How Much CPU and RAM is Enough?

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uOpt wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 8:24 pm I think we agree to disagree.

I would urge you to review the DRM systems of the software and libraries you use. With a dead boot drive and a full reinstall you might lose quite a bit and cause a wait period until you can reach the original vendors. I also don't quite follow why backing up multiple drives is supposed to be easier than a single one.
Ivybirds is not wrong in this case. RAID 0 (disk striping) is a technology based entirely upon what Ivybirds was saying. The general idea is that multiple drives working in parallel to retrieve the data through their own bus, is faster than one drive retrieving data serially. Thus faster reads and writes.

However, it is also dependent upon what you plan to do with it. If you are only going to be reading or writing one track of audio at a time, all of the extra technology is moot. If you are going to need to retrieve lots of data and write many tracks at the same time, a single hard drive may not be sufficient unless it has fast enough reading and writing capabilities.

Truth of the matter is, that a lot of work used to be able to be done on old spinner hard drives as long as they had an RPM of at least 7200. Most of the modern SATA SSDs go way beyond the speed of what a spinner hard drive at 7200 RPM can do. The M.2 NVME SSDs are much faster than the SATA SSDs. The average user is unlikely to notice the difference between a system using a single drive, and a system using multiple drives. But, if it ever came down to a very heavy workload, the computer with a single drive has a much lower chance of managing the work load than the computer with multiple drives.

The easiest way to check and see if your motherboard will manage multiple drives properly, is to look for a motherboard that supports RAID. A motherboard that properly supports RAID and has multiple M.2 slots for hard drives will more than likely work for what is needed.
Vendor‑Dependent Copy Protection: Customers lose. Pirates win.:mad:
(Also: I'm Accused of lying about Linux—it boots, runs my pro audio workflow, stays stable, updates--though yearly dismissed as “niche”. Yet I'm the deluded one.)
:roll:

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Motherboard based RAID sucks, though.

I'm not sure when RAID entered the room. I support using RAID as it gives an actual speedup, it was just not a topic so far. And it needs to be a decent software RAID, not the garbage the motherboard offers,

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To answer the OP question, get as much RAM and the fastest CPU and SSD you can. The less you have, the less you can do at one time. Some of us have been on KVRAudio since it began. I've got an adult son that wouldn't be born for another five years after I joined KVRAudio. People were making music just fine back then. Even a low end budget computer of today can do as much (or more) than we were able to do back then.
Vendor‑Dependent Copy Protection: Customers lose. Pirates win.:mad:
(Also: I'm Accused of lying about Linux—it boots, runs my pro audio workflow, stays stable, updates--though yearly dismissed as “niche”. Yet I'm the deluded one.)
:roll:

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uOpt wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 9:53 pm Motherboard based RAID sucks, though.

I'm not sure when RAID entered the room. I support using RAID as it gives an actual speedup, it was just not a topic so far. And it needs to be a decent software RAID, not the garbage the motherboard offers,
According to whom?

EDIT: Hardware RAID generally costs more than software RAID but may offer better performance.

The reason I brought RAID up, is that it is an example of a technology that uses multiple drives to increase performance and safety--which is what Ivybirds was referring to with his methodology of putting Windows on one drive, Samples on another, and software on the third.

...but now we are starting to go off topic. :)
Vendor‑Dependent Copy Protection: Customers lose. Pirates win.:mad:
(Also: I'm Accused of lying about Linux—it boots, runs my pro audio workflow, stays stable, updates--though yearly dismissed as “niche”. Yet I'm the deluded one.)
:roll:

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Right. If you were to put the 3 drives into RAID0 you would actually get a speedup. If you put 3 different things on those 3 standalone drives you don't get a speedup unless you use them at the same time. The OS drive for example is extremely unlikely to be heavily used during music operations as all the stuff you need from there is already in RAM. It is wasted performance-wise.

And if your OS drive is sitting in the only full-speed M.2 slot it is a double waste. Similar for the software drive. You won't touch it after initial loading. If you really want 3 drives then put them in RAID0 where they speed up everything. It also makes backup easier as you have fewer filesystems.

If you don't believe me observe `iostat` during loading.

(All this is assuming that you have enough RAM)

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audiojunkie wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 9:54 pm To answer the OP question, get as much RAM and the fastest CPU and SSD you can.
But likely you won't really need more than 16GB ram & 1 TB SSD to do whatever you can imagine.
Fear is a bad advisor.
We are the KVR collective. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Image
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uOpt wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 10:10 pm Right. If you were to put the 3 drives into RAID0 you would actually get a speedup. If you put 3 different things on those 3 standalone drives you don't get a speedup unless you use them at the same time. The OS drive for example is extremely unlikely to be heavily used during music operations as all the stuff you need from there is already in RAM. It is wasted performance-wise.

And if your OS drive is sitting in the only full-speed M.2 slot it is a double waste. Similar for the software drive. You won't touch it after initial loading. If you really want 3 drives then put them in RAID0 where they speed up everything. It also makes backup easier as you have fewer filesystems.

If you don't believe me observe `iostat` during loading.

(All this is assuming that you have enough RAM)
But in the real world I get better performance, better data security, less risk of a total catastrophic failure and easier back ups and I get all of that for less cost

There is more to PC performance than theoretical disk read and write speeds that are printed on the box

If you have multiple M.2 drives and your OS drive is the first one and it is idle that will mean the others down the chain are faster but even if they are slower if it takes 0.4 seconds to pull up that file instead of 0.3 seconds is it going to really matter?

If you are loading a 5gb video file in 6 seconds instead of 5.5 will it matter? It's not like it's 1989 and we are loading floppies

And I want my OS to be on the absolute fastest drive and have the absolute fastest route to the CPU. That way my OS boots up faster and if Windows decides on its own to do something in the background it can do what it wants and not hit the hard drives my other stuff is on

My entire philosophy in this is to have multiple less costly drives instead of one larger expensive drive. Compare the cost of an 8 TB NVMe drive to the cost of a 1TB drive for the OS/C drive, a 2 TB drive for the Software and a 4 TB drive for the digital assets, I saved hundreds of dollars by getting three drives over a single 8 TB drive when I built my PC last fall

I probably could have easily gotten away with a 1TB drive for my software drive when I built it last fall but a 2TB drive was hardly any more as I got a good price. The 8TB drives were crazy stupid expensive

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The 8 TB sn850x went for $550 on Amazon just recently.

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BertKoor wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 10:21 pm
audiojunkie wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 9:54 pm To answer the OP question, get as much RAM and the fastest CPU and SSD you can.
But likely you won't really need more than 16GB ram & 1 TB SSD to do whatever you can imagine.
Fear is a bad advisor.
Fair enough. But in my defense, I thought I had made that pretty clear when I was talking about systems in the old days with their 7200 RPM spinner hard drives and still doing just fine. :)
Vendor‑Dependent Copy Protection: Customers lose. Pirates win.:mad:
(Also: I'm Accused of lying about Linux—it boots, runs my pro audio workflow, stays stable, updates--though yearly dismissed as “niche”. Yet I'm the deluded one.)
:roll:

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uOpt wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 11:01 pm The 8 TB sn850x went for $550 on Amazon just recently.
It's $623 at the moment
Screenshot_20250220-201457.jpg
The 1TB is $85, the 2TB is $147, and the 4TB is $299

So all in the three drives would be $531. That's almost $100 cheaper
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IvyBirds wrote: Fri Feb 21, 2025 1:21 am
uOpt wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 11:01 pm The 8 TB sn850x went for $550 on Amazon just recently.
It's $623 at the moment

Screenshot_20250220-201457.jpg

The 1TB is $85, the 2TB is $147, and the 4TB is $299

So all in the three drives would be $531. That's almost $100 cheaper
Yeah, but for 1 TB less. The cost per TB is virtually identical.

And for increasing your risk of a disk breakage taking your whole music playing environment down by a factor of 3. You distributed things over all 3 disks in a way that the sampler stops working when any one of the 3 disks fails.

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uOpt wrote: Fri Feb 21, 2025 1:44 am
IvyBirds wrote: Fri Feb 21, 2025 1:21 am
uOpt wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 11:01 pm The 8 TB sn850x went for $550 on Amazon just recently.
It's $623 at the moment

Screenshot_20250220-201457.jpg

The 1TB is $85, the 2TB is $147, and the 4TB is $299

So all in the three drives would be $531. That's almost $100 cheaper
Yeah, but for 1 TB less. The cost per TB is virtually identical.

And for increasing your risk of a disk breakage taking your whole music playing environment down by a factor of 3. You distributed things over all 3 disks in a way that the sampler stops working when any one of the 3 disks fails.
Wow that's the leap you are making? You are saying putting everything on one drive that will work 3X as hard and run hotter in the process, quite literally putting all your eggs in one basket is the safer option

Wow

You do realize you said earlier that the OS drive wouldn't be working very hard, does that make that drive more or less likely to fail? If it did fail, which is unlikely but possible I have my old PC with Windows 11 and pretty much all my DAWs and all of the plugins I use already installed on that ready to go. The back up drive which is attached to the network that automatically backs up all my samples and stuff is also ready to go. My old back up PC is three years old, and also set up with three drives. I use it on my network as an AudioGridder server so I can offload plugins to it's CPU for things like Diva, as a result everything is updated regularly

As I said earlier I back up my third drive with all my samples, photos, and videos on it automatically. So if that drive failed I would be back up and running in seconds as everything is backed up on a external drive that's already connected to the network

If my Software drive failed and I was on some kind of deadline I have lots of space on the other two drives to reinstall them. It would be an inconvenience but I would be back up and running in very short order on my main PC or just use my backup PC

I had a catastrophic hard drive failure many years ago when I only ran one drive. I am probably more prepared for the scenario of a drive failure than most. One of my absolute biggest mistakes back then was putting all my digital eggs in one hard drive basket and when that singular drive crashed I lost everything

Having one drive with everything on it is a terrible idea if you do A/V production and creation

My son is an electrician, I have a whole home surge protector, a large UPS backup battery system for my studio and a whole home generator

Outside of a fire or tornado I am good

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audiojunkie wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 5:15 pm
maanga wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 11:50 pm When the GPU is built in the CPU, it shares the main memory, may be up to 16 GB.
Always use a dedicated graphics card.

I use 3 drives. One for the programs, One for the samples and the third for all backups.
This is an essential one that not many people are aware of. One may ask, why do we need to buy a graphics card for music making? This here is the reason!
The flip side of that is with a separate GPU you run a higher risk of DPC latency issues.

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I just wanted to thank everyone for their thoughtful suggestions. After considering a lot of options, and saving up some money, I just finished putting together a system with the following:

Ryzen 9 9950X CPU (air-cooled, with a large twin-tower air cooler)

MSI motherboard with X870 chipset (To get USB4, more PCIe lanes, & other niceties)

One WD SN850X 4TB NVMe drive (I'm sure I'll eventually add more.)

64GB of 6000-DDR5 RAM

It's tucked away inside a BeQuiet! case, and powered by an 850W BeQuiet! power supply. Unless I'm stress-testing the system with a heavy load, I don't even notice the sound of the four case fans, dual CPU fans, or the power supply fan.

I don't have a dedicated graphics card, but that isn't a problem for my DAW work at all. I might get a low-end to mid-tier graphics card in the future, to enhance photo and video editing.

I built it over the weekend, and I'm absolutely delighted by how well it turned out. :hyper:
I'm involved with photography & audio. For more info, take a look at my site:
GlenVision.com

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Hey, congratulations! That must feel pretty good to be up and running.
I'm impressed that you have that much RAM. Go crazy with the SFZ's if you feel like it. LOL

I have a wimpy system, but just to go from 4 GiB RAM to 16 GiB RAM was a nice bump up on the RAM totem pole.
Seems like you are set.

Peace

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