Hi Mike and Jonathan,

Well, I've made a few decisions and bought some stuff already, and I'm pretty sure of what I'll buy to complete things. Again, I'm going to try to do everything with a single 12 core machine, but I'm leaving open the option of a second machine (perhaps splitting some of the things I'm buying between them).

I ordered a 12 Core 2.93Ghz Mac (due to arrive on August 30). I ordered it with a single 512GB SSD. That seems to make sense, because from what I've heard, Apple expects things to be restored to factory configuration if you need service. I then bought 48Gb of memory from OWC (six 8 Gb sticks). This will keep me at triple channel, running memory as fast as possible. I also got an OWC Blu-Ray drive for my second optical drive compartment. I bought two 200GB OWC SSD RE drives as work drives (more than enough storage for the amount of projects I like to keep on active drives). The RE drives have the SandForce controller, show lots of writing and rewriting shouldn't degrade their performance over time. I also bought a RocketRAID SATA III 6Gb/s, four port PCIe card (Apple has a competitive price on these). I also bought a four drive SATA 3.0 enclosure. 

Now to finish things off, I think I'm going to buy four of the new Crucial SSD SATA III 6Gb/s 256Gb drives. The performance of these seems pretty astounding (355Mb/s). I probably won't RAID them unless I get EW's HS which is 310Gb, and won't fit on a single drive. I'll easily be able to spread my 540Gb of VSL content over these drives. I'll also have room to put some libraries on my system SSD. Finally, in my remaining computer drive slot, I'll either put a 600Gb Velociraptor, or a 2Tb Seagate drive to hold all my additional, not so frequently used libraries. 

Anyway, I think this will be good to start, and allow me to do some torture testing to see how things hold up. I'm thinking that Logic doesn't use all the cores, but if I open additional VEPro instances outside of Logic, they will use those cores. Won't they? The other thing I'll undoubtedly need to experiment with is whether to run Logic at 32bit or 64bit. Hopefully, even if I'm running Logic at 32 bit, I can still run instances of VEPro at 64 bits. I guess I'll find out soon enough. ;)

Whether or not I add an additional machine will be determined by how easy it is to swamp this machine, and/or how stable the machine is with lots of stuff running. With SATA III SSDs and 1333 triple channel memory, I'd hope that loading large templates would be a lot faster. We'll see about that, too. 

Obviously, the other thing that would entice me to add a second machine would be if VSL comes out with a version of MIR for the Mac (hopefully one that can run audio and MIDI via LAN, with no additional interfaces). 

FWIW, my audio interfaces are two Metric Halo ULN-8's (which I have yet to turn on). The ULN-8's have a lot of onboard DSP which will take pressure off the Mac. It's been years now since I've done a major update. Still running my PT Accel HD6 system with four 192 interfaces on a G5 DP 2.5, plus one additional DP G4 and four Pentium 4's in server racks. Antiques!!! All that stuff makes a lot of racket in the machine room, uses lots of electricity and causes my HVAC to run hard during the summer. The quiet of the new system is going to be eerie. I think I'l get used to it pretty fast, though. :) I'm also looking forward to being able to put my whole system to sleep. At the moment, getting my current system turned on, booted up, shells loaded, and content loaded is a major chore. 

Wow, that's a heck of a system.  It would be much appreciated if you could report back how it works and what parts of the system get taxed and if any end up being overkill.

Yeah, but still pretty reasonably priced considering the technology, IMO. I remember the days back when a 10Mb cost $10,000 in 1980 dollars (yes, Mb, not Gb). I remember paying around $9,000 for a Mac Quadra 900 and monitor (and that was through a school discount). The same money sure buys a LOT more today.

I load all the articulations of full SE Plus + Appassionata  and a few "download instrument" in a 13 GB, 3 Ghz early 2008 Macpro (but my buffers are set to 1024)

I use a Raid 0 of 6 x 32 gb raptors.

My VSL instruments are in 6 x VE in a VE PRO SERVER 64 Bit

I use Logic.

The 8 CPU of my MACpro are equaly used

As Logic does not have much to do (a few EQ and 2x Space designer), it is reporting very little load 

I will come back to what Mike said about Logic and the 8 core.

Logic is buggy on that side because it is dedicating cores for specific operations.

Before using VE pro server I was using IAC and a VE of 80 instrument. I was routing the audio in/out of the VE thru Adat out/in

Using Inputs in Logic the load is on the 8th core, same with a Space designer on a 5.1 output

in some configurations other user are reporting overload on the 7th Cpu other on the 4th (not sure if it is the 3rd or the 4th)

Raid v.s. JBOD :

I gain 10 minutes (20 mn instead of 30) when I load my VE PRO server from raid 

As VE PRO server is loading it's samples sequentially putting VSL on different disk will not help at all.

I dont know if you gain polyphony using a Raid 0

SSD :

I am also looking at that, but I am scared that it wont help much, because VSL is taking ages to load its samples as they require a lot of processing before been able to be used by VE PRO

The big problem is which one, (see my post at : http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/p/26070/172603.aspx#172603 )

Best 

Cyril

Interesting information, Cyril. I wonder what would happen if you had more than one instance of VEPro concurrently loading from multiple (i.e. non-RAIDed) disks.

I really want to get around having to wait 10-20-30 or more minutes to load large templates. That's a real productivity killer.

In my current set-up, my four PCs load modest sized templates from two drive RAID 0 configurations. It takes a while, but not an absurdly long time. Then again, the templates aren't that big. I use the wait time to practice trumpet. If I need to start waiting a half hour for things to load on the new system, I'm going to get REALLY good on trumpet. ;)

Cyril,

Reread your post. Just so I'm clear, are you using one machine or two? Is your VE Pro on the same computer as Logic?

@Lee Blaske said:

Cyril,

Reread your post. Just so I'm clear, are you using one machine or two? Is your VE Pro on the same computer as Logic?

I have One Macpro that is running Logic and VE PRO server

I have tried to launch 2 x VE Pro server duplicating the app renaming it, I did not manage !

I have suggest Karel from VSL to explore parallel loading of the different VE, no answer !

In a recent mail Karel said the VI PRO will improve loading and will load in background

Best

Cyril

@Cyril said:

The 8 CPU of my MACpro are equaly used

As Logic does not have much to do (a few EQ and 2x Space designer), it is reporting very little load 

Do you know if your combo of Logic and VEP is using the hyperthreading cores?  Logic seems to have the ability to use them but is limited to eight cores total.

In general, the inability of multiple plugins to load at the same time (particularly coming from different drives, that may be one case where raid speeds things up a bit - SSD definitely will) is an annoying limitation.

not sure about hyperthreading ; does it comes only on 2009 Macpro ?

You're right, HT is only on the 2009+ models, sorry I didn't read your post carefully enough.

I would be curious if VEP uses the HT cores on macs that have it, if anyone knows.

I have order today 3 x 64 GB Crucial to make a raid 0 for VSL and a 256 GB Crucial for VM en working area

I will post benchmarks end of next week

As promised I have post my ssd results