Coputer hardware pros only

[Fuzzbuster]

Got a question for the pros

Do you guys think that using a 15K rpm scsi drive would speed up disc access and file dowloads?

I thought scsi drive stopped being produced 10 years ago until I looked it up on internet.

Thanx in advance.


wish i could spell computer right the first time

 

[Techman]

file down loads are dependent on the buss speeds. Thru put that is.

As for disk access. Yes it could be faster but then again total speed is dependent on buss speed.

 

[Fuzzbuster]

but at 1333 mb speed, wouldnt a scsi 15k drive speed things up? huge?

nobody really speaks of scsi`s

specialy when photoshop uses disk space when out of memory(4G)XP Pro

 

[Kustom DeZigns]

I don't think you really would see a huge differance on speed. Sometimes there is some issues with this type of drives.

 

[Fuzzbuster]

There are?

Like what

they seem to be big $$ compared to sata or even 500G or bigger drives

 

[PartyMatt]

When you are talking about hard drive performance you are looking mainly at two things -- access time and transfer rate. Access time is how fast the hard drive can find the data while transfer rate is how fast it can transfer the data to memory once it found it. The rotational speed mostly effects access time which is important when you want to grab a lot of little bits of data from different parts of the hard drive -- like in a file server. When you are trying to load a single large file into memory, access time means very little.

Let's say you are loading a 300 MB Photoshop file on a machine with a hard drive with a 9 millisecond access time and a 60 MB per second transfer rate. It is going to take 9 milliseconds (nine one-thousandths of a second) to find the file, and then five whole seconds to load it. If you had the fastest spinning hard drive in the world, with a 4 ms access time, you've still only saved yourself 5 milliseconds on that load time -- a completely unnoticeable improvement.

For graphics design you really need a better transfer rate. You can do this with a RAID array of multiple hard drives. The more drives the better (until you reach the limit of the bus -- usually at 3 to 4 hard drives on IDE). For a design station, a RAID of 3 x 300 MB IDE hard drives is far better than a single 300 MB 15K RPM SCSI drive. The RAID would also cost about the same since high performance SCSI drives are horribly expensive.

 

[synergy_jim]

dont waste your time and money.

speed increases are small for the extra $$$ and headache.

 

[Fuzzbuster]

Cool ...Good info

I`m just always afraid of a raid set up

if one of the drives go.....all the files are gone

was just trying to fastest safest way

Thanx for the reply

 

[SignBurst PCs]

SCSI didn't go away. Actually, in the last few years, the enterprise drive of choice has been SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).

A RAID array of 7,200 RPM (SATA) drives can be significantly faster than a single 15,000 RPM (SAS) drive.

Having a RAID array of 2 (or more) 15,000 RPM drives is a better option yet.

Then comes the question on what type of RAID. "0" is fastest, but if any one drive dies, all of the data is lost. Fortunately, the drive failure rate for the 15,000 RPM enterprise drives is VERY LOW.

Also, you have to have a controller for the 15,000 RPM (SAS) drives. I don't know of any "desktop" motherboards that have onboard SAS or SCSI controllers. You would need an additional controller card.

Many good desktop boards do offer onboard RAID controllers for SATA. That means you could but a couple inexpensive SATA drives and configure them into a RAID array for relatively little $$$.

If you decide to go the 15,000 RPM route (SAS), the extra cost of the SAS controller and the higher cost of the 15,000 RPM drives is significant.

It all comes down to, "How bad do you need the speed?". If money is no object, the SAS RAID route is faster. We sell many SAS systems due to the fact that high-output print and wrap shops NEED the fastest system that they can get their hands on. Several thousands of dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of $$$ they make by speeding up the design process.

We also sell many SATA systems due to the smaller shops not quite needing the extra speed all of the time. Money is a bit tighter and SATA RAID can be pretty fast.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

Cool ...Good info

I`m just always afraid of a raid set up

if one of the drives go.....all the files are gone

was just trying to fastest safest way

Thanx for the reply

RAID 10 fixes that.

It requires 4 drives, but it uses 2 sets of "striped" drives, which are "mirrored" images of each other. The first set is an identical copy of the second. That way, if one drive fails, you always have a good copy of the data on the alternate set of drives and can keep on working. You would have to lose 2 drives at the same time to lose the data.

We use this setup on our base level design system (SignBurst Inferno™). You get the speed of a two drive "RAID 0" and the redundancy of a two drive "RAID 1", hence "RAID 10" (or 1+0). That is why it requires 4 drives.

 

[cdiesel]

Well, I couldn't disagree more with some of the posts above.. I've got SCSI drives in my workstation, and absolutely love it. My machine is MUCH faster than other similiarly equipped machine (other than the drive setup). My drives and controller cost a little more than $2k, but it's money well spent. I believe my drives are 10k RPM (and agree that actual rotational speed has little to do with actual read/write speed), and I'm running four in a RAID 5 w/hot swap setup for the program and data files, and another pair of drives running in RAID 0 for the Photoshop & Windows swap file.
Keep in mind, my drives are 73GB, so they're not for file archiving. That's what the server is for! This computer is setup for sheer speed, and it is quick.
$2k is a lot of money to spend for drives, but if you're working on large files in Photoshop, it's the only way to go. Let's face it, if you're working on large files in PS, you can afford the $2k.

 

[AKWD]

The alternative setup is loading your OS and scratch disc onto a RAID 0 setup; Then, for all of your artfile storage, a RAID 1 setup secondarily. Much cheaper than SCSI(SAS), and will net the equivalent or better speeds unless you set up SCSI(SAS) into RAID. I've been running on RAID 0 with a paid of WD Raptors for years now and doing okay; I have a second drive for my important datafiles, and an old box with other drives for regular backups and file archives (Clients older than a year or one-offs).

Some of the speed gains from SCSI that were perks for servers have also been gained by many SATA drives via way of NCQ (Native Command Queuing? I forget.) which SCSI has had for years. The biggest upside to NCQ or SCSI is that random access is minimized as much as possible, increasing speeds. for 99% of people out there, a properly-maintained (Read: defragmentated) drive will not see a benefit from the NCQ-esque functionality. The reasons this technology is key in servers is because of the multi-user/multi-file request setup on a server compared to the generally-unilateral actions of a desktop. Sure, you may be 'multitasking'.

Increased cache sizes have also helped; Steer clear of HDs with 'Hybrid' technologies, and for the most part SSD needs to come down in price.

If you're wanting some serious speed, the new WD VelociRaptor drives are SICKLY fast at 10k RPM -- Slap them into RAID 0 (Or RAID 10 as noted above) and you will have some serious speed; All again for less than what running a good SCSI rig will run you. For much else besides video, you won't see much benefit beyond this kind of setup.

An alternative I've been contemplating is going the way of a ramdisk setup for scratch disk and/or time-sensitive files. There are hardware and software solutions for this, including the loading of the ramdisk during bootup and the unloading at shutdown. Really though, this day and age the speed increase is likely only nominal at best.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

If you're wanting some serious speed, the new WD VelociRaptor drives are SICKLY fast at 10k RPM -- Slap them into RAID 0 (Or RAID 10 as noted above) and you will have some serious speed; All again for less than what running a good SCSI rig will run you. For much else besides video, you won't see much benefit beyond this kind of setup.

An alternative I've been contemplating is going the way of a ramdisk setup for scratch disk and/or time-sensitive files. There are hardware and software solutions for this, including the loading of the ramdisk during bootup and the unloading at shutdown. Really though, this day and age the speed increase is likely only nominal at best.

The Velociraptors are awesome! Unfortunately, they are a bit pricey $$$. But still, awesome drive. They will undoubtable be integrated into our systems before the end of the year. We tested a few of these and had one fail pretty fast. Upon researching it a little, it appears as if WD released some of the test units into the wild and they had a higher failure rate. It looks like the actual production drives are solid as a rock, but it is hard to tell the difference. Give it a couple months and hopefully all of the bad ones will be out of the normal inventory.

RAMDISK applications are not practical for larger Photoshop files. Please correct me if I am wrong here, but I see some of my scratch files hit 300GB+. Granted, that is a very large Photoshop file, but you get the idea.

 

[Fuzzbuster]

Now i`m really f____d up

Onyx is saying it cant be installed on a raid setup but i think cdiesel way might be the way to go

Still undecided now......

Thanx alot...not...just kidding

have archchive set up with raid cab... maybe scsi is the way to go( for lightning speed)workstation
just dont know if its worth the money?

 

[SignBurst PCs]

I have built several RIP workstations with Onyx installed. I have seen very few cases of software not running on a RAID setup. More often than not, the software company doesn't want to support their software on RAID systems because of the added variables.

I like to separate the design and RIP computers though. I find it much more efficient.

As far as, "worth the money", it all depends on your "need for speed", and what size files you are working with. We use RAID on every single model we sell, for a good reason. It is FAST.

cdiesel is using a great setup, it is almost identical to what we do on our systems.

If your work-flow is bottlenecking at the computer, then it may be worth the money. The faster you can get the designs out, the more $$$ you make.

In addition, I hold my personal time valuable. Consider the following:

52 weeks in a year
5 workdays per week (min)
10 hour workdays

If I save 1/2 hour a day with a faster computer, that is an extra 130 hours per year. Assuming a 10 hour work day, you save 13 days a year (over 16 days if you work an 8 hour day - lucky you). The average computer life is 3-4 years. Over that time, you can save over a month in wasted time.

Forget personal time, let's put those same hours back into the business. Too many business men and women don't put a high enough price on their own time. What is your design time worth? $75/hour (conservative)? 130 hours x $75 = $9750 per year. Again, not an exact science, but worthy of thinking about.

That it worth a couple thousand dollars in computer costs to me. I know that it doesn't always work out exactly as the formula suggests, but you get the idea.