How inflexible. And lal that hardware. geesh. Too bad you aren't into Apple computers.
evan, could you please elaborate what you wanted to say us with this reply and what the TLA *lal* stands for? my current state of information is that you hit several walls with all single machine setups, independent from which flavour of system they run. yes, macs can currenly load more instruments than PCs but don't forget to look at the price-ratio also.
welcome d_cham,
much will depend on the size of your performances and how much instruments you would expect to have ready for instant access. for really big orchestrations you might consider three or four giga PCs with 2GB RAM running XP, although of course it would be possible bounce parts of your performance to wave before you continue working on more tracks. many of the wonderfull demos on our site have been made using a single GS-computer.
instead of trying to have all ca. 400.000 samples on your fingertips it would be more efficient to load selected articulations (eg. starting with basic all) and go into details while working on your piece.
also i would choose more disks holding 120-160GB than a single one with 200 or even more GB to reduce the latency while accessing too much files from a single disk - this would be definately the bottleneck working with a large number of tracks
christian
and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.