Menu
What's new
By:
Filters

Mac Studio m2, Thunderbolt case+nvme and still sample streaming issues :(

gsilbers said:

Im trying to figure out the bottle neck or issue with my Mac Studio m2 ultra 128gb ram.​

I have all orchestral samples in one 4tb ssd drive (Crucial p3 4tb pcie gen3 and m2 up to 3500mb/s) on a
thunderbolt 3enclosure (sabrent) 1500mb/s
and another Crucial with a usb3.2 for other samples.
A regular SSD 4tb drive (sata) for audio drive.

I started doing an orchestral only project and suddenly logic is choking.
And I dont know if its the one core cpu spike or its the sample streaming drive.
Meters dont show much. it all seems fine but notice when theres more parts playing together logic stops.

here are the ssd and enclosure.


Should those work fine for a score and streaming normal Kontakt and opus stuff?

I keep seeing posts about the speed of drives but I thought these would-be more than good enough.
Click to expand...
Sounds to me like a Logic issue. I have the same machine and haven’t had issues with Cubase. I don’t think the sample drives have anything to do with it. How many tracks?

I have found the buffer sweet spot to be 192-256.

Oddly enough the only time I hear about issues on M2 are from Logic users. Cubase seems better optimized, which is kinda funny.
 
thanks y'all.

It seems it's not a specific drive. Sometimes everything slows down to a crawl for some reason.
I tested each drive several times and the speed was fine but sometimes, randomly, in some of the checks, speed wouldn't pass like 300mb/s and once even pass 5mb.
im not seeing anything out of place in the Activity monitor when these crawls happen.

Im checking to see background processes like dropbox and backups.
 
David Kudell said:
Sounds to me like a Logic issue. I have the same machine and haven’t had issues with Cubase. I don’t think the sample drives have anything to do with it. How many tracks?
Click to expand...
I use Logic, and a fairly similar set up. I don't think it's a Logic issue either, since I haven't had this issue.
 
khollister said:
I have one coming tomorrow for a 8TB Inland NVMe. I am very skeptical of the "polycarbonate housing for heat dissipation" claim. I plan to just stick some rubber feet on the aluminum and run it naked. Thermodynamics is pretty clear - adding an insulator over a thermally conductive material (aluminum) isn't going to dissipate better.

I have one of the OWC ones on order but the ship date keeps getting bumped.
Click to expand...
Update - installed my Inland PCIe 4 8TB blade in the Satechi case. The bottom line is while very fast cold (3100+ write, 2900+ read), it throttles badly on sustained writes due to heat. This sucker runs 51C at idle (!) and hit up to 80C during a 3TB write. The temp ramps up pretty fast too. The reported max limit by DriveDX is 89C. The bare aluminum case is quite hot to the touch when working hard. so the thermal pad and case are working but since the 8TB blades are double sided, there is no heat sinking on the bottom side, only the top. The write speed went from 3100 cold down to 300 towards the end.

I have one of the new OWC cases on order and suspect it may fare a bit better due to the extensive heat sinking, but double sided drives are going to be little toasters in these type of cases.

I installed the plastic covers and didn't see a huge difference in temps (2-3C at idle).
 
Last edited:
I tried the OWC Express 4M2. The good news: the fan is very quiet. The bad news, I'm only getting around 700 per drive on that, which is really no faster than my Thunderbay SATA drives. The enclosure promises speeds up to 2800, and 4x700=2800, I suppose. Just wondering for those of you who have the Express 4M2 if this is normal for that enclosure. (It's not a big deal since it's plenty fast for streaming samples.) Still, hoping for Thunderbolt 4, USB4 mutlibay enclosures that will be able to get somewhat more speed.
 
jbuhler said:
I tried the OWC Express 4M2. The good news: the fan is very quiet. The bad news, I'm only getting around 700 per drive on that, which is really no faster than my Thunderbay SATA drives. The enclosure promises speeds up to 2800, and 4x700=2800, I suppose. Just wondering for those of you who have the Express 4M2 if this is normal for that enclosure. (It's not a big deal since it's plenty fast for streaming samples.) Still, hoping for Thunderbolt 4, USB4 mutlibay enclosures that will be able to get somewhat more speed.
Click to expand...
All of these TB multi-drive enclosures use only 1 PCIe lane per drive, hence the SATA speed. It makes sense because the TB port is limited to 2500-2800 MBs, so 4x700 ... Having 4 drive controllers with more bandwidth would be a waste. These boxes are really designed for RAID, not JBOD.

If you want more speed per drive simultaneously, you have to use individual enclosures and TB/USB4 ports with dedicated busses. The Apple Silicon chips have a dedicated TB bus for each port, unlike the Intel Macs.

The only other option is a 16 lane PCIe NVMe card in a Mac Pro or to RAID the drives.
 
JohnG said:
I don't mean to state the obvious, but have you tried using a bigger buffer? Orchestral music as you know is sometimes tremendously demanding.
Click to expand...
thanks, I tried several sizes but it seems the issue is a little bigger. I was able to grab a snapshot of the drive going from very slow to very fast. But the issue is across several drives. Suddenly they choke for some reason for a moment. ITs after im doing some tasks, nothing too evolved or anything that would make it choke. The one core logic cpu spikes a lot , in Kontakt the "disk" goes red (top right).
So I think it's some issue related to something else. I think it might be some issues with permissions as some files in the finder suddenly take some time to go from trans lucid to normal when I open a window. Tried disk utility fixes but same.

So I just upgrades to Sonoma to see if it fixed things and still noticed the issue.... but just now finder just crapped out and won't start after several restarts. ...
oh apple..


Screenshot 2024-04-26 at 3.53.55 PM.png
 
gsilbers said:
thanks, I tried several sizes but it seems the issue is a little bigger. I was able to grab a snapshot of the drive going from very slow to very fast. But the issue is across several drives. Suddenly they choke for some reason for a moment. ITs after im doing some tasks, nothing too evolved or anything that would make it choke. The one core logic cpu spikes a lot , in Kontakt the "disk" goes red (top right).
So I think it's some issue related to something else. I think it might be some issues with permissions as some files in the finder suddenly take some time to go from trans lucid to normal when I open a window. Tried disk utility fixes but same.

So I just upgrades to Sonoma to see if it fixed things and still noticed the issue.... but just now finder just crapped out and won't start after several restarts. ...
oh apple..


Screenshot 2024-04-26 at 3.53.55 PM.png
Click to expand...
If this happens over multiple drives it doesn't sound like it's an issue with the external SSDs themsveles.

If this was my machine I would try to start from scratch. Delete the internal SSD and reinstall macOS from an external USB. Then try testing before installing anything.

Here are the instructions to create a bootable macOS installer. Basically you download macOS from the App Store, connect an external USB drive or stick, then run a Terminal command.

If the machine still behaves like this I would start worrying about a hardware issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom