I bought it almost 3 years ago. I use a OWC thunderbolt 3 enclosure. RAID gives me speed of 1500 MBPS. And non raid around 2400. All my drives on PCI max out around 6800. If I bought it today, I will go for thunderbolt 4.
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Mac Studio Enough vs Overkill
- Thread starter SunMoonStars
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I do photography using the Adobe Suite, and went M2 Max with 64GB ram, 1TB SSD and dual 27" ASD. However I use an Maiwo USB 4 enclosure (via TB) with a 4TB WD Black NVMe as my startup drive, it runs at approx. 3,000MB/s R&W. The internal SSD is a cache drive.
Just love the setup, it is super fast, quiet and has lots of screen real estate for multiple windows. .
Just love the setup, it is super fast, quiet and has lots of screen real estate for multiple windows. .
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So you're not using the internal SSD as your startup drive. That's an interesting setup. Why did you choose to go that route? I went with 96GB ram and 2TB SSD. All client working files will be off loaded onto external drives.
No haven't used the internal drive as the startup on this or my previous 27" iMac since about 2020. The USB 4 enclosure runs plenty fast enough for me and the added 3 TB of space is welcome. I have a duplicate enclosure with another 4TB drive and the nice thing is when I travel I bring it along as my startup drive for my 14" MBP, and I am totally up to date. For me, the external enclosure has been great with really no issues. My Studio starts up in less than 15 seconds and shuts down instantly using the enclosure.
I have both SSD RAID and JBOD setups for files. When I travel I bring along 2 SD 4TB V2 Extreme SSD's as a 8TB JBOD setup for files.
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I have a few external USB enclosures with 4 bays, they are old but they still work well. Speed is not a big deal to me in my work. I'm so used to a 14 year old computer anything else is going to scream into existence. I've never been into the latest and greatest. I like a savings account better.
You will just love the Max Studio, it is the best Mac I have ever owned and I bought my first one back in 1984!! I went with SSD's for all storage as time is money, even at my age, and when doing backups I don't want them to run all night long. With even the JBOD and external off the shelf Extreme V2's, my backup time is about 1/4 the time it used to be. The main RAID SSD setups are even faster.
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As a photographer I can see that. I am a graphic designer with large libraries of photos and designs. As these drives wear out they will be replaced with better. I don't want to plunk down thousands when I can do it incrementally. Yeah, it took me 2 years to pull the trigger as I was waiting for the later models to bring the older models down in price a little. Got to the point I couldn't wait.
It took me about 3 years to update all storage to SSD's, as until this year prices kept dropping every year. Right now SSD prices are up about 30-50% higher than last year and when a 20TB backup HDD can be bought for less than $250, it just doesn't make $$ sense to switch to SSD's for backup storage.
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I agree and this has been my experience and will stick with it until it no longer works for me.