Phantom Drives DUO Dual 2.5' USB-C Enclosure - Review

 My quest to find a dual enclosure to house two Sata SSDs at 10Gbps speed is still ongoing.

I reviewed OWC's Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini enclosure last week, and it didn't meet my expectations. Namely the speed of the RAID 0 array composed of the two 1TB SSDs is not faster than a single drive. It should reach higher, maybe not the advertised max of 980MB/s, but at least faster than the around 360MB/s of a single Crucial SSD.

Today I'm testing another dual 2.5' enclosure, the Phantom Drives DUO (enclosure only).

And similarly I am not getting near the advertised "Up to 1000MB/s Read and Write". Instead I get the same as with the OWC's Mercury, a paltry 360MB/s in Raid 0, be it hardware Raid or Apple Raid, no difference.

As single drives in the Phantom enclosure, I get the usual 350-360MB/s.

Either SSD, (A) or (B) delivers the expected speed.

Now this is two SSDs configured as Raid 0 (Apple software) with basically the same speed as a single SSD. Not expected, not good.

And this is the same two SSDs as Raid 0 (Phantom hardware), same crappy speed.

More weird is that the Phantom enclosure only appears as a 5Gbps device in System Report, even though it is connected to Thunderbolt 3 via USB-C. On the Phantom website it is clearly described as a 10Gbps enclosure.

I already returned the Mercury Mini, so unfortunately I cannot check how it's being recognized by System Report.

By comparison, OWC's Dual Drive Dock is recognized as a 10Gbps device. And its speed with the same two Crucial 1TB SSDs is slightly better than either the Phantom or the Mercury Mini, around 550MB/s.

So far that's the best speed I can get on the Mac mini M1 with an external Raid 0 composed of two 1TB Crucial Sata SSDs. It's still slower than it should be.

The best speed of all, 800-680MB/s, an expected speed for dual SSD Raid 0, is only achieved with the Sonnet PCIe card in the Mac Pro 5.1

Why can't I get this kind of speed with USB-C enclosures rated for 10Gbps connected via Thunderbolt 3 on the Mac Mini M1?

I don't get it. Any ideas? Please comment.

Adobe Hates You. If You Ever Cancel An Adobe App Install From CC App, You Will Be Stuck There For A Long Time

 This is so infuriating Adobe, I clicked to install Premiere and realized I needed to do something before I installed, so I clicked Cancel...

And Now all that CC App is showing is "Canceling". And it's not going away.

So stupid, so retarded. I bet no one even in-house testers never ever clicked Cancel on an install. Right? Never tested. If you had you would have seen this stupid situation.

What are we supposed to do Adobe? I've been waiting for 20min. already. Restarting CC App does nothing. I cannot Sign Out, it's greyed out.

OK, enough, I am uninstalling CC. Of course it too is stuck in Adobe nowhere land of stupid. Nothing is happening, great.

 Finally 5min. later it has been uninstalled.

Of course the installer is nowhere to be found having been removed from my download folder by Adobe, without asking for permission. Fine, I'll re-download the installer and re-install. 5 more minutes later, here we go installing Premiere again... Do not press Cancel!

Yeah, yeah, Apple Silicon, blah, blah. 

OK looks like it's happening, fingers crossed.

Adobe Creative Cloud App And Creative Cloud Web Do Not Show The Same Things, Why?

 If there is something I utterly dislike with software and SaaS UI and behavior, it's inconsistency. Adobe and Avid are champions of inconsistency.

Why Adobe do I have different things showing in my Creative Cloud App and on my Creative Cloud Web?

The CC subscription comes with 100GB of Cloud storage, great. This is what it looks like in the CC App (on Mac):

If you try to upload some media file from your computer to your storage on CC App, you get an error:

OK, so if you can only upload PSD AI or XD files to your CC storage, what's the point of this storage?

Well in fact you can upload any kind of file to your CC storage, only YOU CANNOT DO IT VIA CC APP. Instead you have to do it from CC Web. Why Adobe? WHY?

This is now what my Cloud Storage looks like on CC Web:

See how Your Files now contains 4 sub categories / tabs? These are generated automatically by Adobe by the way, I didn't make them.

So now we have: "Cloud Documents", "Published", "Synced Files" and "Mobile Creations". Much different from what we have in CC App, which is... Nothing.

THIS IS VERY CONFUSING ADOBE!

Now let's have a look at what's inside Synced Files:

Bingo! This is where the media files are, and this is where, using CC Web, (or your Local CC Folder), you can upload ANY file to your CC Cloud Storage, including any type of media.

It's also synced to your Local CC Files folder, which looks like this on my Mac:

So dropping files inside this local folder (and whatever folder/subfolder organisation you maintain here) will ripple into your Cloud Storage / CC Web and vice versa. Fine we are used to this.

But why are they not showing anywhere in CC App???!!! Why is the CC App NOT CAPABLE of displaying all folders and files and dos not allow uploading any and all kind of file including media?

Why name "Your Files" in CC App what in reality is only some "Your Cloud Documents"? When "Your Files" in CC Web correctly describes all my files.

It's inconsistent and it's confusing and I don't like it. Please fix this Adobe.

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini Enclosure - Review

The OWC/MacSales Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini Enclosure is a dual 2.5 inch HDD/SSD diskless enclosure with a 10Gbps USB-C connection and hardware RAID 0. You also have a choice of RAID 1, Span and Independent Drive modes.

It looks good, seems well built, is bit large unfortunately because the design has the two SSDs / HDDs side by side instead of stacked. It comes with USB-C and USB-A cables and power supply in a well packaged box. It's easy to open it and insert your own drives.

As far as speed is concerned though, I couldn't get nowhere near the advertised speed of 980MB/s.

I fitted the Mercury with two Crucial MX300 1TB SSDs, and selected RAID 0 on the enclosure, plugged the power supply and pushed the Set button. It quickly gave me an array of 2TB that I formatted Mac OS Extended Journaled with Disk Utility.

The best speed I could get was around 370MB/s connected to Thunderbolt 3 of a Mac Mini M1:

Rather disappointing. I also tried Apple software RAID 0 again for a total array of 2TB with Independent Drive mode selected on the Mercury and got the same results:

With the SSDs as single 1TB drives, not RAID, I actually got the same speed on each individual SSD. Meaning there is absolutely no speed advantage in having a RAID 0 array with this enclosure:

That's too bad. The same dual Crucial MX300 1TB set on a Sonnet TSATA6 PCIe Card fitted into a classic MacPro gets around 700MB/s:

Now maybe I got a lemon, maybe it's possible that fitted with OWC's own SSDs the enclosure is capable of the advertised speed. I don't know and I am not interested by this configuration. As a 0GB, add your own drives enclosure, fitted with 1TB Crucial MX300s, it does not keep its speed promises, so I will be returning it.

What's your experience with this piece of equipment? Leave your comments below.

Cannot Make Bootable Backups Of macOS System Anymore With M1 Silicon, macOS 11 Big Sur, And Forward

 I am stunned reading this explanation by Mike Bombich of the new way Apple is treating macOS security on Silicon Macs.

https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19/beyond-bootable-backups-adapting-recovery-strategies-evolving-platform

No more cloning your system on an external drive, ready for a quick swap in case of an internal system drive failure. With the help of CCC I was always ready in case of a catastrophe, well not any more!...

According to Bombich and Apple, "An Apple Silicon Mac won't boot if the internal storage has failed".

Read that again. Do you get it? Whoa, the ramifications are huge! A Mac lifespan now equals the lifespan of its internal storage. Since all current M1 Macs have a non replaceable ssd, that means when the ssd fails, the whole Mac is worth shit.

My Macs from 2009, 2012 are still functioning perfectly, I've swapped their boot drives countless times. How long is the life expectancy of a Apple NVMe SSD internal storage??? No one knows. Could be anywhere from 3-4 years to 9-14 years for the most optimistic. If it's the latter, OK. If it's less than that, no good.

Apple Care would extend the warranty after the first year, although you have to buy it 60 days after purchase, for the Mini it's $99 for three years, during which Apple will replace whatever hardware craps out, after that... good luck.

Replacing a Silicon Mini every 3 years I might stomach. Replacing a Silicon Mac Book Pro, iMac or future MacPro every 3 years? Forget it.

Also I've made an habit of starting with a clean install when upgrading macOSes: new drive, new OS, fresh start. It has served me well as all the small add-ons and stray files disseminated everywhere and accumulated along the years were zapped with a clean install. Now maybe that's not needed anymore, maybe that's what the new Apple compartmentalizing means: The macOS itself, being immutable, is not polluted by installs and stays clean no matter what. I hope so.

More reading:

https://tidbits.com/2021/05/27/an-m1-mac-cant-boot-from-an-external-drive-if-its-internal-drive-is-dead/

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/28/why-cloning-big-sur-isnt-as-useful-for-an-m1-mac/

macOS Monterey Is In The House, Mac mini M1 With Final Cut Pro 10.6.1 - Part1

 I started using Monterey, it's on a Mac mini M1 with 16GB RAM, 1TB internal ssd.

I have already edited real projects with FCP on it, and I'm running tests.

My current working machine is a Classic Mac Pro 5,1 with 6 x 3.46 GHz cores, 32GB RAM, Radeon 7950 3GB running Mojave 10.14.6.

I have skipped Catalina (10.15) and Big Sur (11) entirely since the cMP is not on the approved list, and I didn't want to risk using OpenCore. I also have a Intel i7 four cores Mini that I use for work, that also has Mojave installed as I didn't want to have mismatched macOSes on my work machines.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

• Boots insanely fast! Seventeen (17) seconds from pressing the power button to the log screen.
• Internal drive speed is nuts. 2800MB/s Read/Write!

• The compartmentalization of the internal drive is something to get used to. APFS introduced with High Sierra (10.13) is evolving. And starting with Catalina (10.15) the System Drive is Read Only! News to me! https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/working-apfs-volume-groups I'm not used to not being able to create a new folder at the root of the disk.
• Monterey is less elegant than Mojave. I don't know when Apple decided to make the change, I prefer the minimalistic icons of Mojave.
• Updating old FCP libraries hasn't been straightforward, often leading to errors:

And after the failed attempt, the Library is definitely corrupted. Make sure you make duplicates before attempting. 

My workaround: Open the library without the Media drive connected (I always store Media outside the Library, on an external drive.) Everything will be offline, but the update will go through without a hiccup. Then mount the Media drive, FCP will reconnect the media by itself, or if it doesn't, Relink the files.

• FCP is super fluid. No waiting time, everything responds very quickly. I dumped my media on a Sata SSD (getting 430MB/s on average) for the small projects I'm currently working on. It's all very fast editing anything, except for non optimized 4K media, R3D specifically. Haven't tried Proxies yet.
• Export times are greatly reduced, especially h264. Exporting to ProRes feels somewhat faster, but not as big a difference. I have to do a real test comparison.
• Compressor is missing some "legacy" Codecs. They are available through Rosetta. I haven't installed that yet.

• Resolve also wants Rosetta installed... Really? Well I don't need Resolve for now, so I haven't installed it yet.

• The Mini does not support eGPU, not a big deal since GPUs have been insanely overpriced for the past 2 1/2 years or even longer. F$*& the hoarders and their stupid bitcoins. Let's see what this M1 is capable of. The old i7 Mini only has a paltry Intel 4000 1.5GB Vram GPU, this new Mini should run circles around it.
• The M1 Mini has a HDMI out for a first monitor, and I can connect my second monitor via a Thunderbolt 3 to HDMI adapter. Leaving the second Thunderbolt 3 for DAS. It's working perfectly. If you need a third monitor you're out of luck as the M1 only supports two. That's fine for me.
• It is near silent. So much so that I now find rotating HD's noise annoying!
• Exporting h264 or ProRes doesn't start the fans, the box is not even warm. Compared to the i7 Mini which starts the fans as soon as Safari is open, and becomes as loud and hot as a steel plant when encoding h264 or ProRes, it's amazing!

That's it for now, more soon!

Dolby Atmos Is Now Integrated into Logic 10.7, What About Final Cut Pro Apple?

Logic 10.7 integrates Dolby Atmos Tools directly within the software. No need for additional software, except for some functions that can only be performed with the Dolby Renderer / Dolby Atmos Production Suite, for the most part this is Dolby Atmos production for the masses.

https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC4n6dl9JjQ&t=340s

Additional bonus: Exported Dolby Packages can be used to transport projects from one DAW to another.

Then why is that Final Cut Pro 10.6, just updated with Cinematic Mode (meh!) and Object Tracking (yeah!) still limited to 5.1 surround? Is Dolby Atmos for FCP 10.7? Come on Apple, sync these apps ASAP.