Writing 8 Tracks at Once on Mac Mini

L

LouCipher

Logician
What type of External Hard Drive should be used with Logic to ensure ability to record 8 tracks at a time...?

I just purchased from the Apple Refurb store a 2.6Ghz 2012 Mac Mini with 1TB hard drive and 4GB RAM and want to put Logic Pro on the internal 2.5" 5400 RPM drive and write the tracks to an external drive over USB 3.0 to a 7200 RPM, 64MB cache, 3.5" drive.

I will get an 8GB DDR3-1600 MHz SODIMM PC3-12800  CL9 (or should it be lower?) and get the machine to 10GB RAM (any recommended specs for the RAM?)

I see G.SKILL SQ Series 8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL11 SODIMM Memory (F3-1600C11S-8GSQ) for $50 at Canada Computers and wondering if there is something wrong with this as the price is low...?


Will this work writing 8 tracks at once...?  Anyone try this regularly...?

I have read how an external drive would never write as fast as an internal drive because of the translator software on the external drive's controller to convert USB3.0 signals to hard drive IO language (i.e. data/info).

Should I have purchased the 2.3GHz Mac Mini Server version that has two internal 5400 RPM drives to write the data at that speed instead to ensure 8 tracks at a time can get written successfully to the drive without "Disk Too Slow" errors (or whatever the exact error message is)...

Thanks for your advice!
 
Hi GDoubleYou - Kirkland - nice city! Used to work at Microsoft for 16 years so visited Seattle many times and Kirkland is really nice. Was there watching OJ on the run back in 1994! LOL! 🙂 I've completely switched to Mac since 2009 - love it!! Anyway...

16GB RAM, eh? Was hoping 10GB was enough as I am trying to get a friend who does hobby studio stuff to switch to a Mac and he is on a budget.

They have an ART Tubefire FW400 so got him a "6 pin male 9 pin male" firewire adapter cable to plug into the Mac Mini since it only has FW800.

Good to know you feel writing 8 tracks to an external USB 3.0 drive will work.

They have these old ADAT drives (Fostex D-160) and want to move 8 tracks at a time to the Mac Mini. And when recording drums and a band live off the floor want 8 tracks at a time.

Thanks for your advice.
 
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