As the Mac mini M2 I own has a builtin ssd soldered directly onto the system board, I Have moved my user folder on to an external SDD, in order to save wearing out the internal SSD in the Mac.
Reading online, I can see that they have an expected lifetime of about 5 years, and then R.I.P. Mac Mini
in my /Users/me is an Applications folder and I just had an idea…
Wouldn’t it be great if the Steinberg Download manager could define destination folders for both applications and sounds so we could save our expensive builtin nand SSD’s in the Mac we own ?
5 years is a rather short life expectancy for a pricey Apple product. I wouldn’t want to take the risk working on a project knowing EOL is neigh…
Hopefully, you have a reliable backup strategy in place @Don-Brock .
It’s the eternal Mac vs PC debate. With Mac, you pay extra and sacrifice flexibility and repairability to their walled garden ethos, and in return you get the best laptop hardware on the market, stellar customer support and painless hardware compatibility.
I like my Mac’s very much, it’s an idea, possible usable
If Cubase was running on Linux I would go there right away.
I base my thoughts on the higher wear of audio use, with lot’s of recording, editing and deleting, so even I slightly regret my 5 years of use statement, the idea remains the same:
the possibility to install all Steinberg stuff on an external drive
And here I was always under the impression that Raggae musicians were generally not into being too dramatic
There are numerous reasons to use secondary/external SSDs on any computer that has storage soldered onto the motherboard. And/or simply running out of room on the system disk is one of the very common one’s (even on Windows and Linux boxes, @inthevoid).
Reasons and techniques to do that are widely written about on the Interwebs, so the idea isn’t exactly brand new either.
Most modern and better music software that uses significant space (like sample libraries) allows for having those libraries on other storage devices. That’s also generally easy to find with simple web searching.
More ambitious users, who want to relocate folders to a different place for software that doesn’t make that easily configurable, there’s the technique of using “symbolic links”. But that needs to be done carefully.
One important consideration is, to ensure that the computer will still be usable, even when the external storage is disconnected. Making an otherwise unused spare administrator account, for emergency access only, is one technique.
And of course it’s important to ensure that the connection to external storage is rock solid and also as fast as one can afford. Cheap cables and/or low data rate USB cables can cause frustrations, depending on the specific use case.
All of those issues are widely written about and only a few web searches away.
Life experience: Never trust a computer, keep 3 backups.
Prob is the backup system for Cubase (non song) is a serious mashup/siltation from decades of non housekeeping…so I STRONLY urge you to keep serial BUs of those settings as (some) users spend a lot of time getting there tools and workshop (DAWs) efficient and customised)
More the point, we need a daw targeted OS…not office or consumer based OS.
eg
BeOS etc…that was so far ahead of its time…and they knew it
The lifetime of the SSD depends upon how it’s used. We have an M1 Mac Mini from 2020 that’s been used a minimum of 3 hours a day for 365 days a years over the past 6 years and it has no issues. That includes deleting and writing 40G+ to the internal drive every day. Apart from having backups which someone mentioned, you can look up online how to check the S.M.A.R.T. Status of the internal SSD to see if it has encountered any errors. Apple’s proprietary internal SSDs meet specific specs and use custom firmware so TRIM support, garbage collection, etc. work automatically with MacOS. Third party SSD’s won’t exactly replicate that even if you could swap one in. Those who know enough to build a hackintosh (Mac clone) can usually get those SSD maintenance functions to work, but it is not supported by Apple (risk of data corruption).
