M395 vs the M395X

[Samuelsan2001]

I just took a look at the size of some of my videos. They range from 450-800MB. Photos are 7-8MB. The drone will be getting a lot of use after the weather warms up.

They are tiny don't worry about it.

If you go pure SSD then you can easily attach external drive for media storage, but looking at your use case any 2tb or 3 tb fusion will be fine.

For the ram upgrade add 16gb to the two empty slots for a total of 24gb that's more than enough for most people and makes an upgrade to 32gb easier in the future if needed.

 

[joema2]

I just took a look at the size of some of my videos. They range from 450-800MB. Photos are 7-8MB. The drone will be getting a lot of use after the weather warms up.

If you are shooting H264 4k drone video, this produces about 7.5 megabytes per second, or 2.25 gigabytes every 5 min. Typically when working on a video you shoot a lot more content than is used in the final product. A shooting ratio of 20:1 is on the low end, and 50:1 or 100:1 is not uncommon. If your final video is 5 min, this implies the 4k source material would be at least 20x that or about 40 gigabytes. If you have to transcode or optimize that for smoother editing, that's at least 80 gigabytes, maybe much more.

A 2TB Fusion Drive might be enough for a while, but remember everything you do should be backed up.

 

[Trebuin]

If you are shooting H264 4k drone video, this produces about 7.5 megabytes per second, or 2.25 gigabytes every 5 min. Typically when working on a video you shoot a lot more content than is used in the final product. A shooting ratio of 20:1 is on the low end, and 50:1 or 100:1 is not uncommon. If your final video is 5 min, this implies the 4k source material would be at least 20x that or about 40 gigabytes. If you have to transcode or optimize that for smoother editing, that's at least 80 gigabytes, maybe much more.

A 2TB Fusion Drive might be enough for a while, but remember everything you do should be backed up.

Could someone more familiar with fusion drives bring up some info on reliability? As far as I know, they are like a raid pairing which can induce some risk, but I don't know compared to SSDs & HDDs. That's why I back everything up with a large external.

 

[joema2]

Could someone more familiar with fusion drives bring up some info on reliability? As far as I know, they are like a raid pairing which can induce some risk, but I don't know compared to SSDs & HDDs. That's why I back everything up with a large external.

Nobody outside Apple has any good data on Fusion Drive reliability. The SSD portion and HDD are like RAID-0, so they both must work. However any HDD, SSD or hybrid drive can fail at any time, and even pure SSDs can have significant failure probabilities.

It might at first seem that 2TB Fusion Drive is more likely to fail than a similar-size SSD, but the SSD in that case is 16x larger than the 128GB SSD in FD. It has a lot more storage cells to fail or get hit by a cosmic ray, so it may have different failure characteristics. I personally think the SSD is more reliable but you can't go by "gut feel".

We do know that SSD itself can have significant failure rates. Worse, unlike an HDD which often gives off warning signs of an impending hard failure, SSD often just totally dies. SSD reliability studies and discussions:

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.c...sd-vs.-hdd-performance-and-reliability-1.html

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/30/are-ssds-reliable/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

I don't see that Fusion Drive makes any difference in terms of backup plan -- they must all be backed up or you risk losing your data.

 

[Trebuin]

Nobody outside Apple has any good data on Fusion Drive reliability. The SSD portion and HDD are like RAID-0, so they both must work. However any HDD, SSD or hybrid drive can fail at any time, and even pure SSDs can have significant failure probabilities.

It might at first seem that 2TB Fusion Drive is more likely to fail than a similar-size SSD, but the SSD in that case is 16x larger than the 128GB SSD in FD. It has a lot more storage cells to fail or get hit by a cosmic ray, so it may have different failure characteristics. I personally think the SSD is more reliable but you can't go by "gut feel".

We do know that SSD itself can have significant failure rates. Worse, unlike an HDD which often gives off warning signs of an impending hard failure, SSD often just totally dies. SSD reliability studies and discussions:

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.c...sd-vs.-hdd-performance-and-reliability-1.html

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/30/are-ssds-reliable/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

I don't see that Fusion Drive makes any difference in terms of backup plan -- they must all be backed up or you risk losing your data.

I side with you on the SSD reliability. I found out two years ago that most of the SSD failures that have occurred were not actually failures. I don't know why it hasn't been published, but after tons of digging, I found out that most of these involved SSDs powering down improperly & completely disappearing from the users & are completely recoverable. I've had that happen to two of my SSDs & a friend of mine had several that went bad. The solution: turn on & leave in a failed state for 12 hours. I recovered mine twice & my friend tried the same fix & it worked on all of them despite being different drives.

I have yet to see the cells lock from hitting max use, but I"m still worried that an airport will wipe out my drive as it used to wipe out my thumb drives all the time.

I wonder if the Fusion actually functions in a RAID-0 or RAID-1. If it's a zero, that's quite a risk. Given that the drives are marked as 2.2TB, I'm assuming they're actually in RAID-1...simply mirrored rather than split.

 

[joema2]

...I wonder if the Fusion actually functions in a RAID-0 or RAID-1. If it's a zero, that's quite a risk. Given that the drives are marked as 2.2TB, I'm assuming they're actually in RAID-1...simply mirrored rather than split.

I believe they are functionally RAID-0. If either HDD or SSD component fails, the drive fails. However I have no proof of that. I don't see this as a big problem -- even regular hard drives have multi-gigabyte read/write caches. There is a lot of electronics on both HDD and SSD drives which can fail.

Consider previous cases where a high % of drives failed -- the Seagate 3TB. This wasn't because it was an HDD, nor was it because all Seagate drives are unreliable. The replacement Seagate 4TB had a very low failure rate in the exact same environment. It was a bad batch of 3TB drives: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

If the 128GB SSD component of a Fusion Drive is very reliable, it won't add much failure chance, even if it's RAID-0. But it doesn't matter either way -- you always must backup your drives, whether they are SSD, HDD or Hybrid.

 

[9917282]

edited

 

[mpe]

I wonder if the Fusion actually functions in a RAID-0 or RAID-1. If it's a zero, that's quite a risk. Given that the drives are marked as 2.2TB, I'm assuming they're actually in RAID-1...simply mirrored rather than split.

Neither like RAID-0 nor RAID-1. The closest thing is JBOD as they work together but not at the same time as in RAID. The caching is exclusive therefore the SSD is not included on the HDD.

Yes, you'll loose your volume if either component fails.

The side effect of FD is however that it actually helps to improve reliability of both HDD and SSD as it converts random HDD writes into sequential which prolongs its life a bit and also improves endurance of SSD by making sure that the SSD never gets filled which helps to garbage collection algorithms employed by SSD. So arguably the fused drive is more reliable than if you were using plain SSD + HDD separately.

However, no matter what storage you use it is always important to use backups.

 

[mathemabeat]

I'm configuring the 27" iMac I'd like to purchase this month and am wondering if I will see a noticeable difference if I go with the M395X over the M395 graphics processor. Most of it's work will be for editing 4K drone videos.

Specs that I'm looking at are -

• 4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz
• 8GB 1867MHz DDR3 SDRAM - two 4GB - I'll upgrade this to 16 or 32GB myself
• 2TB Fusion Drive
• AMD Radeon R9 M395 with 2GB video memory

I picked up the high end retail 27 inch 5k iMac a couple months back. Quad core i5, 2TB Fusion Drive, M395 graphics and it absolutely shreds 4k video editing. At least with Final Cut Pro X.


I have been working with 4k video for about 18 months so far and this has been by far my best experience editing it. I had a maxed out late 2012 i7 iMac, then went to a loaded dual cpu 2009 Mac Pro and then beefcake Hackintosh and finally my late 2015 iMac. This machine has been the best at working with 4k footage and a total beast in FCPX.


I did replace the stock 8 gigs of ram with 32 gigs and I edit all my videos on an external USB3 SSD drive.

It's fantastic.

 

[1050792]

I picked up the high end retail 27 inch 5k iMac a couple months back. Quad core i5, 2TB Fusion Drive, M395 graphics and it absolutely shreds 4k video editing. At least with Final Cut Pro X.


I have been working with 4k video for about 18 months so far and this has been by far my best experience editing it. I had a maxed out late 2012 i7 iMac, then went to a loaded dual cpu 2009 Mac Pro and then beefcake Hackintosh and finally my late 2015 iMac. This machine has been the best at working with 4k footage and a total beast in FCPX.


I did replace the stock 8 gigs of ram with 32 gigs and I edit all my videos on an external USB3 SSD drive.

It's fantastic.

This is what confuses me. How come your "beefcake" hackintosh not be up to or even better than the late 15 iMac? I mean it is using the same components as every other computer.