Hey guys, been digging into as much research as I can with OWC’s Accelsior 8M2 internal drives which are not cheap, but provide insane speeds (internally). I love the idea of having nothing attached externally to my machine, so that is about the only thing driving me towards upgrading to a Mac Pro.
However, I’ve heard such great things about the Mac Studio. I would need external storage though- not the end of the world, but I wouldn’t mind consolidation.
I’m not really interested in chasing/waiting for the latest and greatest chip anymore, so it’ll be whatever is currently for sale from Mac.
What do ya’ll think? Mac Pro w/ internal storage only- or Mac Studio with external storage?
I do everything from big commercial conforms/deliveries, to heavy 2.5D compositing (in Flame of course).
I’ve been hearing from my IT guys that all the studios they installed these Mac Studios for, they have buyers’ remorse and end up wanting Linuxes. Spending $15k+ on a system that underperforms a Lenovo for about the same price. Anyone seeing this?
If I do external it’ll either be another Thunder 8 Bay or their newer Flex 8 with 4xSSD and 4xHDD.
I’m less concerned about needing speeds faster than those two units, and more leaning towards something that feels a little more upgradable, serviceable, and also dicipates heat better.
I can’t go Linux right now, so I’ll be staying Mac.
cache as dwab exr or prores , the you can get away with a much smaller and slower framestore.
We have a 8tb shared framestore between 3 machine and its filled like … 80GB (no joke) after 3 months or so.
We also dont generate media in flame pretty much at all which helps
I can recommend using a 10Gbit nas as a framestore now if you set your cache to dwab.
all in all I would look at changing he workflow to avoid the framestore rather than to throw money at it.
So just get a 4-8tb internall studio and have a neat package we got a super good deal on ours using apple refurbished
Also I found external storage to just always be flakey, you dont want framestore disconnects while working its super bad and itll break stuff, so i am not a fan at all of having a framestore connected via thunderbolt ot whatever.
You’re saying get a NAS, which is in theory external storage- but also that external storage is flaky with disconnects? I’ve been running various OWC Thunderbays and haven’t had any disconnect issues.
I’ve considered doing a NAS, but it ends up being about as expensive as everything else.
I hold conforms, breakout plates, and do a lot of comp work- so space fills up fast when I’m managing multiple projects at once.
Do you like the reliability of the studio? Any heating issues?
You run flame as a project server on that nas so that the project server has local/reliable storage and you can nuke your machine anytime you want, its the “awesome” way. ask @ALan about that
I just had a bunch of issues with external DAS storage on the macs, they all at some point start disconnecting randomly when on for too long and stuff like that. its just odd, often i end up with stff thats double mounted (share-1) , NAS just works usually.
You do want storage for all that stuff yes absolutely BUT not framestore space, if you run a modern openclip workflow, no render nodes in batch (the type of stuff where
your archive is usually only megabytes in size) you can save a hell of a lot of money while simplyfing your data-life , the framestore then becomes a space for metadata and temporary timline caches like it should.
I could totally get away with a 2TB internal disc for probably a year worth of project data for my framestore the way i work now. probably even less…
no issues wih the studio , quiet the opposite the heat is so low its so nice because its so low wattage networkig is stable and fast too, even smb
for performant NAS you need a lot of spindles if you’re running HDD, or you need to buy all SSD, and capacious SSD in a 2.5" form factor are not exactly cheap.
If you opt for NVMe NAS of which there are few, the price of the enclosure increases.
you also need good networking, a switch, adapters for your macs, cables.
the B.O.M. quickly accumulates.
this is an absolutely acceptable way to run one flame.
then the question is:
which NAS?
personally, i would just get my feet wet with trivial startup costs and buy an old HPz *20 or *40 workstation for $100 bucks, fill it with cheap storage - you can physically store 28 2.5" drives in a z820, and try networking that with your current mac - point to point.
You’d get a system running and tested for less than the cost a of a populated OWC device.
yes… I would even run a single machine with S+W Project Server. I never want my data residing on the workstation itself. I need to be able to nuke workstations at my whim without worrying about data migration or saving. The NAS is for the stable storage.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t stripe a few of the thunder blades across the various busses on the Mac Studio. 2 might nearly double the speed. 4 thunder blades may be around triple. All the ports on the back are on separate busses…
