Building New Computer

[Jace161]

And with those three words added in I now agree with you lol

 

[Jim Doggett]

I would gladly give up dual monitors for a single monitor with an insane resolution... High Resolution > Dual [stool-like] Monitors.

Hi Cptcorn,

I've not, personally, found a trade-off in quality with 1 vs. 2 monitors. I've always run both at full resolution and highest quality; currently mine are both wide aspect ratio models, which can help with arranging Photoshop tools outside the work area using a single display. But I still tend to get so dang many tools windows going that the second monitor makes it far easier to keep my design space uncluttered. That's definitely a personal preference thing, and no doubt your single Megatron setup works best for you.

But I think most would find a dual monitor setup best for Photoshop, since I'm confident that a most who've worked in both environments would agree that dual monitors is significantly easier and faster given the way Photoshop tools occupy desktop real estate.

Just my opinion.

Best,

Jim

 

[jasonx]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Oh you want quick? Build that baby.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Oh you want quick? Build that baby.

LOL, did you see how many SSD's he had in there? That is probably $40,000 worth of hard drives, easy.

We have tested the SSD's in our systems. The cost of the drives is still way too high for the capacities we need. Not only that, we a experienced too many failures in the drives themselves.

I really LOVE the idea. It won't be long until the capacities come up and the failures and cost comes down. A couple of years and we will be in I/O bliss!

 

[jasonx]

Yep I saw all the drives and when he starts jumping up and down holding them.

It's going to be interesting the next few years.

How are those SSD in like Raid 0 as a scratch disk for photoshop perform well outside the reliability issues?

 

[Jim Doggett]

They need more monitors :^)

 

[cptcorn]

Yep I saw all the drives and when he starts jumping up and down holding them.

It's going to be interesting the next few years.

How are those SSD in like Raid 0 as a scratch disk for photoshop perform well outside the reliability issues?

I don't quite understand your question.

You get the speed boost in raid0 because 2 hard drives act as one. 100mb file gets written on to the drives at the same time (ie 50mb to each drive) essentially doubling the speed of the drive.

When you start Photoshop up it reserves an amount of ram that you define in the preferences. So once you start editing a file, Photoshop will utilize every part of that. If you're working with huge file once it's used up all of that memory it's reserved, it will "overflow" into the RAM that isn't being used, and once that's filled up, it starts writing to the scratch disks.

So when we analyze the speeds of HDDs and RAM we can see where we can get a lot more performance. 5,400rpm drives are slow as molasses compared to 10,000rpm or 15,000rpm drives. Even those drives are slower than RAM, which is solid state, which is even faster than a SSD HDD since it has it's own dedicated pipelines to the processor.

If we build a machine with a huge amount of ram, say 32gb. In 64bit Photoshop you can reserve almost all of that 32gb, aside from the amount Windows needs. If you're running 64bit Windows and 64 bit Photoshop, it elimates the need for a scratch disk in the form of RAM since you can reserve the majority of the ram (above 4gb) for Photoshop. On a 32bit system a lot of ram is pretty much useless. On a 64bit system with 32bit Photoshop, all of the RAM above the 4gb mark can essentially be utilized as a RAM scratch disk. This is fast. It still is a bit slower though than reserving that full amount on a 64bit/64bit machine since it has essentially store the overflow data in another section...

Sorry, rambling, and I know it's not the most technically accurate response, but it hits key points

 

[SignBurst PCs]

Yep I saw all the drives and when he starts jumping up and down holding them.

It's going to be interesting the next few years.

How are those SSD in like Raid 0 as a scratch disk for photoshop perform well outside the reliability issues?

They performed well. The deal is that for the cost, they didn't perform well enough. The cost vs performace ratio didn't add up. Not to mention that in order to get a decent sized scratch disk, you would have to put eight (or so) SSDs in a system. Now that isn't cheap.

 

[jasonx]

I don't quite understand your question.

You get the speed boost in raid0 because 2 hard drives act as one. 100mb file gets written on to the drives at the same time (ie 50mb to each drive) essentially doubling the speed of the drive.

When you start Photoshop up it reserves an amount of ram that you define in the preferences. So once you start editing a file, Photoshop will utilize every part of that. If you're working with huge file once it's used up all of that memory it's reserved, it will "overflow" into the RAM that isn't being used, and once that's filled up, it starts writing to the scratch disks.

So when we analyze the speeds of HDDs and RAM we can see where we can get a lot more performance. 5,400rpm drives are slow as molasses compared to 10,000rpm or 15,000rpm drives. Even those drives are slower than RAM, which is solid state, which is even faster than a SSD HDD since it has it's own dedicated pipelines to the processor.

If we build a machine with a huge amount of ram, say 32gb. In 64bit Photoshop you can reserve almost all of that 32gb, aside from the amount Windows needs. If you're running 64bit Windows and 64 bit Photoshop, it elimates the need for a scratch disk in the form of RAM since you can reserve the majority of the ram (above 4gb) for Photoshop. On a 32bit system a lot of ram is pretty much useless. On a 64bit system with 32bit Photoshop, all of the RAM above the 4gb mark can essentially be utilized as a RAM scratch disk. This is fast. It still is a bit slower though than reserving that full amount on a 64bit/64bit machine since it has essentially store the overflow data in another section...

Sorry, rambling, and I know it's not the most technically accurate response, but it hits key points

Hey my question was directed to Casey's testing of the SSD drives. I was assuming he would of only tested 2 drives in a raid 0 configuration or maybe 4 drives and not 24 drives like in the video.

 

[jasonx]

They performed well. The deal is that for the cost, they didn't perform well enough. The cost vs performace ratio didn't add up. Not to mention that in order to get a decent sized scratch disk, you would have to put eight (or so) SSDs in a system. Now that isn't cheap.

Cheers always good to get real world feedback. I've been out of the hard ware loop for a long time.