There's the R/W speed issue. Just about everything is faster than your MP 6.1 — the 2 Lane bus was the bottleneck and TB 1/2 to SSDs was no faster than USB 3 to the same drives.Chris T wrote: ↑Tue Jun 06, 2023 9:36 am …
Any good reason not to keep this same setup with the new Studio, or do folks consider it robust enough to run work projects / samples etc off say the large internal 8TB in the new studio? My inclination is just to go with a 1TB internal and keep my outboard enclosure for all my work and samples.
An NVMe 3 x4 blade over TB 3/4 is about 6x that speed. Only the M2 Mini with one internal SSD is slower. It has the slowest internal R/W of any current Mac.
A Studio with one NVMe 4 x6 SSD is about 10x faster than what you had before. Those with two are about 18x faster. All smaller capacity Macs use one and the larger capacity use two in a modified RAID array that's not quite 2x faster. Apple doesn't publish which has what but there have been enough teardowns — still, Apple changes this now and then.
Any NVMe blade over TB 3/4 is the same 6x — in this case, the 4 Lane over TB3 is your bottleneck. Multiple SSDs will be slower but with greater capacity.
In real world applications, audio hardly notices and video/AV does.
But there's more:
If you share files with others, how much internal storage you have might become very important.
It used to be that you stored your files on the Mac or an external drive and could sync them to Dropbox copies. Beginning with Monterey 12.3, that's reversed.
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/17/dr ... -by-april/
Sharing over iCloud and Dropbox now requires the files to be in the Cloud. If you have enough internal storage, you can sync these files to your Mac — but not to on an external drive. If you don't have enough storage, the files stay in the cloud and will not store copies on your Mac.
It gets worse — Apple app files (Logic, Final Cut etc.) can no longer be shared over Dropbox — iCloud only.
What does this mean? Well, for starters, Dropbox files residing only in the cloud will not be backed up to Time Machine or *Backblaze — only sync'd copies found on your internal drive will. Apple has been doing this with iCloud quite awhile but no one really noticed until the changes to Dropbox.
People on many forums are going absolutely bonkers over this.
*Backblaze with a Business Enterprise account can include external drives and NAS but personal accounts cannot.