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Hi everyone! I've just treated myself to a used Mac Mini with some oomph having bumped along for 6 years with a £50 Dell Optiplex tower Mountain Lion Hackintosh. Did a great job with plenty of RAM and a fast 2nd hard drive for audio.

So I've now got a late 2012 Mac Mini i7 Quad Core with 16GB RAM, a 256GB Solid State system drive and a 2nd 1TB solid state drive which I will dedicate to storage on one partition and audio recording on the other partition. I'm running High Sierra, Logic X and Reason 10 (intro version) and don't have plans to upgrade to Catalina. It's a very fast little setup and should meet my requirements

Could someone tell me if the 2nd Hard Drive format (for audio) is particularly important? Currently, the system SSD is APFS format but the storage/audio SSD drive is Mac Extended (Journaled).

Should I also make the 2nd SSD APFS format as well or will it make no difference to the audio/sample streaming performance?

Thanks in advance!

Marc

If your main OS drive in on APFS, there's no reason for them all not to be.

Larry Mal wrote: ↑

Wed May 13, 2020 9:22 am

If your main OS drive in on APFS, there's no reason for them all not to be.

Thanks for the clarification! I'm really happy with my 'new' computer - it's pretty damn quick considering it's an 8 year old specification.

Yeah, I just bought a new video card today to get a couple more years out of my 2010 Mac Pro. I want to be able to run the latest Logic but don't want to be made obsolete by Apple's bullshit. Glad your computer is working well!

Larry Mal wrote: ↑

Wed May 13, 2020 1:50 pm

Yeah, I just bought a new video card today to get a couple more years out of my 2010 Mac Pro. I want to be able to run the latest Logic but don't want to be made obsolete by Apple's bullshit. Glad your computer is working well!

Hi Larry I know there are a couple of workarounds to get later versions of OSX on older machines. You can update the firmware on Mac Pro’s so it shows as a later model. The other option is a utility that creates a patched USB bootable install stick that allows High Sierra onto machines that are not recognised due to planned obsolescence BS.

Thanks Marc- I do have a USB stick that should install Catalina on my Mac Pro. The one from this guy, so this seems likely to work.

The holdup is that he tells us that the stock video card will run like a dog on Catalina, so I bought another one that can handle Metal and the other graphic acceleration.

I would like to get a couple more years out of my Mac Pro, you know? I will just move to either a Hackintosh or a Mac Mini down the road, but I sure don't want to have my hand forced by Apple and their artificial obsolescence.

As time goes by, I learn to dislike that company more and more. Firstly, I hate the new OS every year that really only serves as a way to make older machines obsolete before they actually quit working. I hate the endless security that they keep baking into the OS which makes the user experience worse. I hate the incredible expense. I hate the vision of the company now.

If it wasn't for Logic, I would just go to Windows, and I still might. But Windows 10 sucks, also, although I am starting to feel that Microsoft is a company that cares a lot more about their customers than Apple does.

I’d be curious about doing something similar with my 2014 Mac Pro, but I’m worried that some hardware somewhere will drag it down (like the video card).

I’ve worked on pc’s and changed out almost all of the hardware, but not a laptop or macs, so I’d be a little hesitant about trying to swap much out. And I definitely don’t want to brick my computer.