What are all the cool kids using these days for external storage on a Mac Studio?
Would need 4K playback. Thx!
As render/cache/framestore drive: Glyph Atom PRO Portable Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD V2 – Glyph Production Technologies
Large direct attached storage (48TB): PROMISE Technology - Storage Solutions for IT, Cloud, Surveillance, and Rich Media
And NAS storage via Synology (MacStudio has 10GbE built-in)
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Thanks! Pegasus looks great.
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It’s one of the better external TB RAID enclosures I’ve used. And decent performance utilizing a write cache. For 8 spinning drives that’s not bad.
I have a Mac Studio setup to be portable. After going through various configurations, I now have this super simple setup for a standalone Flame. I just have one external drive as both the project drive and the Framestore. Works great for me.
With 4 x 8tb Samsung SSDs
Absolute workhorse, love it.
For my second Flame (iMac Pro) I have this as just a Framestore with 4 x 2tb NVME drives. Also great, blisteringly fast for such a tiny piece of kit, and cost way less than a grand including the drives, so good value.
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I use the OWC U.2 Dual which is 8 NVME drives raided and thunderbolt its been great and its quiet
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My setup is to use the internal drive and a NAS. The internal drive is really fast and will playback ANYTHING. Like 6GB/sec fast.
I have my stone set to /Users/Shared/AutodeskMediaStorage/. That gets anything I want to cache or render into that fast storage. I also keep my published job data in /Users/Shared/JOBS/<project>/ where I just keep my PUBLISH and OUT data. This gets me playback for my timelines and batch work and I can QC the outputs without playback problems. Essentially all live sources are on that internal drive.
The PUBLISH and OUT folders are constantly synced to my NAS via ChronoSync - triggered by a filesystem change. The rest of the less active job data like source footage and graphics live on the NAS and this operation just writes into the main project folder in there to keep it all in one place.
When a job is over and I have archived the Flame work, I just delete the project folder from the internal drive. Boom. I don’t worry about losing it because it’s all on the NAS ready to move to an archive state.
I keep a bootable SSD hanging off the MacStudio that’s also running a sync everytime there’s a file system change. That way if there’s a problem, I unplug it and move it to my backup computer.
The MacStudio is like a reliable Honda. It’ll keep up with traffic, it’ll get you where you wanna go, you can mod it, but it’ll never be a F-150 and it’ll never be a Lambo. Top of my wishlist for this machine would be an interface via PCI to external storage.
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@space_monkey @RufusBlackwell - question for both of you regarding your setups. I assume you wouldn’t be able to have 2 flames hanging off the drives working simultaneously.
No the nvme that I have are connected via thunderbolt / usb-c , for two flames to work you would need a fast NAS connection to be able to playback.
thought as much, just wanted to check - thanks for confirming
My main Flame uses the OWC thunderbay 4 mini as both the project drive and the Framestore. My second Flame is networked to the first and uses the OWC thunderbay 4 mini as a project drive but has it’s own Framestore. Works well for me.
I believe the new Promise Pro works as both DAS and NAS with a nice little gui to setup what is shared where. A bit expensive though, Have used a Pegasus for many years and it has been rock solid. Recently added an Areca, which seems to be very good so far.
Hey Igor !
I would suggest Netstor Nvme raid. NETSTOR
In previous topics we talked about it then I compared it to the OWC raid Nvme and came to this one because of… Super silent + keep cold in + You can turn it off + can be upgraded to 16 To with 4SSD 4To
Work perfectly well on my Mac Studio For 6 months now.
If you need to move your Framestore, I suggest OWC Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3 + You choose your SSD. It has excellent speed, is cheap, and has had no issue with it for 2 years now.
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Thanks yo!
If you use OWC Thunder* products, be sure to check the General tab of the Security System Prefs and allow OWC/Macsales if it appears there.
from my experience its handsoff anything areca, the amounts of issues we have with their stuff is insane.
for anything owc definetly skip all the softraid software BS , thats stuff is pure evil. use macos raid instead
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Hmm, never had any issues with the ARC-8050T3U-6 + 6x Micron SSDs.
Lucky then, we have a junk pile of about 5 of different arecas and they are all just giving us issues
most of them just straight up died on set, their drivers are ridicolous, (try to uninstall MRAID on windows.) some models would just kernelpanic any mac we plugged them into instantely… lets just say we moved on and anything areca is on my blacklist of pain .
I went with @space_monkey 's suggestion:
OWC Mercury Pro U.2
OWC U.2 Shuttle
Four 4TB M.2s
$1500 USD
1.5 GB/s
16TBs in RAID 0, and I could still put in four more M.2s:
-Ted
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