Vienna Symphonic Library Forum
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  • Best configuration for purley sample playback slave?

    Hi folks,

    I am looking at buying or building my first slave computer.  This computer will be exclusively for large orchestral sample libraries.  The vast majority will be Kontakt instances, but I'll also have East/West stuff.   I will not be hosting VST synths on the slave.

    I am currently running a Mac Pro 5.1 as my primary and I run Cubase.  

    I have seen lots of threads on this, but there seems to be a lot of different answers.  Specifically for sample playback, what are the most important things?  Do I want 10Gig Ethernet?  Do I want the fastest CPU or go for more Cores?  I know generally people say faster CPU is more important-but is that still the case with a sample playback slave?  I see some people here using a NAS, and that surprises me because they don't have much RAM.  

    I am considering building a system with several smaller (200 gig)  SSDs that are doubled and set to RAID 0 with a the different orchestral sections on each RAID array.  The idea would be that then brass would always stream from one SSD while strings was from another, etc.  

    I've been really frustrated that I can't get minimal latency while composing and streaming from VEP6 and I'd really like to get a lot closer to that goal.  


  • My opinion:

    Gigabit ethernet is sufficient

    More cores

    Forget RAID; get larger drives

    Your computer doesn't care if you're streaming a piccolo or a tuba; segragating by secion has no bearing on performance

    NAS is for storage, not hosting sample libraries in VEP


    Dorico, Notion, Sibelius, StudioOne, Cubase, Staffpad VE Pro, Synchon, VI, Kontakt Win11 x64, 64GB RAM, Focusrite Scarlett 18i20, August Forster 190
  • My thought is that with multiple drives and the sections split over them then the computer wouldn't be trying to access the same disc for several things at once....I'm not saying I'm correct, but that was my thinking. ..