System data killing my Mac/keyboard issues

[familychoice]

(hmm.... Affinity2 requires MacOS Mavericks minimum, Logic10.5 requires Mojave, and Ableton runs on just about anything. It occurs to me that this underutilized M1 Mini could be sold off for very high three-figures if they're going for $1,199 on Amazon right now, and replaced with an i7 intel Mini with 16/500ssd config for under $200, and you'd get a subjectively faster experience running this software under Mojave.)

Does the Apple keyboard work on any other computer?

They tell you that not because it's the best solution (it almost never is), but because that's what they've been trained to say.

I haven't tried with the laptop (I'll need to find something to connect the keyboard USB to the laptop's USBC port), but my iPad picked it up ok. I'll test with the laptop though.

I need the M series for the latest version of Logic, so it's compatible with my iOS version, as the laptop is Intel.

It seems relatively stable with the (horrible, cheap) PC keyboard at the moment, but when it starts playing up again and not picking it up I'll try an external boot, and then total wipe. If that doesn't work, I'll get a new Apple keyboard.

If none of the above works and it's a dodgy hardware issue that for some reason isn't getting picked up by diagnostics, I guess I can always do an Apple trade-in for a new M2 (don't think you can trade-in with refurb). I wouldn't feel comfortable selling it privately, knowing there's a lurking issue.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[Minghold]

I need the M series for the latest version of Logic, so it's compatible with my iOS version, as the laptop is Intel.

You're voluntarily ensnaring yourself in the artificial-obsolescence/subscription-model merry-go-round churn of their ecosystem. You could literally do everything listed for one-sixth of the money and none of the headaches by getting out of the mindset of needing "the latest". If I put a thousand Mac-owners in a room and asked them what the difference is between Logic Pro 10.5 (runs on Mojave) and Logic Pro 10.7 (current) and what features both lack that used to be in Logic Pro 9 (ran on Snow Leopard in 2gb ram), I doubt that a single hand would rise with the correct answers.

The truth is that established products of this type were "finished" in a sense around eight or ten years ago, and few substantive improvements have been since. (E.g., Office360 is still using 2015's formats, and Adobe's formats haven't changed since 2013. Logic Pro 10 debuted in 2013, and the only reason that 10.7 requires Big Sur instead of Mountain Lion is because Logic Pro was bought out and is owned by Apple. You don't need gargantuan horsepower to sample and mix music when that is one the least intensive tasks you can throw at a processor beyond basic document-creation. Most such technologies also have generic free alternatives that have themselves been around for years.

It seems relatively stable with the (horrible, cheap) PC keyboard at the moment, but when it starts playing up again and not picking it up I'll try an external boot, and then total wipe. If that doesn't work, I'll get a new Apple keyboard. If none of the above works and it's a dodgy hardware issue that for some reason isn't getting picked up by diagnostics, I guess I can always do an Apple trade-in for a new M2 (don't think you can trade-in with refurb). I wouldn't feel comfortable selling it privately, knowing there's a lurking issue.

My advice remains to step off the treadmill of throwing more good money after bad

Thanks for your reply.

You're welcome.

 

[familychoice]

If I put a thousand Mac-owners in a room and asked them what the difference is between Logic Pro 10.5 (runs on Mojave) and Logic Pro 10.7 (current) and what features both lack that used to be in Logic Pro 9 (ran on Snow Leopard in 2gb ram), I doubt that a single hand would rise with the correct answers.

I bought the new 13” Air iPad specifically for using Logic, since all my other iOS DAW’s (I’ve tried them all, bar Cubasis - so that’s next on the list) aren’t up to scratch. Logic was virtually unusable on my 11” Air, but works great on the new 13”. That means I had to install the latest version, and so for compatibility with the Mac I installed the new one on that too.

There are a bunch of improvements - session players, stem splitting, mastering assistant that are really useful, and under-the-hood fixes such as improved MIDI routing that are only available via M-series Macs/iPads. There have been a lot of bugs fixed too.

I also have a ton of iOS AUv3’s that I can use on the Mac as plug-ins, and again this is an M-chip-only option.

I’m not a serial updater - I was running Big Sur and old Logic up until a month ago, and haven’t updated my other desktop DAW (Ableton), for example. To be honest I wouldn’t have bothered with the desktop Logic update if I hadn’t been trying to fix the keyboard/Time Machine issues with OS updates, but now I have, I wouldn’t want to go back to the old version.

An older Mini isn’t out of the question if there’s one going cheap and I can fix this bugger, then I can keep the M1 for music, and the other whatever-it-is for work. Maybe an Intel Mini with more storage.

Apple seem to only want to give me £240 for my £1000+ device in a M2+ trade-in check, so hopefully I can get it fixed with an OS reinstall, as it’s hardly worth swapping at that price.

 

[CasualFanboy]

My "why does he always say this?™" suggestion:

TURN OFF time machine.
TURN IT OFF... forever.

USE SOMETHING ELSE for backups.

Hell yeah, 100%.

Having said that, to SEE what is eating up your space, use this:
Diskwave (small and free):

DiskWave Homepage

Best app out there to ascertain what is using up space.
I'm thinking, tm shapshots.

I got excited until I saw the last release date (2012). lol

I have this possibly weird criteria for installing applications - if it's not in homebrew, I have a lower opinion of it. Homebrew is my app store.

 

[Fishrrman]

DiskWave still works just fine.
If it works, I use it.

 

[Minghold]

Logic was virtually unusable on my 11” Air, but works great on the new 13”.

Most of those 11"s only came with 4gb ram and a 120gb drive; they're basically purse computers (and you definitely don't want Catalina or higher on them). Considering that about the first thing Logic harangues the user to do is download ~70gb worth of audio kits, those little drives just suffocated.An older Mini isn’t out of the question if there’s one going cheap and I can fix this bugger, then I can keep the M1 for music, and the other whatever-it-is for work. Maybe an Intel Mini with more storage.

Apple seem to only want to give me £240 for my £1000+ device in a M2+ trade-in check, so hopefully I can get it fixed with an OS reinstall, as it’s hardly worth swapping at that price.

This soft of forced-obsolescence chicanery is exactly who I advice people not to buy new computers anymore. (There is enough glut of perfectly good 5yo hardware out there for everyone on the planet to have half a dozen. Entire pallets get torn down at local recyclers every day. If Quincy Jones could lay his tracks in Logic 6 on core-2-duo hardware, it gives you some idea as to how *efficient* things were not that long ago. Now, everything is bloat for bloat's sake to make an M1 seem slow.

An older Mini isn’t out of the question if there’s one going cheap and I can fix this bugger, then I can keep the M1 for music, and the other whatever-it-is for work. Maybe an Intel Mini with more storage.

Beware the consumer-grade minis with rotational-drives flogged within an inch of their lives by Catalina/APFS. In any event, you can get a 5TB shirtpocket external for ~$120 at Best Buy.

 

[HDFan]

1. The general rule is to keep ~30% free on your boot drive
2. OS storage, especially if you are using Time Machine, is extremely unpredicatable. You need to keep enough free space to handle the ups and downs.
3. TM should be only one of the backups in the recommended 3-2-1 backup strategy as TM backups tend to fail.
4. DaisyDisk or similar utilities can help with managing storage

Using an much larger external SSD as your boot drive is the easiest way to avoid having to keep managing storage and would eliminate some of your problems.

 

[Slartibart]

The general rule is to keep ~30% free on your boot drive

Where do you get that number from? 😂

TL;DR

• Use something like: 2 x installed RAM + system installer size <- rounded up to the next tens digit GB.
• If you really want to operate with percentage, that’s 15%-ish free space on your boot drive.

However, there is a bit more to it 🙃

First: from a technical standpoint, there is no penalty for using all your drive space - please bear with me here 🙂:

HDDs come in two main types - SMR and CMR. CMR uses a traditional storage method with consistent write speeds across the drive. In contrast, SMR layers writes, slowing down as the drive fills, but without a sharp decline at a specific capacity.

SSDs also come in various types: SLC, TLC, and QLC. SLC stores one bit per cell with uniform write speeds. TLC and QLC store three and four bits per cell, respectively, resulting in progressively slower writes as the drive fills, but without a sudden drop in performance at a specific capacity. Also on HDDs, leaving free space helps reduce file fragmentation = faster read/write speeds and better overall performance.

Both SMR HDDs and MLC SSDs use a cache to stabilize write speeds, hiding the slower writes from the user (which, as a side note, means that a power failure could potentially lead to data loss).


And yes, SSDs use smart wear leveling algorithms to evenly distribute write and erase cycles across the memory cells, and having some free space helps these algorithms do their job better, which means your drive lasts longer. Keeping free space also helps maintain those speedy read/write speeds, as SSDs can slow down when they’re too full. Plus, free space makes it easier for the drive to handle garbage collection and TRIM commands efficiently.

On top of that the OS(s) and applications often require temporary space for caching, virtual memory, and other system operations.


So you should keep free space on your boot drive. There are clear reasons for it. But recommending on general 30% free space is really not necessary. A better "threshold for concern/to take action" is, if you must use percentage, about 15%.


nota bene: if you are concerned about "extending" the life span of your SSD - TBW and DWPD offer good, practical estimations.
Well, and if you are interested how long the in oxide layer of your SSD will last, please feel free use the following formula: (Write cycles * Capacity) / ((Real Amount of Data / Actual Amount of Data Written) * Estimated Data Written per year).
There are threads related to "excessive" SSD writes/SSD life span support here on MR… 😃

Oh, just to be clear: you can of course keep more than 15% free space on your boot drive.
As well as: no need to grasp for your towel and HGTTG when it hits less. 🙃

 

[Sciuriware]

Where do you get that number from? 😂

TL;DR

• Use something like: 2 x installed RAM + system installer size <- rounded up to the next tens digit GB.
• If you really want to operate with percentage, that’s 15%-ish free space on your boot drive.

However, there is a bit more to it 🙃

First: from a technical standpoint, there is no penalty for using all your drive space - please bear with me here 🙂:

HDDs come in two main types - SMR and CMR. CMR uses a traditional storage method with consistent write speeds across the drive. In contrast, SMR layers writes, slowing down as the drive fills, but without a sharp decline at a specific capacity.

SSDs also come in various types: SLC, TLC, and QLC. SLC stores one bit per cell with uniform write speeds. TLC and QLC store three and four bits per cell, respectively, resulting in progressively slower writes as the drive fills, but without a sudden drop in performance at a specific capacity. Also on HDDs, leaving free space helps reduce file fragmentation = faster read/write speeds and better overall performance.

Both SMR HDDs and MLC SSDs use a cache to stabilize write speeds, hiding the slower writes from the user (which, as a side note, means that a power failure could potentially lead to data loss).


And yes, SSDs use smart wear leveling algorithms to evenly distribute write and erase cycles across the memory cells, and having some free space helps these algorithms do their job better, which means your drive lasts longer. Keeping free space also helps maintain those speedy read/write speeds, as SSDs can slow down when they’re too full. Plus, free space makes it easier for the drive to handle garbage collection and TRIM commands efficiently.

On top of that the OS(s) and applications often require temporary space for caching, virtual memory, and other system operations.


So you should keep free space on your boot drive. There are clear reasons for it. But recommending on general 30% free space is really not necessary. A better "threshold for concern/to take action" is, if you must use percentage, about 15%.


nota bene: if you are concerned about "extending" the life span of your SSD - TBW and DWPD offer good, practical estimations.
Well, and if you are interested how long the in oxide layer of your SSD will last, please feel free use the following formula: (Write cycles * Capacity) / ((Real Amount of Data / Actual Amount of Data Written) * Estimated Data Written per year).
There are threads related to "excessive" SSD writes/SSD life span support here on MR… 😃

Oh, just to be clear: you can of course keep more than 15% free space on your boot drive.
As well as: no need to grasp for your towel and HGTTG when it hits less. 🙃

Very informative; when buying an SSD drive, however, the choice is very coarse: 1, 2, 4, 8 .....Tb
And, to reduce disk usage, a lot of main memory will also help.
;JOOP!

 

[Slartibart]

Very informative; when buying an SSD drive, however, the choice is very coarse: 1, 2, 4, 8 .....Tb
And, to reduce disk usage, a lot of main memory will also help.
;JOOP!

Well, the majority of preconfigured Mac models or other laptops comes with less for their boot drives. 🙃

And while SSD size correlates with TBW and DWPD, and while Apple is mum about e.g. the TWB of their 256Gb SSDs (for the sake of argument let’s assume they use a variation on the common TLC SSD ), a little bit of research shows that it will reach 300TBW with ease, and quite likely more.
There was reporting on excessive writes on M1 mac’s in the past where some observed 15Tb in 2 month which is quite a bit, and which was mostly due to swapping main memory to the SSD. (There is a long thread here on MR related to that.)

All that means that you would have ~4 to 8 years of SSD life at that 90TB/year writing rate with an 8GB/256GB M1 Mac. You can double that for a 512GB SSD and it increases further for 1Tb and beyond. The commonly observed writing rates on Macs are now lower.


Last not least for the moment, way back in 2014 Techreport found that some 256GB SSD were capable of reaching almost one petabyte of writes. Those drives used older, longer-lived 1-bit/SLC NAND rather than today’s common 3-bit/TLC. The 2-bit/MLC drives in the tests tended to dropout at around 700TBW in the same tests.

So while you need to keep free space on your boot drive, there is IMHO no indication to promote "keep 30% free on your SSD" and there is probably not much to be concerned of in relation to the life span of the internal SSD in Macs.


To emphasize the obvious: Apple should stop soldering the SSDs and implement an elegant solution for swappable ones (ideally with controller). For a variety of reasons. Now. Pretty please.


nota bene: the number one cause of death for an SSD seems to be not gradual NAND-, but controller-failure.

 

[HDFan]

Where do you get that number from?

It has been a rule of thumb for decades. The actual number varies, 20% being the minimum I've seen although that may have changed with newer technology. Although I have 38 TB free (~30%) on my Promise RAID drive Promise support still says I should avoid going under that 30% number.

[SOLVED] - How much % space must be kept free to keep a SSD running as fast as new?

What % of SSD can i possibly use and have little or no compromise in performance?

forums.tomshardware.com

How much space to leave free on HDD or SSD?

In the informal (i.e. journalistic) technology press, and in online technology blogs and discussion forums, one commonly encounters anecdotal advice to leave some amount of space free on hard disk ...

superuser.com

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-much-space-to-leave-free-on-ssd.1306486/

 

[Sciuriware]

It has been a rule of thumb for decades. The actual number varies, 20% being the minimum I've seen although that may have changed with newer technology. Although I have 38 TB free (~30%) on my Promise RAID drive Promise support still says I should avoid going under that 30% number.

[SOLVED] - How much % space must be kept free to keep a SSD running as fast as new?

What % of SSD can i possibly use and have little or no compromise in performance?

forums.tomshardware.com

How much space to leave free on HDD or SSD?

In the informal (i.e. journalistic) technology press, and in online technology blogs and discussion forums, one commonly encounters anecdotal advice to leave some amount of space free on hard disk ...

superuser.com

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-much-space-to-leave-free-on-ssd.1306486/

Thanks. Obviously, reading all above, anyone can now be convinced to leave some space on their disk(s).
Still, speed degradation can be a perception: if you are in a hurry, nothing is fast enough.
;JOOP!

 

[familychoice]

If Quincy Jones could lay his tracks in Logic 6 on core-2-duo hardware, it gives you some idea as to how *efficient* things were not that long ago. Now, everything is bloat for bloat's sake to make an M1 seem slow.

Beware the consumer-grade minis with rotational-drives flogged within an inch of their lives by Catalina/APFS. In any event, you can get a 5TB shirtpocket external for ~$120 at Best Buy.

I’m not the greatest keyboard player on the planet, I just love making weird noises on synths. I bought my first Korg MS20 in the early 80’s, playing in a teen electro band, and ever since have been interested in the latest music tech. I’m more or less 100% software based now, with 75% of that via iOS apps.

So I need a relatively recent device/OS to be able to play the new stuff. Environment wise - we’re incredibly green here, and have created a wildlife friendly, (almost) self-sufficient place, which hopefully goes towards offsetting my iPad use.

An older Mini would be fine for work though. I was initially impressed with the M1 Mini, but recent problems have soured that one, so having ‘the latest new thing’ isn’t an issue. When it finally packs up I’ll probably get a cheap Apple refurb.

I may even stop using the desktop for music making - Logic Pro on the Air 13” is ticking all my boxes for now.