Is that it on the Mac mini for now?

[mikehalloran]

I'm around but church music deadlines and medical issues* have made it so that I don't come around as often as I'd like.

Wouldn’t external storage be fast enough for audio needs?

Yes and no.

Anyone remember the BTD stalling issue that MOTU was never able to reproduce? Well, I can duplicate it on projects stored onto external TB drives but not on those same projects running on my System drive. Always heard back, 'It's not that.' Ok, fine but I disagree and can duplicate my results. It may be a timing error—my system is extremely fast and for raw speed outperforms the M1 anything for now.

VIs except SampleTank, AppleMusic/iTunes and archives are run externally but swapping projects in/out of my 4TB System drive takes time. SampleTank runs ok on external but I often have to rebuild the index and that's faster if the libraries are on my System. 8TB onboard clears that bottleneck especially as I'm doing more video and AV.

*I'm ok enough (I think) but recent situations have made being me extremely inconvenient especially when it comes to sitting in a chair. I am improving, however. More tests tomorrow for new stuff.

[mikehalloran]

From posts I've seen in other forums, users who have large orchestral VI templates have had them stall, stutter and halt with 16 Gs of RAM on M1 machines. Logic seems to give better performance though, but the consensus seems to be that with large VI projects RAM is still RAM and you might just want to wait.

My guess—and it is pure speculation—is that we're going to hear that the M1 Max with 64GB integrated RAM doesn't have this issue. If it chokes, then 64 is not enough. We should know through the grapevine soon enough. The M1 Pro is ordered with 16 or 32GB; for the M1 Max the choices are 32 or 64GB and the difference between the two is only $400.

That said, the reason I will consider the next iMac is to get 8TB onboard storage. Of course, I will get the 64GB Max. Even though the Max specs out a touch slower than my 18 core, that's not a real world issue for me. The AV performance is supposed to smoke the Vega 64x in my iMP and that will save time. With only one working arm, I work slowly so Time Savings = $ Earned.

[gavspen]

Goodness Mike, sounds like you're going through some stuff! Sorry to hear it, and always happy to see you here. You know a lotta stuff!

Get well soon,
Gavin