The OWC RocketYard Blog has a really interesting article on how the new M1 Macs actually have 2 thunderbolt busses even though they only have 2 ports. This is unlike previous Thunderbolt macs which had 4 thunderbolt ports, but only 2 busses, with 2 ports split on each bus. The new M1 Macs have only 2 ports but 2 busses, and with the new ability to use USB4 Hubs to split thunderbolt you can have the more ports.
Woohooo! Softraid has publicly release it’s SoftRaid 6 beta with support for Big Sur and M1 Macs! This is huge news, as I can never move to an operating system until SoftRaid supports it, as I can’t work without my RAID.
And it already has the Final Release of the SoftRaid Version 6 Driver included, so a RAID should be fully supported.
SoftRaid is mandatory for a RAID on a mac, so I could not be more happy about this.
And they are working on M1 support, but it obviously couldn’t be out with development Macs as they didn’t include thunderbolt ports, so you couldn’t test thunderbolt connectivity, but are working on it now.
AppleInsider has an article on how the new M1 Macs in fact support USB 4, and not just Thunderbolt 3. I hadn’t realized this at all, but it makes sense as it is new open standard, but amazing that it is before Intel managed to release it. They do need to add more ports though, 2 ports on the laptops when it includes charging is nuts. I have problems with only 4 thunderbolt 3 ports on my imac pro as is.
I still hope for external graphics card support in the MacPro, but think it is less and less likely that will happen, but maybe I will pleasantly surprised. And if not just how much memory will a pro need to run the graphics and system memory? And it won’t be expandable, you are stuck with what you buy.
Apple has released it’s first 3 Macs with the M1 chip it is designing itself making for the 2nd processor transition in the history of the mac and the first ARM based Macs, now on the same platform as the ipad and iPhone.
Apple’s stats make it look really fast and the first benchmarks make it a very impressive machine and 3 of the fastest macs apple has every released.
Of course for now it is useless to me as Adobe software does not yet run or at least run well under Rosetta. Still the performance of Final Cut Pro sounds impressive and I love that the latest beta of DaVinci Resolve 17.1 runs on M1 Macs already. And Adobe has a beta of Photoshop out as well.
What scares me is the single thunderbolt channel and only 2 ports and the fact that it can’t run an external graphic card even with it’s thunderbolt port.
And what is even scarier for me is that the M1 shares it’s memory between the graphics card and the onboard memory. So you had better get the 16GB because you are sharing them with the video processing. If this continues you will need to really get more RAM on high end machines (which hopefully won’t top out at 16GB as the current machines do.
Still the processors do have impressive performance already so the higher end version will likely be very impressive.
And it is amazing that basically the MacBook Air is only different in a single GPU core being disabled, and the MacBook Pro and Mini having fans to cool the system down.
I look forward to what the truly pro Apple M1 Machines will look like, but I don’t look forward to the software update cost that will go along with it, and the software that will break and end up going by the wayside.
OK, this is an issue that has been bugging me for a while, and I would really love to hear an explanation for the behavior of Premiere Pro.
The graphic above shows the sort order of my bins, I am sorting by Media Start so I can merge my audio and video using the merge clips function.
This is an image of my bin with the 2 clips selected that I am going to merge in a bin sorted by Media Start.
This is the same bin, now showing the merged clip as soon as I have merged the clips. The bin is still sorted by Media Start, and the Media start of the new clip is 11:39:19:19, so why does it move to the top of the bin (well almost the top, under the folder in the bin) as soon as it is created. Why isn’t in the sort order? And if you close the bin and re-open it, or create a new file, that file then moves into the sort order of the bin, but when created it jumps to the top of the bin. WHAT IS GOING ON?
Here is another case.
Here I have the files sorted by Name, and I have a version B of a file that I want to update to be the version 12, so I change the name and date of the file to be after that of V11.
The file is renamed, and the folder is still sorted by name, but the file is not sorting by name. What the hell is going on?
When using Apple’s Music, formerly iTunes to import music, why does it automatically play what you are importing? There used to be a choice in iTunes to keep it from doing this, but Apple purposely removed this feature. So now every time you import something it automatically plays that, even if you are already playing something else.
Now I don’t know about you, but importing and wanting to play are seperate things, and I would always rather chose to hit play than to have auto-play.
Why does this feature even exist? And it gets ridiculous when importing downloads of multi-disc albums, when it plays some random track off all 4 discs, starting one, then another, then another, then another.
I know apple doesn’t want me to own any of my own music anymore unless I buy it from them or stream it from them, but I don’t buy any music from them, and I wish they would have a more hands off approach.
A huge annoyance that I have run into in Catalina, is a major inconsistency of the Finder’s Save Dialogue box. In previous OS’s when I saved a file, the name of the file was always selected when the window popped up. This window shows what I mean.
I can’t understand why sometimes the text is selected and sometimes it isn’t. This seems totally random, and I can’t figure out why it happens.
I have posted about it at the Apple community forums, though I don’t expect to hear a response.
So I talked to Other World Computing and they sent me a replacement. I screwed up though, I went by the Thunderbolt id in softraid, but when i pulled a drive the id numbers changed, so I realized I didn’t know if I had the drive that was going offline. When I put the 4th drive back in (with no changes to the other drives) it took 2 days to re-sink the drives, with nary a thing to tell me how long it would take. I decided to back up my raid as quickly as I could. And when they came back they came back I wasn’t dropping a drive again, but now I was nervous.
So I upgraded my RAID from 2 tb drives to 12 tb and reformatted. I was quite surprised as when I formatted the 4 2 tb drives to make it RAID 5 and it took all of 30 seconds. This apposed to when I made the 6 TB raid, which just a couple of years ago took 4 days, which makes me wonder if there wasn’t an issue on one of the 2 TB drives to begin with. As the 36 RAID 5 took 30 seconds to create.
And I worry again because on the first night after formatting one if the drives went offline. Now it cane back with a restart, but it makes me worry that the housing was the issue all along, though OWC hasn’t responded to my further issues.
So after taking the time to do the upgrade on the firmware on my OWC Thunderbay as I saw in this post on their forums, and shutting down my computer over the night, I restarted and one of the drives disappeared.
