The hard drive on my mac mini (quad core i7, 16gb ram) is filling up, so I'm going to have to get an external hard drive for samples somewhere down the road, if not pretty soon. But I also still have a macbook from late 2011 (duo core i7, 4gb ram), and am wondering whether to just put the next drive I get in there, and use it as a slave (I'd probably have to upgrade ram too if I went that route). One potential disadvantage I'd see in doing that is that it has less virtual cores, which I thought might be a bottleneck, and made me think I should stick with keeping everything on the more powerful more recent mac mini.
Also, do slave computers work better if their OS is on an SSD, or is it okay for the slave computer's samples to be on an external ssd with a regular speed hard drive for the OS, since I'm only using them for playing the samples?
At what point do you know whether getting a slave would definitely be beneficial to what you're doing? I could probably see myself doing that at some point down the road, but I don't want to sink money into doing that when it turns out everything I'm using can still be done on one computer.
Thanks in advance