The Apple Silicon Mac Pro was ALMOST good....

I've had my M2 Ultra cheese graer Mac Pro for over 6 months now and I've absolutely loved it but I haven't loved it because it's a Mac Pro in fact as per my initial review of this thing it is indistinguishable from the Mac Studio in terms of performance the only benefit that you can really get from this Mac Pro is expansion if you need or want PCI E cards this thing has you covered it's just absolutely overflowing with them but the problem is to get access to the Mac Pro platform is a $3,000 upcharge and the only aspect of this system that you can upgrade is the storage Apple sells first-party OEM storage upgrades and you can of course add more through pcie but the RAM CPU and GPU that's all baked onto the M2 Ultra s so so honestly this thing is a terrible deal but it was so close to being good and today I'm going to show you why because I am in need of more storage and the Mac Pro makes things super easy so let's get to upgrading right after our word from today's video sponsor today's 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more check out the links in the description below or search narwhal fro X Ultra on Google or Amazon a big thanks to narwhal for sponsoring today's video and now let's get back to it now when I bought my M2 ultrax Studio the only thing that I upgraded was to get that 76 core GP you I didn't touch the Ram or the storage because quite frankly with unified memory you don't need more than like 64 gigs anyway at least I don't and the storage I was just going to do later and that's the undeniable benefit of the Mac Pro I can sit here 7 months after I bought it and go hm my one tab SSD isn't really cutting it so I'm going to add 32 more terabytes so let me talk you through it first off I need some more background storage for old video and project files so that's going to be courtesy of two 12 tbte hard drives and we're going to install them with this guy which is actually the hard drive cage that was sold as an accessory for the 2019 Mac Pro but apparently this still works so I bought one on eBay for 200 bucks and we're going to see if we can get it working but of course the big deal here is SSD storage which is where I edit all of my videos and right now I'm mainly using this which is a 2 tbte nvme SSD in a very fast Thunderbolt enclosure now when we run a disc speed test Apple's internal SSD is of course the fastest at 5 or 6 GB per second now for an external SSD this thing is pretty darn quick it'll do 2.5 GB per second read right which is very impressive and if I didn't have a Mac Pro this is probably about the best I could do over Thunderbolt but fortunately I do have a Mac Pro which means I can install two 4 tbte nvme ssds in this pcie Riser card and that should allow us to create an 8 tbte Ultra fast pcie raid array of ssds and this is the only Apple silicon device that will let you do that now if you go through Apple to try to get 8 terab in your Apple silicon Mac you're going to find that that costs more than $22,000 in most cases but for this upgrade the adapter and the ssds combined came in at about $500 and if you're thinking wow that sounds pretty appealing what a great reason to buy the Mac Pro I'll stop you right there because as I mentioned at the very beginning of this video Apple charges a $3,000 premium just to get the Mac Pro so before I've even started this whole video is kind of a moot point I could have bought a Mac Studio with the same exact s so the same exact performance and 8 TBT built into it from Apple even with their extortionate pricing and it would still be less expensive than this but we're going to do it anyway cuz I don't care that's a big boy I got to say this has to be one of the laziest product adaptations Apple's ever done there's so much blank space on the PCB it it's kind of hilarious but anyway let's start with the upgrades here now my promise j2i hard drive enclosure actually came with an 8 tbte in it which I believe is what it shipped with so we'll go ahead and remove that so I think all we have to do is take off this little retaining plate and then it's just going to slide right in oh that's so easy all right 24 tabt loaded up let's put her in okay I may have installed one of the hard drives upside down but in my defense I did not know that okay now we're all good and man that was easy to do and look at how sturdy and clean that looks I like it let's do the ssds and this honestly is even easier just put the ssds in the slot and screw them down that's it normally when I make mac upgrade videos I have to show you like a whole tutorial but not here cuz it's just obvious oh I want to take off one of these pcie plates well I'll just unscrew this thing and then I'll take out a slot unlock it put in the SSD and lock it and gosh if this Mac Pro chassis isn't the best design gosh dang ATX is case I've ever ever seen in my life and that's it we're done that's an upgraded 32 tab of storage just plopped in this Mac Pro in about 7 minutes let's go test it out shall we okay so about that slight issue it's now the next day and as it turns out I was a bit of a fool and I expected that Apple would support pcie Lane bifurcation and would make it super easy they have this utility here called expansion slot utility which I was like okay sure yeah that's going to just allow me to like configure whatever needs to be done but of course this is Apple they don't like to play by the rules so it doesn't work basically we can only detect one of the nvme drives uh so bit of a bummer probably should have done more research but I do just happen to have another just standard like $10 nvme pcie thing so I'm just going to split it into two I've got like 78 million pcie Lanes anyway so we'll just go put one of the ssds over here raid them together and we should be good to go now see me personally I would argue that it's a little bit silly to have an $8,000 Mac Pro like this who let's be honest main reason for existing is PCI Lanes would just not support that feature like what am I paying for here exactly but look it is what it is I've got plenty of pcie lanes and I've got plenty of adapters so we're just going to call it a day and work with what we got now let's get into dis utility here and we can see our drives showing up now I've got these four Toshiba drives that are in my existing rate array and now we have two new 12 tbte and two new 4 tbte oh my God there's so much storage connected to this Mac Pro it's ridiculous give me more gigabytes all right so we'll go to file and then raid assistant and I'm just going to do striped so we'll grab our two hard drives first and what should we call them Bert I like like that yay Bert 24 terabytes available and then we'll make Ernie 8 terabytes all right so now let's see how fast Ernie and Bert are I'm going to start with Bert because I'm curious to see what these internal RAID hard drives are going to do okay so it's a little faster than my external drive which is about 300 megabytes per second so that's pretty nice but obviously this is still pretty slow now Ernie on the other hand I do expect to be at least decently fast oh yeah let's go Ernie that's just as fast as Apple's internal ssds and I could definitely get this faster this is kind of just like a cheap and quick solution but for 500 bucks the fact that we're matching Apple's internal SSD with just some random ssds on Amazon and pcie adapters that was $500 total yeah I'm pretty happy with this but the unfortunate truth of the situ ation is well I'm not maxing out this Mac Pro by any means I couldn't achieve these types of speeds on any other Apple silicon Mac because the fastest you're probably going to be able to find for an external enclosure is about 3,000 megabytes per second but the issue is to get into the Mac Pro as I have it spec with a 76 core GPU 64 gigs and 1 tab of storage that's $88,000 I could buy a Max studio also Max it out with the same GPU also give it 128 GB of RAM and go all the way to 8 terab of storage for the same price now the benefit to the Mac Pro is obvious because I've already put more than 8 terabytes in it and I could just keep adding pcie ssds until the cows come home if money is No Object you can put dozens of terabytes in this Mac Pro but it's so expensive just to have the option to do it that it's just not financially responsible to do right now on eBay there really isn't a market for used or discounted 2023 Mac Pros so only time will tell whether the Mac Pro ends up becoming a better value in the future so in a couple of years as the prices start to come down on these I could definitely see them being appealing on the secondhand Market but really the story here is just what a wasted opportunity I was looking forward to an Apple silicon Mac Pro ever since WWDC of 2020 when they announced that Apple silicon was going to happen I thought hey the Mac Pro is Apple's ultimate computer surely they're not just going to phone it in but then they phoned it in and what we're left with is this incredible piece of engineering with apple silicon kind of like shoved into it I honestly wish Apple would just combine the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro into one perfect little machine make it just a little bit bigger than the Mac Studio but give it one or two pcie lanes so that you can add extra storage or some expansion if you need it and allow you to buy first party storage upgrades from Apple like you can for this Mac Pro I think a device like that would be a one-size fits-all anyways that's just my two cents I am very happy to be able to use my super fast nvme ssds even if I definitely got ripped off to get here so I'm very curious to hear what you guys think let me know down in the comments below and of course be sure to like if you enjoyed this video And subscribe for more and with that I will see you guys in the next [Music] one

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 73,205

Keywords: apple, mac, upgrade, ssd, hdd, Mac pro, apple silicon, repair, right to repair

Id: SDtHEcYgkH0

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2024