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sebo2001

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 18, 2018
36
7
Few days before mini M2 release I found good deal on very little used MM M1 with 16GB of ram and 500GB drive 750USD = 1000CAD, drive only had 3TB written on it. 5 reboots and 87 hours of uptime.

Plan was: upgrade/supplement/replace my very old Mac Pro 5.1 12 Core 3.45Ghz 64GB ram 580RX and 8TB Raid 0 and 24TB Raid 5 in OWC mercury Elite pro quad. Box is mainly used for photo and video editing, plus multiple VMs for going where I should not go.:)

I was waiting for 2 years because I know how Apple works. What a pita even 2 years later…

I had to completely blew my SoftRAID RAID5, recreate from scratch due to 16k unit size issue. I was planning to boot from 1TB External Samsung (to save internal drive and have instant disaster recovery) yes it boots great, but my OWC enclosure doesn’t work because I can’t load 3rd party drivers when booting from external drives. WTH Apple, who needs this type of external boot? this was first big hit to my plan. I thought 2 years all the issues would be solved.

Plan B. run all I have from Internal and alias what I can to external, use the rest of the space as scratch disk for FCP, photoshop and Lightroom. Let’s face it, this was a compromise. Apple intentionally plans to kill all of those MM M1 at one point.

I created RAID 0 to see how it performs, and WTH Apple again, it is over 100MB/s slower than on my old MacPro, system I had for like 8 years!!! Maybe it is an issue with RAID 0… I have created RAID 5 and run the test again.

Even worst with RAID5: MacPro 560MB/s both read and write, on Mac Mini M1: 330MB/s Write and 510MS/s Read unit connected to Thunderbolt port I tried all my cables I had, when I connect via USB A speed drops to 250MB/s both read and write!

This is unacceptable, ok this is old OWC enclosure capable only USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10 Gb/s) but those speeds are not even close, and why are the slower then 14 years old Mac Pro? I have to drop 120$USD for SoftRAID7 software after using it for 8 years and get slower speeds? What kind of broken logic is this? (having said that: SoftRAID guys are top if it comes to support. Fully deserve it)

Can someone suggest faster/the fastest enclosure for large 4xSATA HHDs that would run well on Mac Mini M1? I can’t afford 32TB of SSD’s please only real life examples with speed quoted. I do not believe any one of those manufactures\influencers anymore. Any pointer would be appreciated.
 
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