Hello K,
Creds - We have deployed a number of Minis with Nuendo using high I/O counts and large sessions so I pretend I know something about it.
The most important thing with what you quoted is to increase the memory - Cubase and the MacOS will constantly be swapping things out of ram with only 2GB. We prefer to go with 16GB because these are production environment machines so the more the better. 8GB will work depending on your sample requirements.
SSDs are highly recommended but not the Fusion Drive. The SSDs will make your machine feel and perform much faster because, like all modern OSes, it’s constantly reading and writing logs, prefs, etc. and the SSD improves that. Do some research on the model and determine your price/performance point and be aware that third-party SSDs are not natively TRIM-enabled on the MacOS but you can do it manually. The OWC drives do not normally require TRIM but there are caveats so do your research. If you’re familiar with the guts of PCs then researching SSDs will be easy for you.
Your latency discrepancy between in and out is due to the Saffire driver - it’s adding an additional safety buffer to the output at low latencies because it needs it, as many usb and firewire devices will do. Example - I just checked an RME interface here that’s 1.375ms in and out at 32 samples. Each interface’s driver will be slightly different and there may be additional delays in the Safire that are not reported to the OS making what you’re hearing worse. There’s nothing wrong with the Saffire, it’s a fine interface for certain needs. However there are slightly lower latency models out there and if that is a high concern then you may want to investigate.
Beyond the hardware there are a number of other things -
Disable sleep
Disable “spin down hard drives”
Disable Notification Center by setting all the apps to “…not…” (you’ll find it)
Disable screen saver
Disable display dimming
Disable automatic updates and automatic checking for updates in App Store
Set keyboard to have “normal” F-keys
Disable Spotlight on record drives during recording
If you don’t use Bluetooth turn it off, otherwise disable “discoverable”
Turn off file sharing during large sessions
Eject network drives during large sessions unless needed
Turn off Flash in System Prefs
Turn off Java 6 in Safari or Java 7 in, wherever that is again, forgot.
If you don’t need network access turn off wifi, we always do during recording even if we need it between recording.
That’s what I randomly thought of, there are more I’m not thinking of. No need to go in and turn off services; beyond automatic updating and network access there isn’t much that conflicts.
Good luck,
Hugh