Mac mini updates

First off, I am a dummy and completely failed to notice that there are in fact two USB-A ports on the Mini itself. The dock was completely unncessary for my initial setup. Oops!

Also, I just played some test content in HDR and holy heck it looks pretty amazing. Conveniently enough, Safari supports HDR in YouTube while Firefox doesn’t, so I was able to play some videos side-by-side to see the difference, and it was pretty immense, especially in the extremes. Which is, of course, the whole point to HDR.

I’ll probably keep using Firefox for usual video stuff, though, because I’m not a fan of not having a decent ad blocker. Hopefully Firefox adds HDR support soon!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I ended up force-quitting the NI installer so that I could finish installing some system updates and the Wacom driver and so on. What’s really cool is that even though the Wacom driver is still x86, Rosetta still emulates it. Holy cow. Also the Silicon Macs use a new driver signing thing that’s a little onerous but also exposes a nicer way of going into the startup disk selector (now you just hold down the power button while booting, no need to remember an awkward keyboard combination that doesn’t always map right to whatever weird keyboard you’re using at the time).

Also, I had meant to do some disk speed tests as well. See below!

As a recap, here are the timings from the iMac:

Drive Connection Write speed Read speed
Internal (Fusion drive) PCIe+SATA 603.2 2505.4
SATA storage (SSD) USB 3.0 318.3 390.7
NVMe storage (SSD) USB 3.1 880.3 900.4
NAS (RAID-5 HDD) 1000baseT 70.6 109.8

And here’s the timings on the mini:

Drive Connection Write speed Read speed
Internal (SSD) PCIe 2871.6 2935.1
SATA storage (SSD) USB 3.0 372.3 260.8
NVMe storage (SSD) USB 3.1 908.1 807.4
NAS (RAID-5 HDD) 1000baseT 71.6 85.7

So, wow, that internal disk is ridiculously fast! The other volumes are about the same, as expected (and each test fluctuates quite a lot anyway). The NAS is probably slower than before because I’m actively downloading Native Instruments stuff still (and that would easily account for a difference of 20MB/sec, which is of course around what I get from a saturated cable Internet connection).

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