A few questions about the adequacy of the 21.5” iMac for PT11.3.

[VRW]

Hi Matthew,

if you stay with the 21,5" iMac let me once again highly recommend just going with the 512GB Flash drive because regarding to your needs...

Originally Posted by mattskii

I’m doing home recording. At the moment, I’m running three tracks consecutively, but intend to want to be up to eight at the same time.

...it´s the most convenient, fastest solution and you would not need any additional, external drive anymore.
Because 512GB will be enough storage space for your needs for sure you just can run your whole Pro Tools work from that one and only super fast drive.

If getting the 256GB Flash drive you probably will run out of storage space sooner or late (with the required 20% left free space on the drive) and you will
have to use a 2nd, external hard drive for your Pro Tools sessions+audio files.

The 21,5" iMac with the 512GB Flash drive would be $1799.- all together but you would not need anything else to buy as for the computer.
If buying the 256GB Flash drive it will be $1499.- but you will need another external drive which again will cost around $200-300.- (USB 3+SSD).
So it would make sense to go for the faster, more convenient and hassle free internal 512GB Flash drive as it will be the same costs approximately.

The 1TB 5400rpm HDD and the Fusion Drive you do not want to buy as they both will not work with Pro Tools Native as mentioned earlier.


All the best to you,


VRW




Mac Mini i7Quad, 16GB Ram, MBP Mid 2012 2,5GHz i5, 16GB Ram, Mac OSX 10.10.3 Yosemite, Apogee Quartet+Duet 2
Genelec Active, Yamaha NS10, Pro Tools 11.3.1, Logic 10.1.1, Waves, MCDSP, Duende Native, HOFA, IK Multimedia, NI etc.