Need advice from someone who knows these kinds of things, as I’ve now spent dozens of hours going back and forth on this. I currently have an early 2009 MacBook Pro 17” 2.66 GHz dual-core i7, 8 GB of RAM and a 300 GB drive. I had been hoping to get a new Mac Pro this June, to build a DAW, if the Mac Pro had been seriously updated. Now I think I’ll wait until “later in 2013”, as I can afford one major purchase like a Mac Pro this decade, but I don’t want to be out of date before I’ve even started and it seems there’s a good chance the promised 2013 iteration of the Mac Pro will be a serious update.
So for the meantime I was thinking I'd use my 2009 MacBook Pro, and I was thinking of getting a Mac mini server as a slave, for its quad core. If I understand correctly, since more cores are always better, this won’t be wasted even if in a couple of years I upgrade to the Mac Pro of the future.
For portability purposes my employer is also getting me a new MacBook Air, which I hadn’t intended to use for any audio/composing, but now I’m wondering if it might not be better as an interim solution for my planned DAW. The 13” MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM is also dual-core like my MacBook Pro, though the clock speed is a bit slower. The advantage, it seems to me, is the ports! It has 2 USB 3 ports, and a Thunderbolt connector, so I’m guessing it will connect much faster to the Mac mini server, and I'm thinking that is an important consideration.
Here’s what I’ll be running in the DAW, never in epically large arrangements (maybe 12-18 tracks, occasionally a few more) and never all at once: Logic as the host, VSL Special Edition and Vienna Instruments Pro, some Native Instruments stuff (Reaktor and some samples), the occasional SampleModelling instruments, Pianoteq, Arturia Minimoog, Applied Acoustics Guitar plug-ins, LMSO (“Lil’ Miss Scale Oven”) for controlling alternate tunings, and Altiverb. Sometimes I will need to run ProTools sessions that incorporate Melodyne, for retuning monophonic audio tracks. I have a simple Mbox2 for audio in/out.
Here are the specific questions:
1) What do you think, could either the new MacBook Air with 8 GB, or my old MacBook Pro with 8 GB, plus a new quad-core Mac Mini with 8 GB, pull this off for a while (just as a hobbyist btw--I work as a musician, but I don’t earn my living as an arranger or anything like that) until the new Mac Pros appear (hopefully)?
2) If I tried to use the MacBook Air connected to the quad-core Mac mini server, would I end up using the fast Thunderbolt connection between them, or is there a better option? If I used my old MacBook Pro, would I network it with the slave over ethernet? What’s the usual protocol?
3) Do you think Thunderbolt hubs will materialise soon? If I connect the slave to a new MacBook Air over Thunderbolt, I don’t know how I’d also connect to my 30” Cinema Display, which uses up one Thunderbolt/mini display port AND one firewire/USB port. The only hub I could find mentioned online was the $400 Belkin, and it’s not even released yet.
4) Is the drive on the Mac mini server fast enough for serving all those samples, or would there be a benefit in investing in an external SSD for faster access times?
5) A general question: does Logic, or any other host, care whether the total number of cores available is within one machine (like a Mac Pro with 12 cores) or spread out over a host computer and one or two slaves? What difference needs to be factored in, performance-wise, between these two scenarios?
Have I forgotten anything dumb? As you’ll notice, I am a real noob here and I really appreciate any help. From seeing the descriptions of some of your monster systems that I see being thrown around, it’s obvious to me that I won’t be doing any large arrangements for now. But--am I totally dreaming that it’s possible to get *anything* done with the interim system I’ve descibed?
Sorry for the epic post, and I will truly appreciate any advice from the experienced members here.