DP + VEPRO + THUNERBOLT 2 DRIVE + NEW MAC PRO

[c0mp0ser]

Hi all,
For 2 months now I have been using a new composing template that I created, which is 100% hosted on the new Mac Pro. All samples are hosted in many instances of Kontakt in VEPRO with the new MAS plugin. It's a relatively large template, taking up about 64 gigs of RAM.
Now, the samples are on an external GRaid Studio hard drive, which is equipped with Thuderbolt 2. But I am encountering much sample dropout, and drive bottlenecks. I'm not really layering that many things together, you notice it, for example, when you have some staccato strings going, and then layer some sustain elements. This is just awful, and I'm very sad that I could not get it working all on the same computer. The buffer is already at 512.
Is there anything that can be done to resolve? Anyone have a similar setup? Are we not there yet? Do we still need external PC's for large orchestral templates?

[oknussen]

Thanks for posting this. I've been considering going to a similar system and have wondered how it would perform. I am sorry you are experiencing these problems - I do hope there is a solution and will follow this thread carefully.

[James Steele]

I'm wondering how much TOTAL RAM you have in your Mac if your samples are taking up 64 GB?

[mikehalloran]

I'm wondering how much TOTAL RAM you have in your Mac if your samples are taking up 64 GB?

Yikes!

The buffer is already at 512

What happens when you make that larger?

[Elektroakoustika]

Is the GRaid drive using SSD's or HDD's? With such a big template I can't imagine running without SSD's.

Also, I assume you're using Kontakt for the majority of your samples. Is Kontakt's CPU meter spiking or the Disk meter spiking when you have these dropouts? Have you tried changing the preload buffer in Kontakt?

FWIW, I'm running a fairly large template (around 32GB) on my 09 Mac Pro where I have an SSD as the boot drive and an internal SSD as the samples drive (still running off SATA II... eek!). I have found that I needed to mess with the Kontakt preload buffer before I could get it working without dropouts/clicks.

[cody]

Just curious which way you went with the Kontakt preload? On my mobile rig I'm running most samples off a RAID SSD setup with Thunderbolt and have some dropouts as well. Tried the buffer very low at first to preserve RAM but then went back to default.