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❔ What computer is your Mac Studio replacing? ❔
- Thread starter sonicthehedgefrog
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Not mine but my wife is replacing her dead (logic board) 2017 5k iMac with a base Mac Studio with 1TB SSD. She's been using a 2020 13" i5 Macbook Pro for the last 18 months or so.
What do you plan on doing with that 2070 Super?
Custom Built X99 Hackintosh -> 2020 M1 Mac mini 16 GB/512 GB -> Mac Studio M1 Max Base Model
First off, the X99 Hackintosh became frustrating to maintain and had stability issues. After WWDC 2020, I decided to make it into a VMWare ESXi server.
2020 M1 Mac mini was the eventual replacement for the home office and have a machine for development that uses Apple Silicon. However, 16 GB is not enough since I constantly hit little over 50% memory pressure. This is not an issue on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16. I replaced it with the base M1 Max Mac Studio and replaced the 2014 Mac mini I used since 2015 as a home server with the M1 Mac mini since it's hitting 7 years old and will loose OS support.
First off, the X99 Hackintosh became frustrating to maintain and had stability issues. After WWDC 2020, I decided to make it into a VMWare ESXi server.
2020 M1 Mac mini was the eventual replacement for the home office and have a machine for development that uses Apple Silicon. However, 16 GB is not enough since I constantly hit little over 50% memory pressure. This is not an issue on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16. I replaced it with the base M1 Max Mac Studio and replaced the 2014 Mac mini I used since 2015 as a home server with the M1 Mac mini since it's hitting 7 years old and will loose OS support.
Not quite sure yet. I’ll have to see if I still have a use or need for that PC.
Early 2009 Mac Pro with almost everything inside upgraded at least once.
Was late to the party so mine won't arrive until mid-June. It's going to replace my Windows Server, or at least I will try and see how it goes within the 14 day return period. My Windows Server has a RAID1+0 array with 8x 10TB hard drives and like half of them are showing yellow warnings as a result of wear. It has 2x Samsung 860 Pro 1TB SSD's as cache and a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe as OS drive. My server is rather decent with a Asus X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen 3900X CPU, Zotac GeForce 1070 Ti and 32GB 3733MHz DDR4 RAM.
Currently running Windows Server 2022 hosting my Plex Server, torrent server and running 3x Ubuntu Server installations in Hyper-V, one for Unifi-Controller, one for HomeBridge and one as a TimeMachine Backup server.
It's the situation regarding the hard drives that makes me want to replace it. These 10TB hard drives are slow and expensive and doesn't seem to last all that long. I no longer have any need for such a massive dedicated server. The time where I have 20TB+ of TV-series and movies locally on my Plex Server is overdue as we mostly stream using Netflix, Disney+ etc these days. I still need it as some services have horrible quality (HBO Max for instance in my country) and there are still content that is just not available via decent streaming services.
My original plan was to opt for the Mac Studio with M1 Max baseline, upping the memory to 64GB RAM and upping the internal storage to 1TB and add 4x Samsung T7 2TB USB3.1 SSD's for additional storage. But after reading how the Apple Silicon seems to fair when it comes to external storage via USB and whatnot I decided to go all crazy and opt for the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra baseline and upping the internal storage to 8TB.. It's the same price per TB storage when going for the 8TB option as it would have cost me to get 8TB via 4x Samsung X5 2TB NVMe Thunderbolt external drives so why not have it internal as it's much faster and will be far less messy. This will also allow me to add up to 6x Thunderbolt 3/4 external NVMe drives down the line if additional storage is needed.
The big question is wether I'm actually able to run everything I want on Apple Silicon with macOS. I've done some research and it seems like Plex Server and Homebridge will run just fine directly on macOS on Apple Silicon. Currently Plex will have to run under Rosetta2, but there is a Apple M1 native version releasing soon. Homebridge is supposedly able to run just fine directly on macOS without the need of a virtual installation via VMware Fusion or Parallels. Unifi-Controller do require me to run Ubuntu Server for ARM it seems, but I might just move the Unifi-Controller to a Unifi Cloud Key Gen.2 instead. Will just have to test it out within the 14 day return period and see how it goes.
One massive benefit of moving from my dedicated Windows Server to the Mac Studio is sized and efficiency. My server is enormous, and my external array of 8x 10TB 3,5 inch hard drives is enormous and it's not efficient at all. It creates a lot of heat and drains a lot of power. The Ryzen CPU is decent when it comes to efficiency, but everything else not so much. The Apple M1 Ultra will have something like 1/5 of the power usage and thus create like 1/5 of the heat. The fact that it will be so small it something the wife is really happy about as well.
Only reason for me to change for M1 Max baseline to M1 Ultra baseline is futureproofing. Currently VMware Fusion is only in BETA/Preview, and I don't think Parallels has great support for Apple Silicon yet either. But linux server distros are already pushing for becoming fully ARM native and I suspect that within 1-2 years this Mac Studio would be a perfect server to run X amount of ARM native virtual machines and having 16 high-performance cores, and 4 efficiency cores, 20 in total makes it a really flexible hypervisor server.
Currently running Windows Server 2022 hosting my Plex Server, torrent server and running 3x Ubuntu Server installations in Hyper-V, one for Unifi-Controller, one for HomeBridge and one as a TimeMachine Backup server.
It's the situation regarding the hard drives that makes me want to replace it. These 10TB hard drives are slow and expensive and doesn't seem to last all that long. I no longer have any need for such a massive dedicated server. The time where I have 20TB+ of TV-series and movies locally on my Plex Server is overdue as we mostly stream using Netflix, Disney+ etc these days. I still need it as some services have horrible quality (HBO Max for instance in my country) and there are still content that is just not available via decent streaming services.
My original plan was to opt for the Mac Studio with M1 Max baseline, upping the memory to 64GB RAM and upping the internal storage to 1TB and add 4x Samsung T7 2TB USB3.1 SSD's for additional storage. But after reading how the Apple Silicon seems to fair when it comes to external storage via USB and whatnot I decided to go all crazy and opt for the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra baseline and upping the internal storage to 8TB.. It's the same price per TB storage when going for the 8TB option as it would have cost me to get 8TB via 4x Samsung X5 2TB NVMe Thunderbolt external drives so why not have it internal as it's much faster and will be far less messy. This will also allow me to add up to 6x Thunderbolt 3/4 external NVMe drives down the line if additional storage is needed.
The big question is wether I'm actually able to run everything I want on Apple Silicon with macOS. I've done some research and it seems like Plex Server and Homebridge will run just fine directly on macOS on Apple Silicon. Currently Plex will have to run under Rosetta2, but there is a Apple M1 native version releasing soon. Homebridge is supposedly able to run just fine directly on macOS without the need of a virtual installation via VMware Fusion or Parallels. Unifi-Controller do require me to run Ubuntu Server for ARM it seems, but I might just move the Unifi-Controller to a Unifi Cloud Key Gen.2 instead. Will just have to test it out within the 14 day return period and see how it goes.
One massive benefit of moving from my dedicated Windows Server to the Mac Studio is sized and efficiency. My server is enormous, and my external array of 8x 10TB 3,5 inch hard drives is enormous and it's not efficient at all. It creates a lot of heat and drains a lot of power. The Ryzen CPU is decent when it comes to efficiency, but everything else not so much. The Apple M1 Ultra will have something like 1/5 of the power usage and thus create like 1/5 of the heat. The fact that it will be so small it something the wife is really happy about as well.
Only reason for me to change for M1 Max baseline to M1 Ultra baseline is futureproofing. Currently VMware Fusion is only in BETA/Preview, and I don't think Parallels has great support for Apple Silicon yet either. But linux server distros are already pushing for becoming fully ARM native and I suspect that within 1-2 years this Mac Studio would be a perfect server to run X amount of ARM native virtual machines and having 16 high-performance cores, and 4 efficiency cores, 20 in total makes it a really flexible hypervisor server.