Getting ready to get a new Mac, and....

[andygabrys]

IMO Loren, basically yes.

when hard drives were slow (i.e. mechanical hard drives even though the high end ones were running at at least 7200 rpm and the real pro solutions were 10,000 rpm and greater) the idea was:

spread things out, so that the one hard drive doesn't become the rate determining step. Older machines like all the Mac Pro's and Desktop PC's with space for multiple internal drives were built for this.

the paradigm shift happened when a) smaller computers became popular that only had one internal drive and b) the hard drives themselves became so much faster, smaller, and generally more reliable (Len911 if you are reading this - do the reading man - if you work through it and believe that there is not a reliability improvement in SSDs /Flash drives fine - but that's not what I have experienced personally nor discovered through reading).

At this point for peak performance, you still need to spread things out. How much is for you to discover. Every situation is different. At least with all those ports, you can buy an external drive, and move some stuff around, and see how it performs. If its not there, then you buy another external drive as finances allow.

re: backups - I didn't mention anything about online backups like "Crashplan" or "carbonite" before - I don't use them, but other composers in this circle do and they seem to be happy with them. That is an option if you are looking for a super streamlined system, with the caveats being that your studio computer will need to be continuously connected to the web for incremental backups and for restoring things if you computer goes down. That's a personal choice obviously to just have physical backups on site, to just use online backups, or a combination of the two.

[Len911]

(Len911 if you are reading this - do the reading man - if you work through it and believe that there is not a reliability improvement in SSDs /Flash drives fine - but that's not what I have experienced personally nor discovered through reading).

I said nothing about reliability improvement in SSD's, here's what I said:

SSD's can fail just like HDD's, I don't have statistics on which is most reliable.

And Loren said Apple had trouble with the fusion drives a year ago.

Reliability varies significantly across different SSD manufacturers and models with return rates reaching 40% for specific drives.[103] As of 2011 leading SSDs have lower return rates than mechanical drives.[101] Many SSDs critically fail on power outages; a December 2013 survey of many SSDs found that only some of them are able to survive multiple power outages.

According to a study performed by Carnegie Mellon University for both consumer and enterprise-grade HDDs, their average failure rate is 6 years, and life expectancy is 9–11 years.[142] Leading SSDs have overtaken hard disks for reliability,[101] however the risk of a sudden, catastrophic data loss can be lower for mechanical disks.[143]
When stored offline (unpowered in shelf) in long term, the magnetic medium of HDD retains data significantly longer than flash memory used in SSDs.

What I take from this is buy a leading SSD, and don't have any power outages!

About fusion and Logic issues, apparently solved awhile back:

http://www.logic-users-group.com/forums ... ives.8888/ https://discussions.apple.com/thread/64 ... 0&tstart=0 http://www.logicprohelp.com/forum/viewt ... 1&t=104573

There's no doubt that buying the biggest, fastest, and whatever else, assuming there isn't problems,
will get you a solution. My view, is just my personal opinion, for the best value for the situation I see, or think I see,lol! I hesitate to use the word value, because I'm not sure I could recommend for example a half-assed condenser vocal mic, because in my past experience so many of those value products weren't really acceptable and therefore not an honest value.

[ComposerLDG]

I've learned so much talking to you guys over these last few days, and I truly appreciate it.

Here's where I am:

32 GB RAM and an i7 CPU are key elements. I realize that 16 GB of RAM would probably do it, but I want to make sure I have lots of head room, especially since I do a lot of symphonic composing. Macbook Pro will only configure up to 16GB, so that puts me into iMac or Mac Pro territory. The Mac Pro is insanely expensive, so I'm leaning toward a 27-inch iMac.

Storage: My plan is to configure the system with an internal 512GB SSD. This will give me plenty of room for system files, Logic, and for storing projects. I'll add 1 TB Thunderbolt or USB3 drive to store my sound libraries on. This will let me stream the samples from the external drive while writing to the internal. That would keep my projects on the internal drive, libraries on the external. I think that would do.

I think that would give me plenty of system resources while spreading out the load, with plenty of RAM and a nice, fast CPU to process it all.

Sound good?

[Len911]

Sounds great to me Loren!

The important thing is that you have explored your options and are confident in your decision, comfortable with the cost, and most importantly, have sufficient computing power.

I must say that, "I do a lot of symphonic composing." threw me for a loop, although Kontact caused me to pause, but when I saw Session Strings, I really didn't suspect much symphonic composing Perhaps I should have asked All is good!

[ComposerLDG]

Sounds great to me Loren!

The important thing is that you have explored your options and are confident in your decision, comfortable with the cost, and most importantly, have sufficient computing power.

I must say that, "I do a lot of symphonic composing." threw me for a loop, although Kontact caused me to pause, but when I saw Session Strings, I really didn't suspect much symphonic composing Perhaps I should have asked All is good!

LOL! Well, I actually should say my plan is symphonic composing (trailers, scores, etc), once I'm no longer limited as I am with my current system! Right now I do as much as I can with my 2008 MacBook! It limps along, but is frustrating as all get out...

[mojobone]

In search of higher track counts, solid reliability and redundancy, I'm right there with you. Mine led to a refurbished Mac Pro with SSD for the system drive and 7200 RPM magnetics for everything else; programs, samples and music data, for the very simple reason that data recovery, while expensive, is at least available, and magnetic media have proven less volatile over the long haul, IMO. Of course that's less of a consideration if you're gonna maintain backups for your backups for your backups, but I'm a suspenders and a belt guy, when it comes to data.

[ComposerLDG]

In search of higher track counts, solid reliability and redundancy, I'm right there with you. Mine led to a refurbished Mac Pro with SSD for the system drive and 7200 RPM magnetics for everything else; programs, samples and music data, for the very simple reason that data recovery, while expensive, is at least available, and magnetic media have proven less volatile over the long haul, IMO. Of course that's less of a consideration if you're gonna maintain backups for your backups for your backups, but I'm a suspenders and a belt guy, when it comes to data.

That most definitely is a consideration, data being recoverable from magnetic drives. How is the performance, streaming your samples etc. from the 7200 RPM? Any issues?

[mojobone]

Up to this point, my drives haven't done a lot of really heavy lifting; CPU and RAM have been the bottlenecks, cuz I'm just now moving to a 64bit OS. Yeah, I've been dragging my feet....also my knuckles.

I have a 12-core 2010 Mac Pro on order, and having done the research, it'll be very easy and cheap to do upgrades to the RAM and add hard drives at about $10 per GB and $100 per TB.

On my old XP machine 40 tracks and four or five VIs was the upper limit, without freezing tracks which never really worked in Tracktion 2 nor 3, anyway.

[joyfrost]

+1 to what Andy said. ALSO adding on the idea of saving some serious cash, I would highly recommend just getting the Mac Model with the lowest amount of RAM and buying RAM cards separately!! Apple charges you an extra $600 for the 32 GB RAM but you could get that much RAM on Ebay for $150 and install it yourself. I installed my own RAM cards and it was actually totally easy! You can save yourself $450 right there. That's two years of a TAXI Membership or 90 submissions No need to pay through the nose for things like that

[mojobone]

Yep, I ordered a basically empty tower, but for the most reasonably-priced SSD for the operating system. Aftermarket companies compete very fiercely for your upgrade dollar. With a dozen cores, 8 memory slots, three drive bays and three PCIe slots, I should be able to keep them (and me) in business for a few more years. Odds are, my next computer will be wearable.