Blackmagic Forum

How functional is the Apple Mac Mini M2 Pro with 16Gb RAM for DVR?
Anyone using it?

My wife is using the MB in that config. While she's mainly doing other artwork, it's quite OK for editing and light grading of video in DR.
For complex tasks the RAM is too low. It will not crash, but get very slow and ruin its SSD in the long run.

Uli Plank wrote:...For complex tasks the RAM is too low. It will not crash, but get very slow and ruin its SSD in the long run.

Uli, is that just a theoretical possibility, or have Mac users actually encountered this on the *internal* Mac SSD? I have a 2017 iMac 27 with 32 GB RAM and a 2 TB internal SSD. I've used it heavily with Resolve for the past eight years, but DriveDx shows 96% lifetime remaining on the internal SSD.

If you are worried about the longevity of the internal SSD it is a simple matter to get an NVMe in a Thunderbolt enclosure and boot from that.

I doubt that your iMac would get into massive swapping, Joe, since it has separate VRAM.
But the M2 with its integrated memory will for complex tasks. Of course, an external boot SSD as suggested by Ian is a solution.
You can watch with Apple's Activity Monitor if your machine resorts to swapping.

joema4 wrote:

Uli Plank wrote:...For complex tasks the RAM is too low. It will not crash, but get very slow and ruin its SSD in the long run.

Uli, is that just a theoretical possibility, or have Mac users actually encountered this on the *internal* Mac SSD? I have a 2017 iMac 27 with 32 GB RAM and a 2 TB internal SSD. I've used it heavily with Resolve for the past eight years, but DriveDx shows 96% lifetime remaining on the internal SSD.

Joe, I am using the 2017 iMac Pro but with 64gb RAM and 2x Vega 56 gpu with 8gb vram each and I don’t see that affecting my 1Tb “internal” SSD as much. Uli is correct that with the unified memory architecture in the Apple Silicon, more RAM would be better to reduce the amount of swapping which affects the longevity of the SSD.

Recently on the Apple forums someone claimed they had bought a used M2 MacBook with 83% life expectancy according to DriveDX.

Within weeks it was down to 81% and they were rightly worried.

I suggested that it was either due to their possible massive use or something like the Spotlight bug creating huge writes but they never replied so the jury is still out.

My solution as mentioned earlier was a bootable external back in 2023 on my base M2 Mac mini. I chose a cheap 1TB SATA SSD in a USB 3.0 enclosure at a total cost of £60.

The write speed of the SSD was an appalling 365MB/s yet when using the mini I could not tell the difference and GeekBench scores were almost identical. Only when measuring render and export times did I discover there was a less than 5% hit.

A year later I couldn't resist seeing what a 1TB NVMe in a Thunderbolt enclosure could do. That drive was actually faster than the internal (256GB) but the user experience was no different although the render speeds were now as fast (or faster) than the internal.

However, this new Thunderbolt drive was running Sequoia and a DriveDX test after a few weeks showed that it was inexplicably writing early a terabyte a week although it was not appearing on the drive. It seemed that as soon as these mysterious writes were made, they were instantly being deleted so there was no sign that it was happening until I used DriveDX.

The culprit (shown in Activity Monitor) was Spotlight and the mds_stores and the solution was to completely disable Spotlight and prevent it from writing to any attached drive.

My new base model M4 mini with a 2TB Thunderbolt drive seems to be immune to the Spotlight problem.

The M4 Mac mini is not critical in this respect anyway, since you can actually change the internal SSD, even upgrading its size. A bit fiddly and nothing I'd recommend during warranty period, but it works.

Hi there,

Sorry for the short pop-up but what do you mean by "you can change the internal SSD" Uli ?

There are third party SSDs made for it at a quarter the price Apple charges but opening up the M4 and navigating through all the internal bits is not for the faint hearted and is quite likely to end up with you bricking your Mac.

There is no guarantee to the quality of these third party SSDs so it is easier, cheaper and safer to use an external.

The "real world" performance is just as good and should the mini ever die or be sold you can keep the SSD to use in your next computer.

INBRO-VIDEO wrote:There are third party SSDs made for it at a quarter the price Apple charges but opening up the M4 and navigating through all the internal bits is not for the faint hearted and is quite likely to end up with you bricking your Mac.

Ah ok... Thx Ian, I knew that actually...
I thought something "new" was to be expected in the field of HD replacements...
Thx anyway

Swapping will ruin your ssd the same way you are doing it while writing on you ssd, nothing more, nothing less, that is just a "myth" that swapping will kill your ssd, yes it will, but at the same way you are doing it while writing on them. Unless you are swapping 50-100GB a day, you will be good for years and years, its most likely that ssd controller will fail then the ssd.. There are standards even for manufacturing ssd, more on that here https://www.jedec.org/
SSD have their "maximum" Terabytes to be written (TBW), they are degrading over time and loose their capacity to store data, and after reaching guaranteed TBW there is no guarantee that they will store data correctly and can fail. But we are talking about 300TBW-5000TBW, more capable the ssd more TBW it should have, it depends of manufacturer, apple doesn't share TBW of their ssd but probably the smallest one (256GB) are not under 100TBW, but that is just a speculation.

Get more RAM for your system to be fast and reliable, if it occasionally swap it is not so problematic for your ssd as it is for your workflow and experience on fast machines, swapping will slow you up a lot. Why would one buy a latest apple silicon machine with minimum RAM for workflow that need a lot of ram and ruin all that speed that they have?
More RAM, better experience and faster you will make your work done. Don't save money on ram, save it on ssd if necessary.

The right question should be, how swapping will ruin my experience, not ssd..

INBRO-VIDEO wrote:Recently on the Apple forums someone claimed they had bought a used M2 MacBook with 83% life expectancy according to DriveDX.

Was that SSD life expectancy or battery life expectancy? The only used M2 MacBook I see on any forum mentioning similar numbers was talking about battery life.

I think some of those accounts were not referring to the internal Mac SSD (which has no published TBW spec) and were using deduced write numbers from Activity Monitor, not the statistics returned from the smartmontools smartctl command.

That command not only returns data units written, but also available spare %, available spare threshold %, and percentage used %. If the SSD was wearing abnormally fast, all those numbers would move in some relationship. There is always some doubt about whether the Activity Monitor I/O numbers are cached or not. The smartctl numbers show non-cached I/Os.

There were apparently some smartctl bugs on M1 Macs around 2021 that reported artificially high numbers, and frantic complaints about those, but I think that was fixed by a MacOS update.

There were a bunch of posts around 2021 where early M1 owners were freaking out that alleged high I/O numbers were going to soon wear out their internal SSD. However we're now four years after that, and I haven't seen any of them post that their M1 Macs died due to a worn-out SSD.

If there is any doubt about smartctl or DriveDx, a developer wrote a simple command-line utility called smartTBW which bypasses smartctl and obtains the data directly from low-level MacOS data. Due to past concerns about possible inaccuracy from smartctl, this would be a good method to verify the SSD data:
https://github.com/jamesdbailey/smartTBW

On MacOS, the smartctl utility is available through Homebrew: https://brew.sh

None of this changes the valid point that it's unwise to configure a Mac with a tiny internal SSD and minimum RAM, especially with (a) Resolve and (b) Unified Memory design. But I don't think some of those early SSD durability concerns were ever verified, yet people are still talking about the problem today as if it were.

This was the post Joe and I see now that it was an M1 MBP.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/25 ... dest_first

While you may get quite a bit of extra throughput when rendering many hours of a project too massive for your RAM, the main point will be speed.
To get back to the initial question: if you have a more beefy machine at your home base and this is just for the road, you should be fine. As your only machine, I'd definitely get more RAM, even if these Mx laptops are impressive regarding stability with limited RAM. When a separate GPU is getting short of VRAM, rendering will simply stop.