Rebuilding a studio after the Palisades Fire – Mac, UAD, iLok, etc.

[coolbass]

Native Access can download to an external drive. Just point to it in the preferences.

[HCMarkus]

Native Access can download to an external drive. Just point to it in the preferences.

Details:

https://support.native-instruments.com/ ... ive-Access

[James Steele]

My point was that a 500K System drive for any of us is too damned small.

Agree completely!! Since these aren't user upgradeable in the future, you really need to spring for as much space as you'll think you need from the get-go!

I think I have seem some rumors of some company working on a way to upgrade the internal drive after initial purchase, but I'm not up on if such a product has come to market. Even if it does, I assume that if you have any warranty left when you do this, it would void it.

[HCMarkus]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/po ... udio-drive

[seamonster]

Fascinating description of how they reverse-engineered the drives. And I like their upgrade philosophy.

I don't see the 1TB drive (in the M2 model I ordered) listed in their table. I wonder why. Presumably they're as "slow" as the 512k's?

Also, their listed read/write speeds are the same as Apple's. So the point is just that if you have, say, a 512k SSD, their's allows you to replace it with something bigger? If they can replace the drive, why wouldn't Apple offer that (even for an exorbitant price)?

[mikehalloran]

Fascinating description of how they reverse-engineered the drives. And I like their upgrade philosophy.

I don't see the 1TB drive (in the M2 model I ordered) listed in their table. I wonder why. Presumably they're as "slow" as the 512k's?

Also, their listed read/write speeds are the same as Apple's. So the point is just that if you have, say, a 512k SSD, their's allows you to replace it with something bigger? If they can replace the drive, why wouldn't Apple offer that (even for an exorbitant price)?

Apple does offer it for an exorbitant price, sorta’ kinda’…. If the NAND also fits the upgradeable Mac Pro, pairs can be used to upgrade the Studio. You can find this on iFixIt. Same was true with my iMac Pro but the cost to upgrade my iMP to 8TB was nearly that of my new Studio

As to the speed of the installed internals, some Minis and Studios have a single NAND; others have a pair. A pair is set up in a “modified RAID 0” array that, like any other, is nearly twice as fast as a single blade. Apple doesn’t publish which models have what but iFixIt has torn down many. All of the M1 Studios have a pair but many of the smaller capacity M2 Studios have a single blade but all have a pair of sockets. A 512GB M2 Studio will have a single blade under the hood; my 8TB M2 Ultra has a pair.

As for those NAND pairs from France, they’re modifying the same generic NAND that Apple uses. I recommend reading this MacRumors thread first. Apple is definitely not happy and their purchase link goes down a lot—including now.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/u ... 048/page-8

Most Minis cannot be upgraded as they use different (slower) NAND and most models have it soldered in, same as the MacBook Pro.

[HCMarkus]

UA has a sale going... 10 plugins for $100. Selection is somewhat limited, but might be a good way to go if moving from UAD to Native plugins.

https://www.uaudio.com/products/uad-sum ... ape-bundle

[seamonster]

Question about drive formatting with the newer Macs (should this be a different thread?) –

As I take inventory of my existing 2010 Mac Pro setup towards making the transition to the Mac Studio M2, I note that I have 4 HD's mounted inside it: 2 are SSDs (240GB each), 2 are high-capacity 7200RPM. (I sort of forgot what was in there, as it's been months since I booted it – I've been dealing with fire-refugee stuff, working on my office iMac.) One of the SSDs is my boot drive, a candidate for possible "migration" to the Mac Studio. (I'll save the remaining space of the M2's internal 1TB for samples and active projects.)

The Mac Pro boot SSD is APFS. Its other drives are a mix of APFS and Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I want to consolidate the contents of those other drives on a new 4TB external that I haven't yet formatted.

Am I correct that APFS is the best format for an external drive that will be written to from the old Mac Pro and read/written by the new MacStudio? Is it fine to format it from the old machine, running OS 10.13, or is there some new-improved flavor of APFS that can only be formatted using the Mac Studio and its recent OS? (I don't want to have to set up the Mac Studio until I'm ready to migrate the boot drive from the Mac Pro.)

[HCMarkus]

You might want to get something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Enclosure- ... M7KCX&th=1

I used a similar device to transfer data from my old Mac Pro's HDs and SSDs to new media when I made the move to Apple Silicon with the M1 Mac Studio. Sneaker Net is a great technique... just pull the old drives from the old Mac, and use the dock, which is connected via USB to your new computer.

New media should all be formatted APFS. For organizational purposes, APFS Volumes can come in handy... they are like self-sizing partitions. On the new, higher-capacity media, you can create an APFS Volume for the data from each of your current drives if you want to keep it organized similarly. Folders work, too, but Volumes will show up as separate drives in Finder.

Two of my old SATA SSDs now reside in inexpensive ($12) USB3 cases; one holds my photo library; the second is used for daily end-of-session manual project backups. This is, of course, on top of automated Time Machine backups (to external 8-14TB Hard Drives) and Cloud backup (BackBlaze - unlimited data for a single computer and all attached drives $100/annually).

[mikehalloran]

Beginning with the last build of macOS 10.13, everything is APFS. This is how all drives should be formatted that are used with your new studio. Time Machine will format those drives automatically. You can’t boot a Mac from a non-APFS drive anymore.

For transferring data from older drives, Migration Assistant doesn’t care how those drives are formatted if you don’t intend to use them again. If you will continue their use, reformat after the data transfer—it’s not supposed to affect the data but still….

External USB docks like the one in the last post are fine for archival and transfer. Note that newer HDDs need to have some leads disabled with tape to work in them. This is not an issue when those drives are used in NAS boxes such as these—all of my Time Machine backups are housed in these configured RAID 0.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AWH05KK?th=1

APFS has some very interesting capabilities.
https://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64689

[seamonster]

HC, Thanks for the tip about the enclosures. It helps me to clarify the process ahead. When I evacuated, I grabbed a plastic tub full of external drives, and sure enough right at the bottom of it was a Newertech Voyager S3, like the ORICO you recommend:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/U3S3HD/

MIke, the thread you linked re APFS – man, that stuff gets arcane fast! But it does help to have at least half a clue about what's going on under the hood. You made sort of an aside I found intriguing: "(CCC and Super Duper! are APIs for Disk Utility/Time Machine no matter how many on MacRumors insist that's not true)." All I can say is: "Mackintosh. Think Different."

But your most eyebrow-raising comment is this: "Note that newer HDDs need to have some leads disabled with tape to work in them." [External USB docks.] Huh?

[HCMarkus]

But your most eyebrow-raising comment is this: "Note that newer HDDs need to have some leads disabled with tape to work in them." [External USB docks.] Huh?

Huh... news to me, too. I haven't run into that issue, but all my internal HDs were/are pretty old... I've been exclusively using External USB3 HDs for Time Machine Backup and Long Term Archive storage since I got my M1 Mac Studio in 2022.

Last time I checked, 16TB Seagates were the best bang for the External HD buck. My most recent purchase was 14TB; I've got several of 8TB Seagates. That size was the best deal for quite a while.

[mikehalloran]

Yep, the tape surprised me, too.

Last year, when I was in Sequoia Hell and was trying to find and save my data, I took a WD Red purchased in 2020, removed it from an old Time Capsule, stuck it in one of those docks and it wouldn't read. Huh? Ok... nearly out of warranty so I ordered a new one. It came with strips of tape and instructions that I ignored but it didn't work in that dock either—What the heck?. So I read the paper, taped over the leads as instructed and it now appeared on my desktop. My NAS boxes don't require it nor does my OWC TB2 twin dock.

Apparently 2020 is the year it began. I can't find a copy of the WD instructions but this article gives the general idea. The instructions I got from WD have you taping over four pins, not one as suggested below.

Applying tape over leads on hard drives is a common practice,

What is the problem?
Some newer hard drives, particularly those compliant with SATA specifications 3.2 or 3.3, utilize the 3.3V power supplied by the SATA power connector as a signal to disable the drive. This is often referred to as the "Power Disable Feature" or "3.3V pin issue".

Why does this happen?
Many older or standard power supplies do not have a separate 3.3V power line and instead provide continuous 3.3V power to the SATA connector. When these power supplies are connected to a drive with the Power Disable Feature, the constant 3.3V signal triggers the drive's shutdown mechanism, preventing it from powering on or being recognized by the system.

How does taping the leads help?
Taping over the third pin on the SATA power connector of the hard drive effectively blocks the 3.3V signal from reaching the drive's control circuitry. This prevents the drive from entering the shutdown state and allows it to power on and function normally

[mikehalloran]

"(CCC and Super Duper! are APIs for Disk Utility/Time Machine no matter how many on MacRumors insist that's not true)."

Absolutely true. Neither of those apps can do anything Apple doesn't allow. This is why both say that they are "APFS friendly" and "work with Time Machine". Uh... yeah... that's the ticket.

There are a number of sites that teach you the various AppleScript one needs to control DU/TM the way that they do. If you want that kind of control over scheduling but don't want to write it yourself, CCC and SD are glad to take your money for the convenience.

True cloning has not been possible since OS 10.4 Tiger. Back in the day, it was convenient to go to a few hundred iMacs in a school and set them up identically using CCC. With OS 10.5, Apple improved their networking tools so that I could do the same thing from a single station in an air conditioned office. Districts shut down the AC during the summer when there are no students and that can be miserable where I live. Districts had to hire the PC techs full time but being the "Mac guy" was a part time, occasional side hustle.