[Help Given] Buying New Deskop - Now Updated!

[IronWolf]

RAID 1 can be slow and it's only a benefit if one of your drives fail; don't think about doing it as a backup. RAID 0 you are putting all your eggs in one basket. Any drives fail; your data is toast. RAID 5 is better for speed and redudancy, but I haven't seen it on too many consumer systems.

RAID1 can be slower than a single disk - just because the same data needs written to two locations. But the single disk doesn't provide any fault tolerance.

RAID5 isn't really high performing in all situations. It is just a way to get a large amount of fault tolerant disk space at a reasonable price. RAID5 sucks at random writes, does well with sequential reads. Rebuild times can be quite long with RAID5 and you suffer a fair amount of performance impact while the array rebuilds - though a lot of this varies on the size and speed of your disks.

Here is a link comparing RAID1 and RAID5 with no cache hits:

http://blogs.sun.com/mrbenchmark/entry/raid_1_vs_raid_56

RAID1 smokes RAID5 in every test - sometimes quite substantially.

Now controller cache can have an impact on the performance hit RAID5 takes, there are some graphs later in that series that do show that.

If you want fault tolerance and performance, looking at a RAID10 solution is better - but certainly not practical for consumer systems.

In either case, there is a good bit to know when tuning I/O subsystems - including knowing how the disk array is going to be used. Most of which is probably overkill for a home PC...

 

[ssampier]

Great links. We have several RAID 5 systems and they perform just terrific for our needs.

I imagine there is a substantial cost difference with RAID10?

 

[IronWolf]

Great links. We have several RAID 5 systems and they perform just terrific for our needs.

I imagine there is a substantial cost difference with RAID10?

Don't get me wrong. RAID5 certainly still serves a purpose and will work in a large number of situations. I still have lots of RAID5 in use on servers I admin - file servers, application servers, even a Terminal Server.

RAID10 is pretty expensive compared to RAID5. I use it on an Exchange server and one of our bigger DB servers. Pretty much you lose 50% of your usable disk by going with RAID10. So it does come with a cost. Whether the cost is warranted depends greatly on what role the server is playing and how likely it is to become I/O bound.

 

[Mycanid]

Then perhaps some links are in order, regarding the Mac Pro , Apple's "Get a Mac" page for switchers, Apple's current OS "Tiger" and next OS "Leopard" , the obligatory Games link, and videoediting with iMovie (part of the iLife suite), Final Cut Express , or Final Cut Pro

Good collection of links sir Aeolius! Saved some extra work for me!

Ya know John ... the Mac Pro may not have many graphics card solutions now ... but who knows what they will have with the next OS release? Still the cards they offer are not that bad.... 'Specially the "workstation" nVidia offering.

 

[John Crichton]

Good collection of links sir Aeolius! Saved some extra work for me!

Ya know John ... the Mac Pro may not have many graphics card solutions now ... but who knows what they will have with the next OS release? Still the cards they offer are not that bad.... 'Specially the "workstation" nVidia offering.

I do like Macs, but I think I am still leaning towards a PC at this point. I've always planned on staying with PCs until I get more freelance design work. When and if that happens I plan on getting a Mac specifically for a studio. We shall see, but for now I'll probably stick with the PC plan.

 

[Mycanid]

Any final decisions yet?

 

[John Crichton]

We finally decided to break down and went with a slightly stripped down Alienware. We would have actually gotten a Dell 710, but the customer service was severely lacking and they didn't want to give us enough credit for their no-interest promo. Odd considering we got approved for almost double from Alienware who have an even better no-interest promo going right now.

The Alienware rep was very helpful, answered all questions easily. The best thing about the purchase is that I'll easily be able to upgrade the videocards (has the SLI slots and power supply already in there), RAM to 4GB later and there is a 4-year in-home and all that fancy warranty stuff on it. We certainly paid a large premium (just over $4000 before taxes & shipping) but for both of us it's worth it as both our last systems were DYI and we're sick of not having a real warranty on our main workstations.

Went with the following configuration:

Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz 8MB Cache 1066MHz FSB
Operating System: Windows® Vista Home Premium
Motherboard: Alienware® Approved NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
Memory: 2GB Low Latency DDR2 Performance SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 x 1024MB
System Drive: Single Drive Configuration - 500GB Serial ATA
DVD ROM: 18X Dual Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Burner w/ Nero Software
Graphics Processor: 512MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7950 GT
Power Supply: Alienware® 1000 Watt Multi-GPU Approved Power Supply

It should be noted that once the Dell option when out the window I called the AW rep for case-related questions and then decided to buy. I will also admit that I've wanted an Alienware for quite a while so that did weigh on the choice a bit. The future-proofing also played a big part. My next choice would have been a VoodooPC, BTW. But the cost was getting way up there for the config I wanted.

The unit should be here before the end of the month and I'll post a review. Thanks to all for the advice! ENworld sold me a Dell, but they weren't sellin'.

Of course they got my money anyway as they own Alienware but you get the idea...

 

[xmanii]

Looks nice, except for the Vista bit.

 

[John Crichton]

Looks nice, except for the Vista bit.

It would have actually cost extra to get XP.

Crazy.

 

[xmanii]

Spending that much, I probably would have went with XP.