[weblacky]

We had several Mac Pros over the years and I loved the expandability and very long support life...but the "New" Mac Pros took ALL OF THAT AWAY. The currently supported Mac Pros are now just Pixar/Hollywood rendering machines. That's exactly who it targets (post-production, movie effects, and real time video work) and that's it. Mac Pros were about third party hardware and growing/adding over time. This one, isn't. The real kicker (laugh if you want) was the fact that for such a HUGE case, they removed any ability to put mechanical 3.5" hard drives in it! That was the abolosulte deal-breaker.

Why? BACKUPS!!!

Of course I'd run an OS from SSD and such. but why would I care about my huge time machine backups being on spinning disk? Just mirror them or whatever in Soft RAID and you're fine. Nope, Apple makes the grand assumption if you're in the business they are targeting, you have a 10GbE driven NAS or something. You know some people just use a single station for a single worker, and maybe want to use time machine to version and backup both work and OS? Save finished work to offline storage or whatever? No harm, well impossible with this beast unless you love external drives...I don't. Apple has never well cooperated with external USB drives for proper sleeping (unless the drive firmware itself is aggressive) nor monitoring external drive health.

All the previous Mac Pros we used had a reasonable SSD for OS desktop stuff and two spinning disks in mirror mode for Time Machine. Never permanently lost data in the household. It work very well and being inside the case meant a native disk interface with proper power management and cooling. Why was that so hard?

So it's now onto a Mac Mini with an external heatsinked M.2 USB-C drive for Time Machine and we'll see how time treats us. I MIGHT have don't a basic new Mac Pro purchase if 3.5" disks could be fitted, no...we're done here. I have much more data in backup then I have in use (because versioning). So it stands to reason I need a larger backup solution that I need an OS partition. The Mac Pros were the last machines to understand that.