Advice on taking my first bite of Apple

[moosicman]

So my present computer is crashing and burning. I think, like or not, its time to buy a new one. I'm going IMac this time and I want some advice. Here are the specs I'm looking at and some of what I'll be doing. I'm looking at the 21.5 inch screen model (I'm gonna go dual monitor so I don't care if its a small monitor). There are three areas I need advice on upgrading it based on the fact that I'm gonna use it to record some of my music. These won't be extravagant studio type albums with tons of tracks but I DO want them to be of excellent quality (where processing power is concerned). So here they are.

1. Should I upgrade to the 3.33 ghz for 200 more bucks vs. the standard 3.06 ghz? If the standard will be acceptable and I can save the cash obviously I would rather, but if it really will make a huge difference then that is what I need to know.

2. Upgrade the 4GB RAMM to the 8GB RAMM for another 200 bucks? The prior is a 2x2 GB and the latter is a 4X2GB. I kinda know what that means but here again, if for my purposes the 4 will be acceptable then I don't wanna buy the 8 just to have a super-power system.

3. Again, should I upgrade the 1 TB hard drive to the 2 TB for $250? Same deal, if I'll use the space, great. If I would probably never know the difference then I would rather save the cash.

I'm gonna be purchasing Logic Studio to do the recording. That's gonna run me $500 and another reason I don't want to upgrade these things unless it really would be noticed and necessary. I want the system to be powerful enough but I don't need to "flex my muscles". I don't want to buy power and space that I could really get by without and won't use. Thanks for the advice!

[theatre4jc]

I know nothing about recording audio on a mac, but I do use my MacBook Pro for video editing. I bought first generation MBP and have thus had it a 4 or 5 years. When I bought it, on Final Cut Studio 1 it was screaming fast. Loved it. When I upgraded to FCS 2 there was a noticeable slow down, and now that I'm onto FCS 3 I'm hitting my head against the wall. Now it's still fast, just not as fast as I work.

I say that for this...upgrade the processor. You might not need it now, but with the software improvements, 4 or 5 years from now you'll be glad you did. .30ghz might not seem like much (and it might not be) but every little bit helps.

As for HD space you can buy an external 1TB for about $150...probably less and I think it is always better to capture audio and video to a non OS hard drive. Meaning a drive that does not contain your Operating System. That way it is working less. I am also a nut for backing up stuff, so you might want to buy to and record to both, as a just in case. This is also something that you could wait on till you get close to filling up your 1 TB.

Do not upgrade the RAM however. At least not through Apple. You can find it cheaper on the web and install it yourself and save money. I bought a 2GB stick for mine and it was about $60 cheaper than what Apple was charging. But that is something you can upgrade to later, when you need it.

[waynehoskins]

I'm a big fan of quarantining system from data disks. I re-realized that this weekend when an OS upgrade on my work computer locked up midway through, leaving the system inconsistent. Had I separated them from the start, rebuilding the system from scratch would be minimally invasive.

For data, if it's big, you may want a large RAID array. I'm not sure how many TB you're looking at, but if it's more than one, my preference would be to RAID5 an array rather than get a large disk. I don't trust a 3.5" disk larger than 1 TB (especially because of the Hitachi 1.5T mass failures a few years ago), nor do I trust a 2.5" disk at all.

[cmchamp]

For what it's worth, I still have a 10 year old PowerMac laying around on which I record our church's Easter Musical audio - 24 tracks.
I personally have no iMacs for reasons Wayne mentions. No ability to separate a data drive from the OS drive successfully, unless you use a FW800 drive, and even with a RAID, it's not fast enough for video rendering.
We do have an iMac, current low end model, at church for our projection and audio recording with GarageBand, but we do nothing more than that, just 2 tracks of the service.
C.

[forty31]

Add as much RAM as you can, from somewhere other than Apple. Ram will give you a much bigger increase in performance than a small processor upgrade. Any of the iMacs with a decent amount of RAM will be able to do what you want and do it well. An external hard drive will also be important for the reasons mentioned above, I record onto a Western Digital 2TB external that is set to RAID 0.

[petereit]

Buy the faster processor, but not the memory or the larger HD. You can upgrade the memory yourself for far cheaper. Replacing/upgrading the internal drive in a new iMac is a daunting task, so I recommend using it ONLY as a system drive and storing all of our media on an external FW800 drive. If you're using it only for audio, FW800 should be plenty fast.

I recommend buying an external dual-slot SATA "dock". That way you can easily swap in/out cheaper internal hard drives. Buy them two at a time and save all your media on both drives, so you'll always have an instant backup if anything should ever go wrong.

[[Director] drew ryan]

I don't know what the specs are on the hard drive, but I would make sure that it is a 7200rpm drive. I know my mini comes with a 5400, but can be upgraded to a 7200. In this case, faster is better.

[moosicman]

Thank you ALL for the input thus far. I'm taking it all to heart.