charles1

I bought a Thunderbay 8 and put 8x 10Tb drives in it, for a usable RAID5 of ~70Tb. I could not get backups to work on a RAID5 with hard drives, it really needs APFS which requires SSDs. NAS does not work well either, even advanced disk formats like ZFS are unsuitable for MacOS backups.
I figured that to back up my Mac Studio M2U with 4Tb internal SSD, I could just clone the drive with a 1:1 backup since I don't run it close to full. I bought an OWC Express 1M2, and put in a low cost but fast 4Tb SSD. The 1M2 enclosure promises bandwidth up to 3151MB/sec and the SSD promises >6500, I got 3090, very close to the limit! Apparently it runs via USB4 and not Thunderbolt, I don't quite understand the tech but I like it! Right now I'm running backups hourly in Carbon Copy Cloner, the first backup (~3Tb) took about 2.5 hours but hourly incremental backups run in ~15 seconds. I am considering switching over to Time Machine, but 4Tb probably isn't big enough for that. 

bradmacpro said:

Well that rather sucks if I may be so blunt. The Mac Studio with M2 Max is looking to be slower than a M4 based MacBook at this point.

Incorrect. The internal memory bandwidth of a Mac Studio M2 is several times that of any MacBook M4. The SSD speed is astonishing, nothing like it could ever be achieved on a laptop. A fast CPU/GPU means nothing if you don't have a system board that can handle that level of performance.

I invested heavily in a Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 4TB of SSD, correctly predicting that it would be a long time before it was dethroned as Speed King. I was correct. 

Nobody will ever call an Apple Vision Pro user a Glasshole. But this Xreal device is basically Google Glass. 

I had a defective Airpods Pro, the left earbud had static all the time. This was a known manufacturing defect and Apple had an extended warranty program to replace them. I must have bought them like 3 years ago. I figured they'd just replace the left earbud. I phoned Apple Support and after a bit of fiddling (my Airpods wouldn't run their online diagnostic) they just said that my serial number was in the affected range, and they'd FedEx me a new set of Airpods. They arrived two days later. No yelling necessary, the Apple Support person was courteous and went beyond the call of duty to deliver a total solution to my problem.

Wow I remember going to Apple's training facility in Orange County several times circa 1985, once they gave us a tour that included their server room. They had a bunch of expensive hard drives stacked up on a high shelf, unanchored, no rack mounts or anything. I suggested that they fasten down some of that equipment or it would fall off in an earthquake. They were unreceptive to the idea.