macOS Ventura out today

[fisherking]

also, there's no 'default' for an external; many in fact come formatted for windows, and need reformating for mac. i chose APFS for my external drives; just thinking of what's ahead...

[des99]

In my case, for this 18TB drive, it was 50/50 between them, but I ultimately went with APFS to be more reliable and future-proof. I kinda knew whichever one I chose was going to end up being the wrong choice, but there you go... 😝

[fisherking]

14 minutes ago, des99 said:

In my case, for this 18TB drive, it was 50/50 between them, but I ultimately went with APFS to be more reliable and future-proof. I kinda knew whichever one I chose was going to end up being the wrong choice, but there you go... 😝

yet you made the right choice! APFS is stable, 'logical', and is the mac format of the future, so when you get there, you'll already be in sync with everything 🙏

[jmob]

1 hour ago, fisherking said:

also, there's no 'default' for an external; many in fact come formatted for windows, and need reformating for mac. i chose APFS for my external drives; just thinking of what's ahead...

Yes it’s of course. That being said, whenever I go to format a new external disk spinner, the default option has always been hfs+

31 minutes ago, des99 said:

In my case, for this 18TB drive, it was 50/50 between them, but I ultimately went with APFS to be more reliable and future-proof. I kinda knew whichever one I chose was going to end up being the wrong choice, but there you go... 😝

18Tb? What's the spin up time for that? I have a 10tb thunderbolt and and am thinking of going smaller. 

[des99]

11 minutes ago, jmob said:

18Tb? What's the spin up time for that?

Probably 20-30 seconds to mount - hang on, lets try... about 25 seconds from turning on to mounted on the desktop. Spinning up itself doesn't take much longer than my other externals of the same type (but smaller).

Just tried my 8TB one next to it (HFS+), and that took 17 seconds from turn on to mounted.

Edited March 26, 2023 by des99

[fisherking]

8 minutes ago, jmob said:

Yes it’s of course. That being said, whenever I go to format a new external disk spinner, the default option has always been hfs+

do you mean the default that disk utility offers? 'mac os extended' offers compatibility with older mac OSes.

here's some useful info:

versus...

apple info

[Dynamic_Notes]

17 hours ago, des99 said:

It's really beyond the scope of the Logic forum to go deep into that, and it's a complex issue (or range of issues, as when researching it, there are different classes of problems, some of which were caused with earlier Monterey versions but then fixed, some of which aren't Monterey problems at all but often user error - bad cables, wrong ports, defective gear etc - but also a class of issues that affect me.)

If you want to look into this, you can google something like "slow USB drives on Monterey" or similar.

TL;DR is there seems to be something deep down in the Finder or USB handling on Monterey which can cause significant problems with some USB drives. All my externals behave fine (HFS+ on spinners, APFS on SSD's) except my main archive drive, which is APFS, which is where the problem is for me. Copying, say a 2.5GB file onto this drive should take a few seconds. It can take *hours* here, when copying in the Finder, and causing the Finder/filesystem to lock up and other problems which can affect the whole machine.

(Funnily enough, using SuperDuper to mirror my system drive to this external gives the expected performance and shows no issues - I guess SD is not using the same macOS filesystem handling in this case, and writes are fine).

I'm getting by as I don't need to copy stuff onto this drive much, but it's still really annoying when I do. (Copying files onto it from my Mojave machine works as expected.)

It doesn't seem like it is, from what I've read. I've got a family machine I can upgrade to Ventura though and check whether my issue is fixed there, or whether it remains, which I'll try soon.

But just because I have a specific issue, doesn't mean it will affect any given user, so I wouldn't necessarily hold off upgrading to Monterey because someone else if having an issue on it. Plenty of people don't hit this, so I'd say give an upgrade a go but as always, *back up your stuff*, and/or upgrade in a way that you can easily revert if you don't like the result.

Thanks for your thoughts. Ive been trying to source an External 7200rpm HDD - something like 4 to 8TB solely for backups before I make any moves but where I am there's a real lack of stock. I suppose I can get a bare drive and put it in a case, but don't know what specced case I'd need. Sometime ago I got one of those portable 4TB things which was worse than useless and returned it.  I don't want to have to get an SSD for this.

When I got my T7 I made sure I formatted it APFS. When I was on Mojave it was recommended to format MacOS extended for TimeMachine so one of my T5s was formatted as that.  I thought Id formatted the other T5  APFS but alas it's not. I dont use TM anymore and Ive wanted to reformat both of them but Im kinda stuck until I can get me a HDD sorted out. They seem to be doing fine but I still rather go to APFS. That also means I'll probably have to download Logic Content all over again since its on External.

[des99]

Some good news on the PA + Ventura compatibility front:

Quote

"How's the Ventura and AAX Silicone compatibility coming?"

PA: Our developers have found one last issue in Audio Units and are working on a fix. This is hopefully the last bug before we can officially announce full Ventura support. Once it's ready, you will be able to update your plugins hassle-free through our Installation Manager at no extra cost.

Avid has released native M1 support for Pro Tools in December 2022, and testing is making good progress on our end. However, we do not have a schedule for the installers. Updates to plugins will be released as they get done. Once M1 AAX support is ready, you will also be able to update your plugins hassle-free through our Installation Manager. In the meantime, please run Pro Tools in Rosetta-mode.

So hopefully not too much longer now.

[des99]

Synapse Audio just updated The Legend to 1.5, which now includes official Ventura compatibility.

https://www.synapse-audio.com/news-legend15update.html

[des99]

On 3/26/2023 at 1:39 PM, des99 said:

TL;DR is there seems to be something deep down in the Finder or USB handling on Monterey which can cause significant problems with some USB drives. All my externals behave fine (HFS+ on spinners, APFS on SSD's) except my main archive drive, which is APFS, which is where the problem is for me. Copying, say a 2.5GB file onto this drive should take a few seconds. It can take *hours* here, when copying in the Finder, and causing the Finder/filesystem to lock up and other problems which can affect the whole machine.

So, it seems I *finally* understand this issue a little better, and it's not a Monterey-specific problem (and hence, won't be solved by upgrading to Ventura - so I won't for now).

The problem is the general performance of APFS on spinning drives - as someone else said, APFS has almost been *designed* to fragment drives by the way it works - but specifically when the spinning drive is low on free space things get *really* bad. Writing files to the drive becomes agonisingly slow, and macOS can even panic and restart due to waiting on the drive at a deep level (I've generated a few of these panic logs) - these are the reasons Finder gets hangy and the system goes to hell, and is the root cause of the problems I've been having every time I needed to copy a few new files on. And the fragmentation only slows things down further.

So I have an 18TB drive, which is essentially a big archive drive - I don't need to write to it a lot, it's a store of stuff I can go to to retrieve files from, all in one place. When I installed the drive, I deliberated over whether I should stick to HFS+, or go APFS, and the choice was not obvious (and I basically *knew* that whatever choice I made would be the wrong one and I'd regret it later. So it goes.)

I was running this with about 1.5TB free and about here the performance when writing new files really drops and becomes unpredictable while APFS does whatever it needs to do to handle the copied files, even if it's just a GB or so. (Performance is OK when doing things like backups, as I'm largely just overwriting existing data, so the performance issues don't show up so much.)

It's the same behaviour using the drive on my old Mojave machine too, which is how I know it's not a Monterey thing, despite all the reports I've seen of poor USB drive handling on Monterey. This isn't the issue here.

I moved off about another half TB of content from the drive, and I can write new files to the drive with normal/expected performance, and without all the Finder hangs and slow behaviour. (It seems the threshold before the drive starts hanging on writes is 1.75TB free space or less)

So, based on my experiences with this WD drive (I'm assuming this is also true for other drives, and it's not just this one drive that is somehow defective) - if you decide to use APFS on spinning drives (and we know this isn't ideal, APFS is really designed for SSDs), I suggest that unless you don't need to write any more stuff to a drive, bank on keeping 10-20% free space before the drive significantly degrades in *write* performance, due to the overhead APFS needs.

(This isn't the case with HFS+ formats, you can basically more or less fill up the drive, and while fragementation may well slow things down a bit for obvious reasons, there isn't the overhead required to write files that causes problems in the same way).

So now I know what the problem is, I can rearrange my stuff accordingly (I can't just easily reformat the APFS drive to HFS+). I'm glad to have really got to the bottom of this, as it was a real problem every time I just wanted to put some new files into the archive.

Maybe that might help someone one day...

Edited May 11, 2023 by des99

[Scriabin rocks]

Back in the days... I always had that policy with platters, approaching less than 25% ...Alert!...Get new drive!

The real world limitation was somewhat around less than 7% from where on you would increase the risk of a head crash or total failure. Mind you that's all in the world of engineers and enterprise class systems, hence very academic.  

Now the thing with Finder and APFS is an entirely different story of course. Reformating to HFS+ means shoveling data around to free entire discs before reformating.

Now, I wonder what that means for time machine drives, which as per apple are preferred to be APFS or APFS encrypted.

 

[des99]

10 hours ago, Scriabin rocks said:

The real world limitation was somewhat around less than 7% from where on you would increase the risk of a head crash or total failure. Mind you that's all in the world of engineers and enterprise class systems, hence very academic.  

Sure. However I have plenty of HFS+ drives that are, say 4TB with only a few hundred GB free, and their performance isn't noticeably depreciated by copying a 200MB file onto them.

And with an 18TB drive, with 1.75 *terabytes* still free, my expectation was that it probably shouldn't be a problem to copy a 2GB file onto it. I've had to temper my expectations in this case, and unfortunately think of the 18TB drive as a 16TB drive, which is now *just* slightly not big enough to do the job I wanted it to do - bit annoying! 🙂

10 hours ago, Scriabin rocks said:

Reformating to HFS+ means shoveling data around to free entire discs before reformating.

If I *really* wanted to do this, I probably could, but it would be a massive and time-consuming task (basically most of the data on it exists on smaller external drives, albeit organised a bit better in place on the big drive).

What I'd be more likely to do is wait for another HD sale, and pick up another identical 18TB drive, format that to HFS+, mirror the APFS drive contents to it, and then either leave things as they are, or reformat the APFS drive back to HFS+ also. Then at least I'd have two proper, easily-mirrorable copies of the data.

However, the online store (Western Digital) I get my drive bargains from got recently pwned by hackers who stole all their customer data, and now the store is offline (for weeks now) while they sort out the mess. So that's probably not happening for some time yet...

 

[Scriabin rocks]

Sorry to hear that. Feckin' hacker bullcrap!

[analogika]

On 3/29/2023 at 7:43 PM, des99 said:

Some good news on the PA + Ventura compatibility front:

So hopefully not too much longer now.

Plugin Alliance just responded to me on Facebook and stated that they are aiming for „late August“ for full compatibility. 
 

https://m.facebook.com/100064714745156/posts/pfbid04Y4Ha28nmjF3jG8HQm4KiqqhSdVh62qVkD4Hj6MNMsL2ZKZbKphYjU3sdzYucbUDl/?comment_id=1002560831109896

[analogika]

Official statement from Plugin Alliance confirming the "end of August" target for Ventura compatibility (and Pro-Tools on Apple Silicon): 

https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/blog/blogpost/items/a_message-on-expanded-support-for-apple-silicon-and-macos-ventura.html

[fisherking]

On 8/1/2023 at 2:43 PM, analogika said:

Official statement from Plugin Alliance confirming the "end of August" target for Ventura compatibility (and Pro-Tools on Apple Silicon): 

https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/blog/blogpost/items/a_message-on-expanded-support-for-apple-silicon-and-macos-ventura.html

they'll be just in time for sonoma 🤣

[Scriabin rocks]

Ops, Ventura background task management open for malware.

 

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-mac-background-task-management-flaw/

[des99]

14 minutes ago, Scriabin rocks said:

Ops, Ventura background task management open for malware.

Yup, I saw this too - it seems this is important enough that it will get fixed.

I'm not sure the consequences of "this will put macOS security back to the level it was a year ago" is too much to worry about, but of course, every security issue *is* an issue.

Rule #1: Don't let strangers into your house asking to use your computer
Rule #2: Don't click on email phishing links
Rule #3: Don't make yourself a political enemy of any governments

...and you'll broadly be just fine. 👍

(It's worked for me so far..!)

Edited August 15, 2023 by des99

[Scriabin rocks]

#3.1 In case you do, have an escape route, your lightsaber at hand, and a shuttle in orbit on stand by.🤣

[des99]

“Help me LPH! You’re my only hope!”

[des99]

 

"Apple silicon and macOS Ventura update is live NOW!

We are delighted to announce that the majority of our plugins now support native Apple silicon (M-series chips) for Pro Tools users and Logic Pro users on macOS Ventura. To view all updated plugins and how to install them, click below."

https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/blog/blogpost/items/expanded-support-for-apple-silicon-and-macos-ventura.html