It looks like the biggest potential bottleneck is the hard drives. I understand the theory behind RAID, but am hoping to avoid it for two reasons. First, I want to keep this thing simple, and not have to double the number of HDs I have to buy and manage.
Second is my anticipated workflow. What I’ve been doing lately is to load image files from CF cards from jobs directly on 1TB external SATA drives on my USB dock. I work them in Lightroom and PS directly on the external drive. This way, large jobs and projects stay together with their LR database, and I can switch the drives around whenever I want, and make backups of them regularly.
owwww.... LR/PS over USB... that's really gotta hurt!
BUT- This is really slow, especially with Lightroom. I attributed this to my obsolete system in general, and also to the USB/SATA dock. I hoped that running the SATA image file drive as an internal drive would speed things up dramatically, and the nature of SATA seems that they are easily removable, like cartridges, to swap around when I want to.
I was also hoping that with enough RAM and/or fast cache/scratch drives, the HDs wouldn’t be working so hard in the first place. I am amazed at how hard Lightroom works my system.
So I was thinking a really small SSD or other fast drive just for cache, and maybe OS & PS.
Does this train of thought make any sense? Or will this system be a dog with regular SATA drives handling the image files?
Thanks for the help so far. Keep the ideas coming!
David
Regular - or rather, moderately high-end - SATA drives are plenty fast enough, the bottleneck is how you get to them. A good eSATA dock, analog to your USB version but much faster, will run you ~$40-80: eSATA ups the price, but is worth it, because that external disk will run at speeds similar to your internal disks. Voyager Q is delightfully retro cute, but you should check out web reviews "hard disk docks" for Vantec, NexStar and others. Beware that there are lots of little quirks, shop carefully.
For still image editing, you don't need to go overboard on really high-performance disks: Pick something from
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3....chmarks,50.html that is above average speed, but also lower-power startup/run (external docks may not have sufficient power to spin-up some power-hungry drives) and *quiet* -- at least, I find a whining disk more annoying than it's worth -- or whatever else strikes you as crucial. WD 1Tb "Green" is a nice compromise, YMMV.
If you're doing video, then you'll want higher-end internal disks and SSD's, but these are really overkill for LR/PS stills. Yeah, you might get a marginal speed improvement, but it's on the wrong side of the cost-benefit curve. Your big initial speed improvement is from all that RAM you've installed.
Yes, your OS/Apps/pics and PS cache can all live on one SSD - only issue is space. You would get far more bang for your buck with a small SSD for PS cache, working pics and maybe the LR/PS/Bridge apps, and leave the OS and most of your data on normal disks. Fast SSD's are SATA-bus bound -- that is, they can r/w faster than the bus can consume/deliver data. Although I'm tempted too, I think SSD are not yet worth buying for this type of use.
I want an SSD for my Hypervisor Color (portable disk + media reader that I use to dump my daily pics while traveling) but for the reliability, not the speed.
How many drives can that ASUS case take internally? I've got 5 disks / 4Tb in my Linux box, and only use a HD dock for backups and archiving -- everything "live" can live on internal disks for months. But older cases don't have as many SATA controllers/connectors, and I don't know what it takes to add one.
RAID is not scary, and offers a lot of advantages for a very modest expense and effort.
If I were starting now, I would propose something like the following:
- At least 4 large internal disks, maybe 1 small SSD
- If an SSD, use it for PS cache, swap, and editing apps
- else, RAID0 stripe on two disks for PS cache; RAID0 stripe on other two disks for swap
- RAID1 mirror of the OS and user space on the two disks that don't have swap
- RAID1 mirror of picture data on the disks that don't have PS cache
- Additional space for online incremental backups (my preference, so recovery of a recently lost file takes seconds rather than finding a backup)
- External eSATA dock for archive and backups - not live editing
Any one disk can die completely without the system skipping a beat (assuming Windows has a decent RAID).
Download new images to internal disk for editing and development. Generally, perform most work on internal disk.
Automate backups of OS, data, pics to eSATA-mounted disk. On Linux, I can keep doing incremental backups until the disk is ~90% full and then it warns me and I switch disks (about once every 6-8 wks). I try to do full backups monthly.
Use a good deep backup or disk cloning tool/strategy to archive images separately from normal backups, including the entire (in my case, ACR) LR/PS database along with the images. The resulting disk should be directly mountable later on your dock and usable in LR/PS for any subsequent edits, or can be copied/restored back to internal disk if needed for a longer period. Working from that eSATA disk should not incur much performance penalty, except that it isn't being mirrored/backed up automatically.
my 2 cents,
-- kab