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MP 7,1 How can I get the 8TB modules for the Mac Pro?

realLucaR said:
Alright Dave (I'm assuming), you convinced me! It does not make sense to upgrade to 8TB. For the cost of that SSD, I could get two Samsung 9100 Pro 8TB and the Sonnet M2 4x4 Adapter, and still have some money left over. So instead of basically 4TB more, I can easily get 16TB for the same cost.

With the added benefit of being able to just take the card and put it in my M2 Ultra Mac Pro once I bought one.

I saw a pretty good offer, an M2 Ultra Mac Pro with 192GB, 76-Core GPU and a 1TB SSD for just under 6500 Euros. I'm really considering that right now. Comes with new Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, all USB-C, which right now would cost 400 Euros alone.

What do you think?

Also, I am also planning to build a NAS now, although I still have to find affordable HDDs because I am not paying the inflated AI prices. Looking at probably 12TB+ per drive, with a 4-drive NAS. Either Ugreen or Synology, still comparing the two! Which model do you have?

A Mac mini is probably not the best option. They are most likely gonna be slower and I cannot manage them as easy as a dedicated NAS. Plus, I don't fully trust old hardware running 24/7 with my precious data haha
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I really think you should wait and see what Apple does with the Mac Pro. The M2 Ultra is very very old doesn't even have latest ray tracing support and other AI features in M4/M5. I have a feeling they will drop an M5 Ultra, which means that the M2 Ultra you're looking for will further drop in price. €6500 is way too much for a 3+ year old computer. Also we don't know if Apple will stop supporting older M class Macs and the M2 is very old.

I'm personally moving over to a Mac Studio when the M5 Ultra comes out this year and either sell the Mac Pro 7,1 or drop in a RTX5080 (or 5090 but the pricing is ridiculous) for a Windows gaming box.

Regarding the NAS, if you don't want a 5-6 drive NAS, you can always do a dual drive NAS (ie 2x20TB drives) and RAID 1 them (in case 1 drive fails you'll have a backup) but then low number NAS drives you will get low read/write speeds (in RAID1 with dual drives you'll get roughly 200MB/sec+). I work directly off this NAS via 10GbE (additional PCIe drop-in card is around $250 from Synology) in Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, etc. so I do push it a lot so it's not just for storing files.

When I bought my NAS I waited for Black friday deals and got the enclosure for $499 and drives I shucked from Western Digital external drives they were HGST drives and work great. They are NAS grade drives. I have the Synology DS1618+ (which is a bit older but works great). The only thing I have heard about these NAS enclosures is the power supply going out (which is an easy swap, I have a backup here just in case) but I haven't had that issue in over 5 years. I connect my NAS to a battery backup for additional protection.

If you really need NVME speeds, you can use Thunderbolt and RAID them in an external enclosure. If your only use for PCIe is the Sonnet card, then I suggest another workaround and for you to get a Mac Studio instead (it's cheaper and gets updated more frequently). You can get the same speeds via external NVME enclosures + TB5 unless you have some special case where you need like 30,000MB/sec with 8 NVMEs in a PCIe card. I don't know what your workflow is, so can't comment on that.

The SSD drives in the Mac Pro 7,1 are really old and slow compared to what's available nowdays.
 
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I use a consumer-level QNAP. Several years of trouble-free operation, but I only use it for Time Machine backups.

Beware that Synology is trying to make people buy Synology-branded hard drives, at elevated prices. Depending on NAS model, they may spam you with warnings for plugging in normal drives, or even refuse to utilize standard drives. This appears to be a cash grab. I've never owned a Synology, so have not run into this personally.
 
reader50 said:
I use a consumer-level QNAP. Several years of trouble-free operation, but I only use it for Time Machine backups.

Beware that Synology is trying to make people buy Synology-branded hard drives, at elevated prices. Depending on NAS model, they may spam you with warnings for plugging in normal drives, or even refuse to utilize standard drives. This appears to be a cash grab. I've never owned a Synology, so have not run into this personally.
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Never had that issue with Synology, might be in the newer ones.
 
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