Upgrading from IMac 2017 to M4 Studio - My Experience
Alan Kefauver wrote:
I upgraded from a Wintel 17 14th gen, with 64GB RAM and a RTX Nvidia 5070ti to a Mac Studio M4 Max with 128GB Unified memory. I added OWC Studio Stack on top into which I put a 4TB NMVe and a SATA 4TB SSD. Underneath is a RayCue dock with 2 NMVe 4TB SSDs. The Prograde Disk reader runs and downloads very fast. But the SSD reader in the Studio, and CFe reader in the Raycue are faster. Both docks connect with ThunderBolt 5.
I had 3 of the NMVe drives in the Wintel box so repurposed them to the Mac. Sold the 32GB memsticks on FleaBay for a great price due to the memory shortage.. Also sold the 5070ti for more than I paid for it.
Woweee Zowie. should have done it years ago. Happy camper here. (LrC, LR, DxO PL9, DxO PR6, On1 Profiles, Photoshop and Lumimar neo. (also Have DPP, and OM Workspace)) Geek be me.
Cool thats a lot of fast external in dock.
Tell me how do you like the StudioStack vs Raycue.
I was looking at Raycue but did not like that you had to raid the nvme's to get 6000mb/s. I like the Raycoe cfexpress in the front though. 1 drive goes or the controller goes and they both go? Or limited to 3500mb/s with 2 drives. [they used usb4 for controllers in a tb5 dock ]
Based on seeing your example and the extreme price of nvme's I am now leaning to StudioStack (no raid 0) with 2tb kingston kc300 (I already have) and 24TB HDD together? I don't do much video so 2TB is sufficent for most projects as working drive.
Apr 09, 2026 at 09:46 PM
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