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Rocco Penny

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« on: November 09, 2009, 09:20:06 am »

Strictly a work machine, I need a desktop pc tower that will do big file stitches and spool prints at a reasonable pace.
OK so I have
CS4, qimage, ptassembler, and conversion software is mostly what should reside on the machine.
I want to have a goodly sized and speed scratch disc.
I've been reading for months on what I should get, but I don't need the liquid cooled neon colored external graphics wired craziness.
I just want a pedestrian machine as a launching point that will be replaced if/when I need to.
OK thanks
Rocco
« Last Edit: November 09, 2009, 09:20:28 am by Rocco Penny »
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Christopher

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« Reply #1 on: November 09, 2009, 11:04:09 am »

Quote from: Rocco Penny
Strictly a work machine, I need a desktop pc tower that will do big file stitches and spool prints at a reasonable pace.
OK so I have
CS4, qimage, ptassembler, and conversion software is mostly what should reside on the machine.
I want to have a goodly sized and speed scratch disc.
I've been reading for months on what I should get, but I don't need the liquid cooled neon colored external graphics wired craziness.
I just want a pedestrian machine as a launching point that will be replaced if/when I need to.
OK thanks
Rocco


I don't have much time right now so, I probably will have to come back for more info but here is a rough outline:

Intel i7 or i5
8GB RAM
graphic card doesn't matter to much, ATI and NV are both fine
Now you did not mention how much storage space you need. This could be the important part.
Besides that I would go with 2 x 320-500GB HDs in RAID 0 as OS and 2 x 320-500GB in RAID 0 for the scratch. What else you need depends on how much space you need.
500 Watt power supply should be enough
I would go with Windows 7, but Vista 64 wouldn't be to bad, if you have a copy and don't want to spend additional on the OS.

As soon as I get back from my shoot today I can try to put something together in more detail. (With prices)
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Rocco Penny

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« Reply #2 on: November 09, 2009, 08:01:22 pm »

Quote from: Christopher
I don't have much time right now so, I probably will have to come back for more info but here is a rough outline:

Intel i7 or i5
8GB RAM
graphic card doesn't matter to much, ATI and NV are both fine
Now you did not mention how much storage space you need. This could be the important part.
Besides that I would go with 2 x 320-500GB HDs in RAID 0 as OS and 2 x 320-500GB in RAID 0 for the scratch. What else you need depends on how much space you need.
500 Watt power supply should be enough
I would go with Windows 7, but Vista 64 wouldn't be to bad, if you have a copy and don't want to spend additional on the OS.

As soon as I get back from my shoot today I can try to put something together in more detail. (With prices)

Thank you  for the response.
I've got a 1Tb external seagate.
I need maybe up to 500gb hd onboard.
I won't use all of that.
The storage mirror is what raid is no?
I'd like that for my permanent storage solution.
Why a different set of drives for the scratch/OS?
So using 4 HD's and 2 are back up?
Is this correct?
Thank you from a novice.
Rocco
OK thanks.
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Phil Indeblanc

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« Reply #3 on: November 11, 2009, 02:33:25 am »

Quote from: Rocco Penny
Thank you  for the response.
I've got a 1Tb external seagate.
I need maybe up to 500gb hd onboard.
I won't use all of that.
The storage mirror is what raid is no?
I'd like that for my permanent storage solution.
Why a different set of drives for the scratch/OS?
So using 4 HD's and 2 are back up?
Is this correct?
Thank you from a novice.
Rocco
OK thanks.


You use 2 drives for scratch as RAID/0 since it will split the work load across 2 "carriers" and it will be 2x+ as fast.  I don't know why you would need a large pair of drives to do this, but I have read Christophers replies on many occassions...and he is pretty much always right(to my knowledge). Perhaps he can explain why 320 to 500GB is suggested.  I would think anything in the 64 to 150GB range would work best as they are smaller and might be faster? I am not sure about how data is laid out across a sindle, so Im not sure.  But those sizes are hardly availabe in normal type drives.

In your budget, I would think SSD drives would not fit, and I am not sure if the writing is upto speed with the work a scratch would be doing.  
(This I would like to know for myself as I have recently purchased a few SSD drives, and I have OS and scratch on SSD but yet to make them paired/RAID-0.  (I do plan to have the OS imaged onto another drive in case it dumps and I loose my installs.  I am not a overclocker or anything, but things are made rather easy these days and stable to do it, so I do have a i7 860 on a Asus P7P55d Pro Motherboard getting 3.8Ghz stable. i7 has 4 cores, so its a great boost.

I just went through this Rocco, and I am with you, I am not a gamer, but often our needs are in the same realm, except for the vid cards. There is a Great deal on Newegg for a Gateway FX series system i7 950 for $1399. I just finished building my system that cost me $2K, but if I was to do it again, that system might have been a quick answer for my needs, as you cannot build your own for that price.
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feppe

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« Reply #4 on: November 11, 2009, 03:42:57 am »

Christopher's advice is good. Two additional pointers:

- With your budget an i5 CPU would be a better choice. You lose a third memory bank compared to the i7, so putting more than 8 gigs of memory will be expensive. Another feature of the i7 is virtualization, which at this time has only academic interest, as I'm not aware of any real-world applications which use the feature to its full potential.
- Make sure whatever graphics card you buy supports the type of output (DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort) you have so you don't have to buy adapters. Also, if you have dual or more monitors, check that it has enough outputs.
- Please note that if you go for RAID 0 (striping), it's (theoretically) twice as fast, but also twice as likely to fail. If one drive breaks, you lose all data on the array. Therefore frequent backups become even more important.

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« Reply #5 on: November 11, 2009, 04:50:32 am »

Quote from: feppe
Christopher's advice is good. Two additional pointers:

- With your budget an i5 CPU would be a better choice. You lose a third memory bank compared to the i7, so putting more than 8 gigs of memory will be expensive. Another feature of the i7 is virtualization, which at this time has only academic interest, as I'm not aware of any real-world applications which use the feature to its full potential.
- Make sure whatever graphics card you buy supports the type of output (DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort) you have so you don't have to buy adapters. Also, if you have dual or more monitors, check that it has enough outputs.
- Please note that if you go for RAID 0 (striping), it's (theoretically) twice as fast, but also twice as likely to fail. If one drive breaks, you lose all data on the array. Therefore frequent backups become even more important.


Still quite busy, but a few more notes:

Yes a Intel i5 will do as well, probably a even batter choice.

Another note about scratch and raid. You DON'T need a 320Gb or 500GB drive, but at least here in Germany it is hard to find "modern" drives with only 40 or 80GB. The benefit of the more modern drives is speed, which for a scratch is important. At last the price is also not really different. Here a 160GB drive is not really cheaper than a 320GB drive.
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Jonathan Wienke

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« Reply #6 on: November 11, 2009, 10:14:52 am »

Quote from: feppe
- Please note that if you go for RAID 0 (striping), it's (theoretically) twice as fast, but also twice as likely to fail. If one drive breaks, you lose all data on the array. Therefore frequent backups become even more important.

It's actually more than twice as likely to fail; the failure rate of a RAID0 array is the failure rate of each individual drive raised to the power of the number of drives in the array. So if the odds of a drive failing in one year of use is 2 in 1000, the odds of a two-drive RAID0 array failing is 4 in 1000.
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Christopher

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« Reply #7 on: November 11, 2009, 03:15:15 pm »

Quote from: Jonathan Wienke
It's actually more than twice as likely to fail; the failure rate of a RAID0 array is the failure rate of each individual drive raised to the power of the number of drives in the array. So if the odds of a drive failing in one year of use is 2 in 1000, the odds of a two-drive RAID0 array failing is 4 in 1000.

Which should not matter at all if it is used for a scratch or system disk.
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Christopher Hauser
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feppe

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« Reply #8 on: November 11, 2009, 03:22:47 pm »

Quote from: Jonathan Wienke
It's actually more than twice as likely to fail; the failure rate of a RAID0 array is the failure rate of each individual drive raised to the power of the number of drives in the array. So if the odds of a drive failing in one year of use is 2 in 1000, the odds of a two-drive RAID0 array failing is 4 in 1000.

Good point, you are of course right  I also didn't take failure of the RAID card itself into account, and the likelihood of being able to recover data if the card fails.

Quote from: Christopher
Which should not matter at all if it is used for a scratch or system disk.

It doesn't matter as long as you have verified, valid, timely and recoverable backups of your system disk.

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« Reply #9 on: November 11, 2009, 03:55:36 pm »

Quote from: feppe
Good point, you are of course right  I also didn't take failure of the RAID card itself into account, and the likelihood of being able to recover data if the card fails.



It doesn't matter as long as you have verified, valid, timely and recoverable backups of your system disk.

Well, Yes and No. I don't need a recoverable  backup for my system if I can set up a new System in less than two hours, however what I need is all presets, settings and configurations stored safely. (I personally have three copies of all times, which are being checked every few months.)
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alain

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« Reply #10 on: November 11, 2009, 04:43:41 pm »

Quote from: Phil Indeblanc
You use 2 drives for scratch as RAID/0 since it will split the work load across 2 "carriers" and it will be 2x+ as fast.  I don't know why you would need a large pair of drives to do this, but I have read Christophers replies on many occassions...and he is pretty much always right(to my knowledge). Perhaps he can explain why 320 to 500GB is suggested.  I would think anything in the 64 to 150GB range would work best as they are smaller and might be faster? I am not sure about how data is laid out across a sindle, so Im not sure.  But those sizes are hardly availabe in normal type drives.

In your budget, I would think SSD drives would not fit, and I am not sure if the writing is upto speed with the work a scratch would be doing.  
(This I would like to know for myself as I have recently purchased a few SSD drives, and I have OS and scratch on SSD but yet to make them paired/RAID-0.  (I do plan to have the OS imaged onto another drive in case it dumps and I loose my installs.  I am not a overclocker or anything, but things are made rather easy these days and stable to do it, so I do have a i7 860 on a Asus P7P55d Pro Motherboard getting 3.8Ghz stable. i7 has 4 cores, so its a great boost.

I just went through this Rocco, and I am with you, I am not a gamer, but often our needs are in the same realm, except for the vid cards. There is a Great deal on Newegg for a Gateway FX series system i7 950 for $1399. I just finished building my system that cost me $2K, but if I was to do it again, that system might have been a quick answer for my needs, as you cannot build your own for that price.

HDD speed is depending on 4 things : platter density, rotational speed, seektime and electronics (cache size etc...)

Current consumer disk can get 500GB platters at 7200 rpm and use cache from 8 to 32 MB, the seektimes are rather the same.  If the platter size is 500GB, you won't find disk with less storage, except if some of it wouldn't be used.

For example the Samsung F3 can get a throughput from 140 MB/s down to 70MB/s, the fastest on the front off the drive.  You could make a raid-0 and partition it so that it's only using the fastest front.  The other partition could be used as temp storage or for example a backup from the -other- OS disks.  


BTW. SSD has almost no seek time and fast reads, but is not always faster for writing.
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Christopher

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« Reply #11 on: November 11, 2009, 05:35:46 pm »

Quote from: alain
HDD speed is depending on 4 things : platter density, rotational speed, seektime and electronics (cache size etc...)

Current consumer disk can get 500GB platters at 7200 rpm and use cache from 8 to 32 MB, the seektimes are rather the same.  If the platter size is 500GB, you won't find disk with less storage, except if some of it wouldn't be used.

For example the Samsung F3 can get a throughput from 140 MB/s down to 70MB/s, the fastest on the front off the drive.  You could make a raid-0 and partition it so that it's only using the fastest front.  The other partition could be used as temp storage or for example a backup from the -other- OS disks.  


BTW. SSD has almost no seek time and fast reads, but is not always faster for writing.

This is the main reason why I say 500GB or 320, you nearly can't find any modern SATA drives which are fast and have less than 320Gb.

However with SSDs it depends a LOT, which ones. What you stated is correct for cheaper SSDs OR the Intel X-M drives, which have a read speed of 240Mb/s but only a write speed of 80Mb/s. However, most modern other SSDs with other controler have a read and write speed of around 200 Mb/s. Some new one from OCZ (anounced a day ago) will probably have something like 260 read and write speed, which would be amazing.
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alain

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« Reply #12 on: November 12, 2009, 06:41:51 am »

Quote from: Christopher
This is the main reason why I say 500GB or 320, you nearly can't find any modern SATA drives which are fast and have less than 320Gb.

However with SSDs it depends a LOT, which ones. What you stated is correct for cheaper SSDs OR the Intel X-M drives, which have a read speed of 240Mb/s but only a write speed of 80Mb/s. However, most modern other SSDs with other controler have a read and write speed of around 200 Mb/s. Some new one from OCZ (anounced a day ago) will probably have something like 260 read and write speed, which would be amazing.

Christopher

Where did you find the 200 MB/s sustained write speed, I only find 100MB/s?  All SSD will have a faster peak write speed to the DRAM buffer, SATA II will max out at about 200-260MB/s.

But fot $1000 you can find a OCZ SSD pci-e card which goes to 600MB/s, but this is the whole budget for the topic starter.  I posted more info on another thread for a real real powerfull workstation for you ;-)
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Rocco Penny

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« Reply #13 on: November 12, 2009, 08:08:04 am »

hahah
ok to be clear; The computer I'll be using is only going to render exposures.
I don't need anything else.
I do want a cd/dvd writer included.
So this sounds good:
win7, intelI7, 8g ram, 320x2@7200rpm hd, discrete?!graphics card?,500w power supply,
Are there interesting fan choices for cooling?
I hate my old cadillac chugging away, what do they use on the space shuttle?
haha you guys....
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mmurph

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« Reply #14 on: November 12, 2009, 11:38:54 am »

I bought a Dell XPS with an i7 920,  6GB of RAM, a Nvidia 220 graphics card (I think), and a 640GB HDD for about $700 a few months ago.  You should be able to get a similar deal for $600 or less if you watch and wait a bit.

I also bought an older model Dell XPS with a quad core Intel 8200 on eBay for $500 (new, built to order with Win7, from Dell.)  

Things to look at are available drives/bays, slots for expansion cards, enough slots to get to 12GB of DDR3 RAM (6 slots) and later 24GB of RAM (when 4GB chips are a bit cheaper), and a good sized case.

You can easily and cheaply add HDD's (1 TB WD was $65 at Newegg recently), RAM, and even upgrade the power supply ev entually if you stuff the box full.

Don't obsess too much. Maybe start a small spreadsheet and track prices as a memory aid to remember the best deals?

Watch the "Bing" cash back deals too. Dell had 15% cash back, HP 25% cash back at specific times. Also look at techbargains.com

Have fun!

Best,
Michael
« Last Edit: November 12, 2009, 11:41:11 am by mmurph »
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feppe

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« Reply #15 on: November 12, 2009, 11:54:08 am »

Quote from: Rocco Penny
hahah
ok to be clear; The computer I'll be using is only going to render exposures.
I don't need anything else.
I do want a cd/dvd writer included.
So this sounds good:
win7, intelI7, 8g ram, 320x2@7200rpm hd, discrete?!graphics card?,500w power supply,
Are there interesting fan choices for cooling?
I hate my old cadillac chugging away, what do they use on the space shuttle?
haha you guys....

Looks good - remember to get 64-bit Win7 with 8GB of memory!

For your (our) purposes you don't need a graphics card, as long as the mobo has the monitor connection(s) you need.

Depending on how many internal HDDs you'll attach, you might need more power.

For fans, it's best to get a proper case with fans.

Christopher

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« Reply #16 on: November 12, 2009, 04:10:13 pm »

Quote from: alain
Christopher

Where did you find the 200 MB/s sustained write speed, I only find 100MB/s?  All SSD will have a faster peak write speed to the DRAM buffer, SATA II will max out at about 200-260MB/s.

But fot $1000 you can find a OCZ SSD pci-e card which goes to 600MB/s, but this is the whole budget for the topic starter.  I posted more info on another thread for a real real powerfull workstation for you ;-)

OCZ Vertex Turbo 128/256Gb, Asax Leopard Hunt II 128/256gb, Crucial M225 128/256gb reach all around 200-220Mb/s average write speed in sequential througput tests.
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Christopher Hauser
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Christopher

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« Reply #17 on: November 12, 2009, 04:13:17 pm »

Quote from: Rocco Penny
hahah
ok to be clear; The computer I'll be using is only going to render exposures.
I don't need anything else.
I do want a cd/dvd writer included.
So this sounds good:
win7, intelI7, 8g ram, 320x2@7200rpm hd, discrete?!graphics card?,500w power supply,
Are there interesting fan choices for cooling?
I hate my old cadillac chugging away, what do they use on the space shuttle?
haha you guys....

One small mistake on my site. If you want 8GB of RAM use a i5 System. (not really slower than a i7 system, just different specs) or with a i7 system use 6Gb of RAM or 12 Gb of RAM. (The i7 has a tripple channel interface and so needs RAM in pairs of three. ( 3 x 2GB, 6 x 1GB , 6 x 2 GB , 3 x 4GB or 6 x 4GB)
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Christopher Hauser
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alain

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« Reply #18 on: November 12, 2009, 04:38:38 pm »

Quote from: Christopher
OCZ Vertex Turbo 128/256Gb, Asax Leopard Hunt II 128/256gb, Crucial M225 128/256gb reach all around 200-220Mb/s average write speed in sequential througput tests.

Strange OCZ gives the Vertex Turbo only 100MB/s sustained write : OCZ Vertex Turbo Specs
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Christopher

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« Reply #19 on: November 12, 2009, 05:05:47 pm »

Quote from: alain
Strange OCZ gives the Vertex Turbo only 100MB/s sustained write : OCZ Vertex Turbo Specs

Two important notes: There is sequential througput tests and a more random smaller througput test.

On the first top SSDs get around 150 min.,  200-210 average and 220-230 peak.
Normal HDs get around 60 min., 100 average and 130 peak

Now the smaller random parts is different and for me not as important, because i need HIGH speed on LARGE files.

Here the write speed is more like this:
SSDs min. 10-20, 70-110 ave and peak stays the same.
HDs min 5-10, 30-50 ave. and peak stays the same.

See Some computer tests sites like tomshardware or similiar for details.

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