Apple Studio/Mini - What bits we need
 

The bandwidth depends on your setup. Do you plan on editing video within protools for example, even though they have apps just for that purpose. The bandwidth necessary to run stereo 44.1 k audio is around 1.4 mbps if I’m not mistaken. I’m too lazy to look it up again. Jfreak was good with those numbers and mathematical calculations. My spinning drive costs a fraction of a nvme and is rock solid. Slightly over 100 megs in speed which translates to over 150 mono tracks at 44.1 k. More than what you can throw at it for a fraction of the price as stated before. For samples, ssd runs fine off of thunderbolt. Don’t load too much samples. I also use an m1 on top of a cheese grater for the transition. I’m saving 3 grand off the computer setup alone. Runs rock solid under Big Sur, and fits just fine below the desk. Have Monterey on a laptop for tweaking and testing. So I’m riding the wave and cutting edge.


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Re: Apple Studio/Mini - What bits we need
 

Audio bandwidth is easy 44.1 kHz stereo say @ 32-bit float -> (2 x 44,100 x 32 / 8)/1024 = 344 kB per stereo track.

This is just a bare minimum it (at least historically) does not guarantee a working track count on a spinny HDD that meets that performance, the practical limits there have always historical been more capped by HDD seek performance. And disk cache changes lots of stuff, now with disk cache in many situations you can probably get away with recording to as a slow a HDD as you can find and things will work. Not that you should.

Re: Apple Studio/Mini - What bits we need
 

Its just storage. Say SFX library and Video streaming.


I agree 100% Eric. Everyon's obsessed with all this power and speed. But do they actually need it?...

Re: Apple Studio/Mini - What bits we need
 

I think seek time is underestimated, especially for sample streaming.

I’m sure Darryl will correct me if I’m wrong on this but.. another misconception is how the measured/quoted speeds of NVMe drives and storage solutions equates to audio/streaming performance. When you see numbers like up to 3500MB/s for a Samsung m.2 or 8000MB/s for a Sonnet m.2 PCIe adapter, those speeds are for reading one huge multi-GB file off disk. If you measure the speed with data chunks more realistic for streaming multiple audio files, the performance drops off rapidly.

VSL’s Synchron Player sample player measures the performance of your streaming drive to optimise the sample pre-load size. I think it does it with 64kB/s chunks and my Sonnet m.2 RAID card that reads 8000MB/s in Blackmagic Speedtest is now reading at 450 to 500MB/s. That’s still fast relative to 344kB per stereo track but when streaming many hundreds and sometimes thousands of sample voices, it soon adds up.