Hard Drive Format/Other

[davidkochan]

Hello everyone. Thanks for all the wisdom and expertise shared by everyone in regards to being able to run our MOTU products.

I have a dilemma and am pushing a bit above my weight class in this matter. I have recently been upgrading my studio and sprung for a newer Mac. Specifically, I purchased a 2018 Mac mini with 64 GB RAM, but only a 500GB internal SSD. I intentionally stayed away from the latest M1 Macs since it seems that all my music software including DP and Waves will not be compatible for quite a while. I am now running the latest version of DP and Mach 5.

The problem is that I have 2 large Seagate Ironwolf 12GB 7200 rpm spinners and I am not sure whether to format these in APFS or HFS+ Journaled format. I have large amounts of old DP/Audio files. I have been wanting to save these DP Audio files/Samples/Miscellaneous in separate partitions on one large drive and then back all this one drive up via straight RAID 1 back-up to a 2nd 12 GB Seagate drive. This all made sense to me when I was thinking of ways to save all my audio and computer files together and then back things up in a straightforward manner. Now I am seeing that it is better to have the DP files on the boot drive which for me is a no go given my small 500GB boot drive. Besides, when I used Apple Time Machine in the past, my back-ups all became incredibly large compared to the source material in a very short amount of time to not make them practical for me.

Now I hear that there are not only partitions, but volumes with AFSP among many other things. Besides all that, varied internet sources state that AFSP does not work well with old (pre 2017) Mac volumes/files and that HFS+ is recommended for the older spinners like my Seagate drives. Moreover, Seagate themselves seem to recommend HFS+ Journalled. Help??

If I didn't have so many old DP audio files/Mac files, I think my decision would have been much clearer, thus my need for lots of storage space and back-up. From what I now know, there is much change that is "afoot" in the Mac related music world as of late. Down the road, I will likely get more SSD's for samples and current DP files when I get some more money, but that may be not for a awhile unless my wife has a change of heart!?

Thanks in advance for any help cleaning up my mess.

Cheers!
Dave from frostbitten Edmonton in the far reaches of Canada.

[mikehalloran]

Spinners are for archive and Time Machine. Period. Why you would cripple the speed of your 2018 the way you are planning is beyond me.

How much space do you need? How are you connecting these drives? What do you need to accomplish? You’re too busy telling us how you want to do things instead of what you need to accomplish. Not the same thing.

SATA ended the need for partitioning in 2002 unless you are running multiple MacOS. You do not need to deal with APFS Volumes — again, unless running multiple OS.

[bayswater]

When I got my 2018 Mini, I also kept the internal drive small and then got a couple of external SSDs for samples and other libraries. I had some larger spinners from an earlier system, and didn't reformat them. Just plugged them in and they worked fine. I think they're all HFS+ Journaled. I also have a 8T spinner for TM, same format.

I keep the current working project on the internal drive and then copy it to a spinner that holds all my projects. But I've sometimes run a project off one of the spinners over USB3 and not run into any problems with that either.

I wouldn't bother with partitions any more. There might be a reason to use volumes on your internal drive if you want to have more than one OS version. I have a volume and keep a test version startup on it. The advantage of a volume over a partition is that volumes share the space on the drive, rather than requiring their own dedicated space. So adding a test volume to the internal SSD will only take up 10-20G. While you can have external startup SSDs, its a lot of fuss and bother getting the Mini to cooperate so I haven't pursued this.

My setup has been trouble free with DP 10, Logic 10.5, and Mixbus for about 2 years. It runs large projects without issue. The only issue I had was one of the older spinners was pretty noisy which becomes quite noticeable when you have the 2018 Mini. That spinner found it's way to the local electronic recycling depot.

[davidkochan]

Thanks for the reply. Looking back at my post, I think I left a few things out.

A main part of the reason why I didn't yet get some SSD drives already is because of cost. In short, the money has almost run out for buying studio stuff right now. Once you start upgrading, it seems you have to upgrade everything.

I initially planned to get one SSD drive for my fairly large sample library and one more for current audio files. When buying my reconditioned Mac 2018, I found there is little upgradability down the road and the price for larger internal SSD drives for the Mac mini was prohibitively expensive at around $1500 for a 2 TB SSD if I remember right. Moreover, you couldn't install the SSD yourself down the road.

It would also seem that with all the changes coming down from Apple (such as Intel to M1, HFS+ to APFS, etc), I am not always on the forward cusp of where things are going. I might be able to scrape enough together for a cheap Crucial 2TB SSD drive for my sample libraries from Superior Drummer and MachFive. I could use this SATA SSD in my OWC Thunderbay Thunderbolt 4 Drive enclosure. That would probably cover one 2TB SSD, but I would need at least one more later on. Part of the problem continues to be that SSD drives are still very pricey. Given the cost of the 4TB SSD drives, I cannot purchase one of these for audio samples and working files at this time. I just upgraded my studio computer, digital mixer (Midas M32r also for live sound) and several needed software upgrades which about covers my available budget for studio things right now.

I guess I would like to confirm the compatibility of hard drive formats between the spinners I am working towards using as back-up and the newer SSD drives which I am working towards getting as I can afford them. It sounds like the spinners should be set up for HFS+ Journalled while the the SSD drives should be set up with APSF, right? Also, my knowledge for backing up large drives comes from my teaching days around the start of the new millennium. Therefore, I am not totally up on new standard practice. I am fine with working towards getting enough SSD working drives as I can afford them, but want the capability of RAID back-up to ensure the security of recorded files along with our other personal files. If partitioning is no longer needed in such a system, that is great. Bottom line, I want to be able to clone one spinner driver to a second spinner for back-up. Me and Time Machine have not always had a good working relationship. Again, much of my knowledge and expertise in this area is very dated from when I worked wth computer networks around the year 2000.

Thanks for the help.

Cheers,
Dave

[bayswater]

LIke you, I'm waiting for the price of SSDs to go down (a lot) before I get any more. Why not see what happens with the alternatives actually available to you? Put the samples on a HGS+ USB 3 spinner see where the limits are. I bet lots of RAM and DP's pre-gen will take you a long way unless you're rescoring Star Wars. If not, nothing lost.

Not getting along with TM -- you might want to do a separate thread on that and describe how you set it up and what happened. I've had problems with backups becoming corrupted when using a networked drive, but using USB connections, TM has just hummed along for years, and been there when I need it. Note you can also set it up to use multiple drives and alternate between them so you have more than one copy of your stuff.

[davidkochan]

Thanks so much for the input Bayswater.

Much of what you described sounds similar to my set-up with the Mac Mini 2018 and the small internal SSD, external SSD’s and a spinner also in the equation. And am I correct in saying that you are also a fellow Canuck? How’s it going eh!?

I maxed out my RAM thinking that this would help things along speed wise for my computer, but left myself a bit short in the SSD department. I also purchased a 2TB SSD SATA card today to help things keep clipping along and move away from the spinners as much as possible. The only problem is that my Superior Drummer and Machfive libraries will use up the majority of that SSD space. That will be my last purchase for awhile which my wife reminded about today. At this point, I too am planning to keep the internal SSD as my boot drive supplemented by external SSD’s as i can afford them. Sounds quite a bit like your recording computer set-up. The suggestions you made in your post were very helpful.

Thanks a lot and take care,
Dave Kochan

[bayswater]

Thanks so much for the input Bayswater.

Much of what you described sounds similar to my set-up with the Mac Mini 2018 and the small internal SSD, external SSD’s and a spinner also in the equation. And am I correct in saying that you are also a fellow Canuck? How’s it going eh!?

Hi Dave. Yes, I'm here on the Wet Coast of the Great White North

I maxed out my RAM thinking that this would help things along speed wise for my computer, but left myself a bit short in the SSD department. I also purchased a 2TB SSD SATA card today to help things keep clipping along and move away from the spinners as much as possible. The only problem is that my Superior Drummer and Machfive libraries will use up the majority of that SSD space.

My set up is more modest. I did a 32 G upgrade on my own which saved a bit of money, and my sample libs fit on a 500G SSD. When I set this up, I noticed a lot of stuff on my older drives had never used in a completed track, so it now sits in an "archive" under the stairs.[/quote]