New Mac Pro 2019! So far so good.

[bdr]

Thanks for the info. Here in Oztralia the base model starts at $10K due to our great ‘Pacific Peso’. It’s pretty easy to convince myself that over the lifetime of using it I would more than make that back in time savings and whatnot. Unfortunately I’m not the one that needs to be convinced...

[mikehalloran]

... I have an old FW/USB2 card and just USB2 I was thinking about trying. ... it would be nice to have more USB ports without having another hub dangling off of it. I still have my Kensington trackball, iLok, controller keyboard,

All of which are USB 1.1. Many 1.1 devices do have issues playing nicely with USB 3. Putting in a USB 2 card isn't a bad idea as long as it works.

I'd like to keep the USB3 ports for my 3.5" backup drives.

Uhhhh right. No reason to do so. Platter speed is the bottleneck and USB 2 is no slower. If Time Machine, Ethernet is better — I find used My Cloud multi-drive enclosures on eBay. Takes 30 seconds and a Phillips screwdriver to swap drives.

For VIs, SSDs are far superior and USB 3 docks are as good as anything. SATA III is your bottleneck.

[thanatopsis]

I'd like to keep the USB3 ports for my 3.5" backup drives.

Uhhhh right. No reason to do so. Platter speed is the bottleneck and USB 2 is no slower. If Time Machine, Ethernet is better — I find used My Cloud multi-drive enclosures on eBay. Takes 30 seconds and a Phillips screwdriver to swap drives.
For VIs, SSDs are far superior and USB 3 docks are as good as anything. SATA III is your bottleneck.

I'm not hooking up one drive to one USB 3 port; I'm hooking up a dozen or so drives in various multi-drive bays and RAID configurations. I've been using them with USB 3 hubs with my Tube for years and they work great. I'm not going to spend another couple K right now to get fancy new Thunderbolt 3 cases or docks for them all if I don't need to. But they are definitely faster on USB 3 than USB 2.

I already have a bunch of SSDs and M.2 drives on PCI cards inside for VIs and recording.

I just want more USB ports without another dang hub hanging off this thing.

[bayswater]

But they are definitely faster on USB 3 than USB 2.

This was my impression too. I have older externals, with USB 2, 3, SATA and FW ports. On my older iMac, I had one plugged into the one FW port as the audio drive, and the others used the USB 2 ports.

Changing to the 2018 Mini, I have them all connected via USB 3, and it was immediately obvious copying files is a lot faster than it had been under USB 2 on the iMac, and faster than it had been on the drive connected to the FW 800 on the iMac.

So these don't appear to have been limited by platter speed. They perform well enough for now that I feel no need to get new drives. Using the internal SSD as a project drive, then moving the complete project to one of the externals, and using another of the externals for TM is working well for now.

At some point, I'll get a couple of external SSDs, maybe with TB 3 connections, and dump these ancient spinners, but for now there are better things to spend the money on.

[monkey man]

Yup, it's obvious here too, and that's just using WD portable USB spinners.

USB 3 transfers much more quickly than USB 2, and that's using a 4-port Sonnet PCI card of each flavour as well as comparing with the built-in 2012 cheese grater ports.

[mikehalloran]

I have them all connected via USB 3, and it was immediately obvious copying files is a lot faster than it had been under USB 2 on the iMac

Your iMac bus was SATA II

[Michael Canavan]

Uhhhh right. No reason to do so. Platter speed is the bottleneck and USB 2 is no slower. If Time Machine, Ethernet is better — I find used My Cloud multi-drive enclosures on eBay. Takes 30 seconds and a Phillips screwdriver to swap drives.

For VIs, SSDs are far superior and USB 3 docks are as good as anything. SATA III is your bottleneck.

I thought this too for a long time, but the latest 2-10TB 3.5" drives are all really pretty fast, and USB 2 definitely slows them to a crawl. For external dives it's much much better to put them in USB3 enclosures.

[Jim]

AS to the internal storage question, this will be available a couple weeks from today:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2

The price on this thing looks about right.

[mikehalloran]

AS to the internal storage question, this will be available a couple weeks from today:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2

The price on this thing looks about right.

About the same price as adding storage as part of the BTO but without the advantage of being tied into the T2 chip or being able to boot from RAID 0. In other words, A great add-on but not a substitute for getting enough storage upfront.

[HCMarkus]

AS to the internal storage question, this will be available a couple weeks from today:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2

The price on this thing looks about right.

SO many issues with OWC SSDs reported... I'd wade in carefully.

This thread has a lot of info: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/su ... t-28089882

[Jim]

I appreciate the warning, but the item I posted appears not to be shipping yet. FWIW, I have three SSDs in regular use for a couple of years with no issues I can track to the SSDs.

I've had good luck with OWC products and MacSales so far, with two disclaimers:

I bought a 4x64 RAM kit which failed on Day 2. I called support, and they cross shipped me a replacement overnight shipping at no extra cost. I had to leave a CC number on file in case I didn't return the bad RAM, but I'm impressed with their service. Their RAM is lifetime warranted.

I also bought a TB expander for my MBP that failed 11 months in on a year warranty. They shipped a replacement with no hassle or shipping fees.

My only complaint with the new Mac Pro so far has to do with Catalina, and that Mojave can't be installed. I don't trust any OSX younger than 10.x.5. I didn't know (although I suspected) I would be locked into Catalina, and I trust Apple will fix their shortcomings later rather than sooner as they usually do.

[Phil O]

AS to the internal storage question, this will be available a couple weeks from today:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2

The price on this thing looks about right.

Ouch again. 480 bucks for 1TB! Somtimes you just want cheap internal storage like the 2.5 inch form factor stuff. Wish they had put in some bays for that. But who am I kidding, the new Mac Pro prices are beyond my reach anyway.

[HCMarkus]

AS to the internal storage question, this will be available a couple weeks from today:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2

The price on this thing looks about right.

Ouch again. 480 bucks for 1TB! Somtimes you just want cheap internal storage like the 2.5 inch form factor stuff. Wish they had put in some bays for that. But who am I kidding, the new Mac Pro prices are beyond my reach anyway.

You can do a PCIe SSD for a lot less, under $200 for quality 1TB blade and and a PCIe adaptor with heatsink:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO- ... 297&sr=8-3

https://www.amazon.com/QNINE-Adapter-Ex ... 228&sr=8-5

Won't be quite as fast (4x instead of 8x PCIE), but how much speed do we really need? Let's face it, in the audio world, drives are not an issue... good ol' SATA SSDs are plenty fast to serve audio files and VI samples to a DAW. About all we gain from the fastest storage tech is a little quicker project load and save times.

[mikehalloran]

...

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO- ... 297&sr=8-3

https://www.amazon.com/QNINE-Adapter-Ex ... 228&sr=8-5

Won't be quite as fast (4x instead of 8x PCIE), but how much speed do we really need? Let's face it, in the audio world, drives are not an issue... good ol' SATA SSDs are plenty fast to serve audio files and VI samples to a DAW. About all we gain from the fastest storage tech is a little quicker project load and save times.

Yea, there’s a lot of mystic jumbo-jumbo promising performance that either isn’t really available or doesn’t mean a thing.

A 970 EVO is really fast but won’t give you better performance than hosting your VIs on SATA III SSDs. Slower blades like the Crucial or Intel have a max speed of 2000 instead of 3600 like the 970 but are less expensive and still 3–4 times faster than the best SATA III SSD.

If you’re an animation or graphics house Where file rendering is measured in days or hours, the OWC unit makes sense — after you loaded your MP with 8TB Up front.

I’m expecting the OWC unit to ship around the time that 4TB NVMe 3 or 4 SSDs become available. Expect 8TB storage to be offered on the MP and iMP around the same time. Samsung makes the Apple SSDs.

I expect to buy an X5 soon — not for the speed since I find SATA III storage fast enough but so that I can turn my iMP into a dual-boot system without compromising APFS Snapshots. The X5 will boot my system into Mojave or High Sierra and run apps a lot faster than a SATA III drive. That’s where t makes a difference.

[cyril]

VERY BAD NEWS

This is the answer of Motu :

Cyril,

While the PCIe-424 card may work with the new Mac Pro on a hardware level, I'm afraid MOTU PCI interfaces are not and will not be made compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Ryan - MOTU

Spread this bad new across internet !
I have 3 x Motu on my PCI 424e
If I go to the New Mac Pro 2019 I will not buy Motu