Master & slave set up with external thunderbolt hard drives.

[Rosella]

Hi I'm looking at my options for upgrading my DAW and have a simple query that I hope someone can answer. Essentially I'm looking at getting a new quad core i7 Macbook Pro (16gb/250gb) as the master and a used quad core i7 Mac Mini (16gb/250gb) for the slave devices. The plan is to store all my VIs' core data and sample libraries on external thunderbolt SSDs. This way, as my instrument arsenal grows I can simply add extra SSDs. Does anyone know for sure that it is OK to set things up like this? Is VEPro able to draw RAM and processing power from the slave machines even if those machines do not actually contain the core libraries for the instruments? Because if VEPro requires the instruments' data to be stored in the same device that it is drawing RAM and processing power from then I will need to ditch the Mac Mini slave option and consider a PC that has better future upgrade options.

[adriaantaylor]

I too would like to know about the used mac mini i7 quad's with ext. TB SSD.

I am tempted to go this route as well.  My other option was a mini hackintosh which i can find hardware and ram much cheaper.  I am tunning 5 or so intances per slave with 9 fully loaded play plugins in each instance. 

Thoughts?

[adriaantaylor]

To answer your original posting.. I don't see why you can't store the library samples on the external TB drive. Id say that is just fine. You might have to point some of the plugins to their respective libraries unless your installing them from scratch to that location.  Should be fine. Keep the OS and the plugins on the internal drive and the sample data and such on the ext. TB SSD. Thats what I'm planing on doing.