Adding a third (cintiq) monitor to my setup.

[oldgoatroper]

have you thought of transferring to all workstation cards?? Im doing this now, saves on power and is a guaranteed card for 3D modeling. Cheaper too

Specifics, please... ?

 

[VinylLabs.com]

Hi, I just skimmed over the posts, so I don't know if it's been answered, I'm also a nvidia man, so it might be different for the ATI, but I'm pretty sure that when you setup 2 cards in crossfire/sli the second card is just an ADD ON card, the ports do not actually work.

if you have an onboard video card, you can enable it in the BIOS, and plug into there, but you can probably expect some driver crashes. 9there is also only graphics acceleration on that card depending on what your onboard is.

you will need to seperate the cards so they are 2 independant cards to use 3 monitors, or you will need to use a pass-through video card (I know nvidia has it, but I don't know about ATI, its when the video card supplies the GPU for all 3 monitors, but passes the data through a 2nd video card so you can have 3 monitors powered by your GPU.

 

[MatthewTimothy]

Specifics, please... ?

ill make a new thread on this

Hi, I just skimmed over the posts, so I don't know if it's been answered, I'm also a nvidia man, so it might be different for the ATI, but I'm pretty sure that when you setup 2 cards in crossfire/sli the second card is just an ADD ON card, the ports do not actually work.

if you have an onboard video card, you can enable it in the BIOS, and plug into there, but you can probably expect some driver crashes. 9there is also only graphics acceleration on that card depending on what your onboard is.

you will need to seperate the cards so they are 2 independant cards to use 3 monitors, or you will need to use a pass-through video card (I know nvidia has it, but I don't know about ATI, its when the video card supplies the GPU for all 3 monitors, but passes the data through a 2nd video card so you can have 3 monitors powered by your GPU.

you dont need to skim cause you have missed a lot.

 

[oldgoatroper]

ill make a new thread on this

thanks...

 

[signswi]

I wouldn't say you're half-assing it but I do agree, just get a network-attached drive with multiple HDDs in it set up for RAID 5 and you're good and safe and it'll be a lot easier (and probably faster) than sharing files from a computer.

We've been running a 2tb NAS (set up for RAID 1 so we have 1tb of storage mirrored to the second drive for backup) for about 5 years, paid $499 for it and it's never failed us once. It is almost full, so we're upgrading to a new NAS with 4 drives. Way easier than setting up a server if all you're doing is storing files on it.

1TB in five years? We're chewing through a TB every couple of months but I'm kind of an overkill guy and I keep everything. Careful with the RAID 1 it's still pretty easy to lose data compared to 5. Unfortunately the floods last year have doubled HD prices, last year was really the year to build a NAS on the cheap.

With regard to the NAS device, see if you can get one that allows for stacking of future backup drives as well, so you don't have to get the entire thing all at one. You can "grow into it" in other words.

Which is (one reason) I recommend Synology or QNAP NAS, very capable enterprise grade NAS companies that have small business offerings. Both also have built in systems to mirror up to Amazon S3 for additional protection. RAID won't help in a fire.

 

[MatthewTimothy]

1TB in five years? We're chewing through a TB every couple of months but I'm kind of an overkill guy and I keep everything. Careful with the RAID 1 it's still pretty easy to lose data compared to 5. Unfortunately the floods last year have doubled HD prices, last year was really the year to build a NAS on the cheap.



Which is why I recommend Synology or QNAP NAS, very capable enterprise grade NAS companies that have small business offerings.

damn right!! i was going to build another server with about 6 3TB hdds in RAID 5. Holy cow!! that was crazy what it would cost. I am looking into a cloud now for temporary setup.

 

[signswi]

The services I mentioned above are all good, check 'em out.

 

[choucove]

I'm kinda looking around at NAS options as well for one of our offices. The problem is, I'm really not a fan of RAID. I've seen more than one RAID 1 array fail and in a couple situations it still lost all the data. Not to mention any kind of RAID array has a higher failure rate than a single hard drive out of a RAID array.

One thing I hear frequently is that people are using RAID 1 as their only storage backup, and I kinda cringe at that because it is failure-prone sometimes. At my office I'm playing with a new setup where I'm configuring a workstation with two drives in RAID 1 to provide the constant up time available with RAID 1, and then adding a third drive that is outside of the RAID and is use to store system images on through a daily scheduled task in Windows 7.

What is the cost and the storage limit available on some of these cloud-based backup services?