About to upgrade to either the Quicksilver 733 or the 867... I’ve noticed that both models have a 256 L2 cache, but the 876 also has a 2mb L3 cache that the 733 does not. Does anyone know if the additional L3 cache provides a *significant* Protools LE performance boost in the 867 over the 733 other than the theoretical 18% processor speed advantage? FWIW Apple states: “In addition, the 800 MHz dual processors and 867 MHz single processor configurations have another 2MB of backside L3 cache running at one-fourth of processor speed. These caching methods result in dramatically increased system performance by allowing large amounts of data to be stored and accessed rapidly. This translates to a very efficient processor with exceptional performance.”

So a 40 gig is big enough because I will do most sessions on an external harddrive? Is that best?

How could you back up a 60 gig? Say you use a 20 gig audio drive. You could have one 20 gig partition on your system drive to make quick BUs and 20 gig for system, apps, etc. But, even a VXA tape can only hold 33 gigs native (i.e.only hardware compression) Also, the larger system drives w/o partitions, the slower the seek time.