applecreativepro

Mike Wuerthele said:

applecreativepro said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

applecreativepro said:

“ We swapped them out with a another matched pair of PCI-E drives from a different manufacturer capable of more than 3 gigabytes per second each, and were unsurprisingly still seeing the same speeds.

This is likely intentional. This allows for good-enough speed for nearly any task, while not hampering the speed of the other ports at the same time.”

Is this not a case where the NVME is outperforming the Thunderbolt 3 spec though? I’m not that technical but I have some NVMEs in a Thunderbolt enclosure and I’m under the impression that would perform faster in a Mac Pro with PCI slots for them rather than on the Thunderbolt bus. I bought a Studio (Ultra) because I couldn’t wait anymore for Apple to make something… anything with PCI slots on Apple silicon :-)

This is a more complex question than you realize. One of the original drives in the enclosure is about maximum speed that can be delivered by Thunderbolt 3 and 4, because of a number of factors. NVMEs in a PCI slot Mac Pro can theoretically deliver more, but it depends on a lot of factors.

We did the swap more to test the drives than anything else. We knew we weren't going to get more than 2.8 gigabytes per second or so, because of the limits of Thunderbolt. Since the speed was unchanged with the new drives that we know can deliver more than 1.6 gigabytes per second, the limiting factor is the enclosure, and probably PCI-E channel allocation to them in the dock itself.

What do you have, do you have a Thunderbolt enclosure with a PCI-E card and the drives mounted on that, or just an enclosure?

I have an OWC Thunderflex enclosure. So there are so HDDs in there but also a 16TB M2 NVME SSD also from OWC. Connected to a Mac Studio’s TB…. er… 4 port? 3? Would there be a difference there too? But I bought the M2 with an eye to putting directly “in” something with a processor. 

Not through Thunderbolt. 

Also, I'm confused -- bought the M2 what? The Mac Studio is M1 Pro or M1 Ultra.

Sorry for the shorthand. By M2 I was referring to the OWC NVME module (they make M2 and M4 models I shouldn’t have shortened that!). So yes currently that NVME is in the enclosure and I wondered if I’d get better performance going internal on a PCI slot. It matters to me because one of the applications I use is NeoFinder which does image analysis on that 16TB drive (!) and the process takes a few days so if I can cut it by some hours that’s worth it.

I was planning to buy a Mac Pro JUST for this kind of analysis (NeoFinder uses Apple’s image analysis algorithm allowing me to search for “car” or “dress”… in video as well as images which is amazing but boy does it take some time!) 

I must add - excellent work you guys do at AI - I have followed you since your inception and really enjoy the podcast now. And the fact that your website does not autoplay video ads - I stopped going to Ars because I can’t listen to music at the same time. Keep it up!

It’s not accurate to suggest that you can “start selling music” by setting up Apple Music Connect. You have to pay a third party or aggregator like Tunecore to submit music to the store. Apple do not accept or solicit independent media producers of any kind. HOWEVER, if in the future Logic, GarageBand and Final Cut included a “submit to Apple Media for approval / distribution” in the menu of these apps it would be a game changer for artist, the industry and Apple. I’ve often wondered why Apple don’t already do this. I suspect the answer is simply that Apple don’t want to annoy the labels (middlemen, sharks whatever you want to call them) who it had to BEG for support when iTunes first launched. Maybe I’m wrong. The other issue is that Apple will have to sift through a lot of rubbish to approve acceptable content. However they are doing this now with the App Store submission process. I call that job creation anyway so they really can’t lose. Thoughts?