I have a 750GB SATA drive with 32MB cache in my new rig and it's smoking fast. There's plenty of room for...well, everything, so I figured I don't need a seperate drive for recording anymore. When I used a slower (but seperate) harddrive in my old system I never saw the HD meter move at all. Has anyone actually experienced drop outs when working with only one drive on a modern system? I never use more than 30 tracks and they're never playing at the same time, so it's not really a heavy load. I have 4GB RAM as well, and plan on upgrading to 8GB soon. Guess that would help.

It depends on how many big sounds and audio tracks are you going to use. For example if you plan to use something like Viena or any other big library at the same time you use some audio tracks I would suggest a separate hard disk for samples. Anyway is a good idea to have a dedicated drive for samples and another one for audio tracks. Depending on how big are your projects you may or not have problems, but definetively separate hard disk drives are an advantage.

On the other hand, there's not a single DAW for mac able to use more than 3.2GB so, you'll be wasting your money by buying another 4gb, unless you have your daw fully loaded at the same time you have dozens or other programs opened. (The OS can use +4GB, but every individual program can only use 3.2gb at the moment)

But have you actually tried using only one drive and had drop-outs? Has anyone? The disk meter never moved on my old system. I had a seperate drive for samples + audio then, but the system was less than half as fast as my new one. I think I'll be alright with my single 750GB drive. I tend to stay below 30 tracks, really.


True. I do tend to have other apps running alongside Logic/Cubase, but I think 4GB is enough for me.

Recording & streaming are always better on separate discs for best performance