Mac Studio Internal SSD partition

[kompaq]

Hi,



We are a sound studio, and we are about to buy 2 Mac Studio. I'm struggling between 2 options on how to store our data.

Currently, I'm using the latest intel mini with an external SSD to work on my protools sessions. That drive is the OWC TB3 drive which I love, but there are some downsides:

• external, easy to move. Harder to protect from stealing.
• It's fast, but the internal SSD in the Studio is faster.
• Almost the same price as the internal SSD upgrade.

My question is, is there any downfall of buying the Studio with a bigger internal SSD and just resizing the partition? Doing 1 for the system and 1 for the works?

We need it separately because not just 1 person/account needs to access these files. We are switching places/rooms/macs quite often, sometimes we land our places, or others work on our project on our machines. So separated accounts are needed, but all of them need to see the same "work" SSD/partition.

 

[mfram]

The internal storage of the Studio will be formatted APFS. There is no reason to "partition" APFS storage at all. Instead, you create new "volumes" on the device. You may create a "work" volume if you'd like. The volume will appear on the desktop like another drive. I verified I can do that on my MBP. On that drive you can click the 'Ignore ownership' button if you'd like. Or you can create a folder on the work volume that is set so that everyone can Read & Write to it. It will show up on the desktop of all users on the computer.

Volumes in APFS are like what you previously knew as partitions except they all share the same free space on the device. Partitions require you to specify the storage space of each area up-front and can't always be changed after you make them. The APFS volume feature eliminates that requirement and the associated downsides.

 

[lcubed]

the advice above is exactly how i'm using the 4 TB SSD in my ultra.
i've got several containers on the Macintosh HD SSD that contain the contents
of the SSD's that i copied from my old macpro4,1.

it's super nice because i don't have to figure out ahead of time how much to allocate to each partition

 

[F-Train]

Taking into account @mfram's point, the question in the original post is about making two volumes, one for the operating system and one as a workspace.

What, if anything, is gained by doing this?

 

[mfram]

I think the idea is that all of the accounts share the same "work" directory on the machine. It's convenient that the default behavior would be for the extra volume to show up as a drive on each user's desktop. And, it might be nice to set the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag to help deal with permissions issues on a shared work directory. Although you can set a folder to writable by everyone, you might still end up with permissions issues on individual files within the shared folder without setting the flag. You can't set that flag on the main "Macintosh HD" volume.

To be clear, each user account on the machine will still have their own user folder that isn't shared.

 

[F-Train]

@mfram Good point, I missed the last paragraph of the original post.

 

[kompaq]

I think the idea is that all of the accounts share the same "work" directory on the machine. It's convenient that the default behavior would be for the extra volume to show up as a drive on each user's desktop. And, it might be nice to set the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag to help deal with permissions issues on a shared work directory. Although you can set a folder to writable by everyone, you might still end up with permissions issues on individual files within the shared folder without setting the flag. You can't set that flag on the main "Macintosh HD" volume.

To be clear, each user account on the machine will still have their own user folder that isn't shared.

Thanks, I will do a volume only then. I never used this feature before but sounds way more convenient in many ways.