Single CPU workstation

[Eric Bowen]

I have not been able to test the 12Gbs cards with a 12Gbs storage chassis yet since I was waiting on them to arrive in country. I should have 1 soon and then I can test. I wouldn't expect much in the mechanical drive realm considering SAS was already far beyond their capability with the current caching models used by the LSI controllers. However SSD's I would expect to show a good increase in raid performance and will verify that when the 12Gbs chassis arrives.

 

[Carmel Bonnici]

Hi guys,

Thank you all! I will go for the Titan Black with possibility to get a second one.
Re Motherboard, which do you think is best Asus P9x79 or Asus Rampage IV Extreme.
Re hard disks to be more accurite I have 2 on raid 0 for raw footage (in) and other 2 on raid 0 for rendering (out). I try to backup regularly on external drives.

For this I have a limited budget and if I can play 1 track of R3D 4k in real time 1/2 res I will be verry happy. I am not bothered if it takes hours to render!

Thank you again!

 

[David Kuhn]

Would anyone recommend the onboard raid controllers? Or just software raid 0.

I've read different opinions on this issue and was curious what red users thought.

Edit : raid 0

My opinion - For RAID0 or 1 the onboard RAID works fine, not for any of the more compute intensive RAID's. RAID0 is a bit riskier - if it's not a great implementation then you will be at increased risk of losing data (besides just HDD crashes... you have to worry about the software losing track of the setup). For mirroring you can usually access each drive as a single drive if the software loses the raid setup.

I don't use onboard raid for long term storage - but it can be useful for working drives.

 

[Joseph Coleman]

I don't know about the Asus Rampage, But I'm running 5 machines with the P9x79 pro motherboards, I love them! No issues at all. I would add a Corsair 100i closed loop cooler to your system. The P9x79 has great overclocking features. All of my systems are running 4.3 ghz no problem. The only thing I would look into, is the P9x79 WS because you get an extra Pci-Express if you ever want to add more stuff or 4 gpu's

 

[Eric Bowen]

I did some testing with the Areca ARC-1883i 12Gbs controller and 5 Crucial M550 1TB drives in raid 5 yesterday. The performance was absolutely consistent for each benchmark used throughout the entire array. HDtune showed 1.5GB/s with 35us access time over the entire array. Sisoft Sandra showed 2GB/s and 15us access time over the entire array. The results were near or completely symmetric each test regardless of how many times the tests were run. This shows the 12Gbs controller is able to access the full potential of the Crucial M550 drives and the limitation is simply the caching. This definitely is an improvement over the 6Gbs controllers.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Not all onboard controllers are bad. They work OK for RAID 0 / 1 on the consumer/ gaming boards. Some of your better workstation and server boards have nice controllers built in. Like the LSI hosts built into the SuperMicro boards. My real complaint about those is they seem to prefer last-generation host controllers. Lots of 3Gbps SAS hosts in current Xeon motherboards. Why…?

Anyway, I have a 12Gbps ATTO H1280 SAS host card here (non RAID). No 12Gbps anything to plug into it yet….

 

[Carmel Bonnici]

Hi Joseph,

First of all thank you.
Do you run 4k on the P9?

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

The non-enterprise class MLC/TLC SSDs will work fine in a Raid5, for a while, but the constant rewrite cycles in order to maintain parity will burn them up fairly quickly, that's the reason most non-SLC SSD raids are in a 0 configuration. An HBA controller has the benefit of letting you run a multi-boot system, and the system will be able to multi-task to a much greater extent.

With the new TB rack mount chassis, you could easily run your x4/x8 2.5" drives and HBA controller independent of a host system, swap between your MBPR and iMac or nMP or Hackintosh system with TB.

 

[Eric Bowen]

http://techreport.com/review/26170/crucial-m550-solid-state-drive-reviewed/2

Parity in a raid 5 is not nearly the amount of data as the actual data so the extra write cycles are not that significant. The more drives you have in the array the lower the percentage of parity. This also greatly reduces the permanent erase write cycles used on the same MLC over time. Along with this the firmware is still implementing the processes that avoid using the permanent erase write cycles. The endurance testing done at this link reflects the firmware implementations that avoid the life cycles. Considering a platter drive has a rated reliability of 3 to 5 years, SSD drives including the consumer series are very viable in Raid 5 without the enterprise req. The controller has considerable impact on this so stay in the LSI SAS controller family ie Areca, Atto, Intel, and LSI and editor should be good.

 

[Troy Smith]

Hi Jeff, I'm wondering what you think of the Z420, I don't need a blazing computer, mainly for archiving, just need something that is solid, I have the Areca Arc 1882ix-12 Raid card and Dat Optics Sas box to go with it, I backup to sets of raid5 and LTO5 and that is my main job, only do small amount of editing and really don't need alot of power.

Thanks for all your posts on reduser!

The Thunderbolt2 card for the Z820 (and it works in the Z420 and Z620) works just fine. It offers a single Thunderbolt2 port and there is a DisplayPort input on the card so you can run video from your GPU into the card and out to a Thunderbolt monitor if you want. I think B&H has the card for $130 or so. The newest ZBook has TB2, I don't know if it's shipping yet, I haven't paid attention to that.

Adobe CC subscriptions *ARE* OS agnostic. I switch between Windows and OSX all the time.

16GB RAM is the only real shortcoming of the Macbook Pro. It's killing me lately. The GPU is weak and there's not enough RAM to do real work. The 2013 (current) model has a much better GPU, but really needs a 32GB RAM option. I'm hoping when the newer ones come later this year they will have 32GB, hopefully even 64GB. I may just wait for Broadwell next year as we'll get more cores in the same power envelope, among other things.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Z420 is a nice little workstation. It's not so great if you need more than one decent GPU, or want to put in something big like a Titan Z. But still good for a single-CPU Xeon box. It actually might be overkill for what you're saying you're going to use it for. Although, it may still be a good option because they're pretty reliable, solid computers and HP has good support for their workstations.