New Performance Computer (Major Adobe Usage)

[dude_56013]

It does seem that I'll be at a crossroads with having 3 SSDs on the board I selected since there are split controllers for the 6Gb SATA connections (knew this going in). Accidentally adding that extra SSD might have caused me a headache. I wonder how big of a difference I'd see moving the 3 x 64GB SSDs to the SATAII ports, then sticking my 2 x 1TB WD HDDs on the Intel SATAIII controller (even though they are only SATAII disks), with the optical drive on either the Marvell SATAIII or the last SATAII port. I've heard that the difference between SATAII and SATAIII is fairly miniscule at this point, but I don't know if that applied to RAID0 arrays with 3 SSDs

Hmph. Guess I'll be playing around with it for a while. If all else fails, down the road I suppose I'd just have to buy a dedicated minimum 4-port (well, okay, technically 3, but I like even numbers) RAID add-on card.

 

[J03]

Hmm... I wonder SATAII limits the overall speed of the array, or just restricts the speed of each drive?

 

[dude_56013]

I don't know. I never really understood the whole drive debate. I mean, if you're looking at sustained write speeds of ~250MB/sec on SATAII (according to specs), and sustained reads of ~75MB/sec, then I don't even see how SATAII can limit the throughput...I mean, even if you maximize performance by RAID0'ing all three and get the best case scenario of tripling both write and read speeds, you're still WAY under 3Gb/s, let alone 6Gb/s. I just never understood all that. Never made much sense. Maybe someone will hop over here and explain it.

Edit: Oh. My dumb ass. It's gigabit. That's what, 128MB, right? So SATAII runs at around 300MB/s and SATAIII would be like 600MB/s. So I get the argument now. I'll be capped at 300MB/s by putting the SSD's on the SATAII ports. Hmm.

My brain hurts. I gotta think this through tomorrow.

EDIT:

I'd like to move this full discussion about SRT and Caching over to the new thread that is title-specific on the matter. While I could care less where the information goes, I want to be able to help others in the same boat as me, so keeping the two threads separate is a must. The new thread on JUST SSD caching and the SSD RAID setup is HERE.

Thanks y'all.

 

[dude_56013]

A quick update. The computer is built and is working well. I'm at college again right now though, so I don't have access to my computer.

I don't have anything installed on it yet, as it was built just a few hours before I had to go back to college (2 hours away). But, it boots up and shuts down so quickly, I'm amazed. There's definitely a wow factor. As to real world performance boosts, well we'll see when I get CS5 loaded up on there.

As a side note, SRT/IRST/SSD caching did not work for me. You can read about that in the other thread.

Pictures up in the cases gallery.