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@BeatlesForever said:

Some days I wake up thinking maxing out ram can free the cpu from the stress, but other days I fear increasing ram will only lead to bottlenecks and issues...so I'm asking to the experts here if anybody ever experimented this, or if anybody here knows if "de facto" whatever boost of ram can help in this very case, without shade of a doubt.

read what I wrote before !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yep Cyril you wrote this:

Clicks pops and hanging notes are produced because of I/O bottleneck and "not enought Memory"

but I yet not understand if both things are needed to be corrected or just THAT boost of ram I am thinking to purchase can solve the issue...in other words I yet haven't heard :

"with 96 Gb alone, you are more than done"

this is what I want to hear from you, only if it's true, of course..

..that's why I am still doubtful , Cyril

...or if such stellar template I'm trying to fulfill is simply utopia and impossible to realize with a single machine of the specs I have provided..

How do you want me to say : buy this or that ! somebody that will say that will be stupid and will fool you

You must test using your templates. (I can test your template when I return from holiday after 15/08)

In K4/K5 there are some sounds that are more gready than others

VSL depends of your template, if you use MIR, if MIR is in stereo, 5.1 or 7.1 and needs a balance between a lot of ram, fast cpu and VERY fast disk I/O

Also with Kontakt I will test if it is not better to use Kontakt in standalone ! 

It's a trial and error !

If I was you I will start to put my Libs on a raid 0 of SSD and see how your system react e.i. see if swapp is still used, I will then reduce pre-load buffer until swap is not any more used, if I still get click and pops I will put more memory

Thanks Cyril for this last message, in other words you are telling me to upgrade my system in order to make it balanced & stronger in all its aspects, not just about the ram...

...and I can understand this is your strong starting assumption , and oc I would follow this way too, but before, assuming I don't use MIR , and I am not yet setup for surround, I need to know:

- seeing I LOVE all my K libs, I bought a lot of them and I need to use them all,  how much will cost me to replace all my 3 x half full 1 Tb 7200 HDs from which I stream all my "treasures", with 3 x half Terabyte SSDs ?? (I wanna STILL  play with all my libs & toys, I'm like a baby)

- how  to make a bloody RAID 0 of them all ( the word "RAID 0" makes me tremble of fear lol, sound like a mortal weapon to my ears)

- in case all of these upgrades won't cut to make my template works as I expect, will I still have 1300 $$$ to max out the ram ?

- in case maxing out the ram won't cut again, will you come to my funeral to mourn me??

About replicating my template, I don't know how you can do this, assuming you probably don't have the K libs I have (probably you mostly use VSL), nor you use Pro Tools 9 CPTK2 as DAW ...anyway it would be a great loss of time and health to do this for me, so for God's sake, DON'T DO !!

....Life is beutiful my friends....

and yes...some K libs are really like those peeps that don't eat for two weeks...stunningly HUNGRY !!

 there's also to say PT9 seems to not support RAID, nor Usb...the only accepted connections are internal Sata drives ad FW800 disks with oxford chipsets...instead, from v10, also RAID is accepted...

...at least for what I know, please correct me if I'm wrong....

I believe it was PT8 that had no OSX Raid 0 support. 

PT9 and 10 are fine...

 Thank you guys ! I too have a problem regarding my orchestral (70 x VI 2, Kontakt and Play) template but I never though it could be an harddrive problem...

All my libraries, projects, third party VSTi are on 1 x 7200 SATA II drive lol

It'll be time for some SSD !

One hard drive is never good... But what is the problem?

 I don't really know if adding hard drive will help to that but on some big templates, I have pops, clicks when several instruments play together. In this kind of projects, I use Play, Kontakt and of course VI2. So, the only thing I have to do is increase the MIR engine latency (up to 8000 in some case !)

So, I hope I could find a solution :)

Sonophile,

Speaking of harddrives.

I'd say you need to spread the load acoross multiple harddrives...

SSD's will improve many things, including  how your 72 gigs of RAM, pre loads data.

Still, there's nothing wrong with good old fashioned HDD's, provided you have enough of them.

And Raid 0 is always a plus.

As for your clicks and pops.

• How many instruments in your "Big Template"?
• What's the latency / buffer in your DAW?
• When increasing the latency in MIR, are you happy with what you hear?
• Are you using Vienna Suite or any other plugins which have adjustable latency / buffers?

@Mike B Studios said:

And Raid 0 is always a plus.

Not really. Most of the time, sample playback is limited by access speed, which limits simultaneous voice triggering. When combining several drives into a RAID-0, they all have to synchronize their data transfer, eliminating the benefit of using several drives.

The best performance ought to be have when striping the sample library up manually over your sample drives, 001.dat on drive 1, 002.dat on drive 2, 003.dat on drive 3 and so on. But it would be quite annoying. SImply distributing the sample content randomly over the drives should be enough.

Before going to a raid of SSD I had a raid of 6 x 32 GB Raptor 10 000 rpm with a Rocket raid card, it was day and night compared to an HD non raided

Martin did you do trial with Rocket Raid cards ?

@Mike B Studios said:

And Raid 0 is always a plus.

Not really. Most of the time, sample playback is limited by access speed, which limits simultaneous voice triggering. When combining several drives into a RAID-0, they all have to synchronize their data transfer, eliminating the benefit of using several drives.

The best performance ought to be have when striping the sample library up manually over your sample drives, 001.dat on drive 1, 002.dat on drive 2, 003.dat on drive 3 and so on. But it would be quite annoying. SImply distributing the sample content randomly over the drives should be enough.

Martin,

I believe one of my suggestions was simply spreading the sample load across multiple hard drives.

To your point, (for sample playback) how many drives in Raid 0 would you say represent too many? 4... 6?

I would think 2 drives are fine, or am I mistaken?

@Cyril said:

Before going to a raid of SSD I had a raid of 6 x 32 GB Raptor 10 000 rpm with a Rocket raid card, it was day and night compared to an HD non raided

Cyril,

Was it night and day compared to 1 HDD, or 6?

@Cyril said:

Before going to a raid of SSD I had a raid of 6 x 32 GB Raptor 10 000 rpm with a Rocket raid card, it was day and night compared to an HD non raided

Cyril,

Was it night and day compared to 1 HDD, or 6?

What it is said on professionnals forum is that you multiply by 1.5 the speed of reading by each disk added.

For six disk

Speed of the disk x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5

This is of course limited by the speed of the SATA channel 

Splitting manually you libs across HD, this is hell ! Raid is doing it for you !