To Slave or Not to Slave.. that is the ?

[WilliebSR]

I used to run a slave puter and used Vienna Instruments to link. Then processors got faster and I went to single with outboard raid for some sample libraries. The challenge now is my sample libraries are getting too big.

Now that the i7 processors have MOBO that accept Thunderbolt I'm thinking of going that route.

Any experiences you'd like to share? Advice?

Thanks in advance.

my siggy is a bit out of date

[musicman691]

Are you doing a new build? If so take a look at putting nvme storage on pcie slots provided you can get the sizes you need for those large libraries. It'll be the fastest option for drive access. It won't be cheap - that's for sure.

While I loved it when I ran a client/server setup with VEPro 6 there's something to be said for the simplicity of having one machine especially when it comes to system maintenance time.

[WilliebSR]

Thanks for responding. Yes, I'm doing a new build.

Going to try to address additional monitors, more ram, and more sample streaming for larger templates all in one fell swoop.

Good idea on NVME. I'll check and see if I can figure out how to compare that speed to the thunderbolt's on the pci bus. Had already decided to use an M.2 for the OS. Have that on the current system, and as I recall that resulted in some noticeable improvements.

I'm liking the looks of the i7-8700k because it adds two more cores and its way cheaper than the extreme versions with that many cores, but the motherboards available look to be focused on gamers. Seems like more attention to having blinky lights than data transfer.. The exception is the ability on some MOBO to have a thunderbolt card and the additional pcie lanes... (which is good????)

I did find one board that had an additional two front SATA ports which seems important because on most boards when you add M.2 you lose access to some of those ports.

So... bigger drives on the SATA bus OR... some type of off board box that connects via thunderbolt. OR M.2 drives on a pci card OR some combination

I'm leaning toward the combination plan. I was posting to make sure I wasn't shooting myself in the foot. Hoping that some of you guys have already tried something like this, and wouldn't mind chiming in.