Air as a fanless daily driver.

[monkey man]

Thank you, Brother Sir Markus, for your thoughtful-and-informative reply.