# RLPhotos Computer upgrade 2013



## RLPhoto (Nov 18, 2013)

Hello fellow CR users, 

I tend to lapse in upgrading my equipment. I use my stuff until it cannot function or it frustrates me into improvising a alternate way of doing things. When that fails, I consider upgrading my stuff and my PC was one of those long neglected pieces of kit. 

My Old Computer specs (built 2006 - Retired 2013)

Intel E6600 OC'ed to 3.4ghz.
Western Digital 500GB HDD + 2TB RAID 5 w/ 4 Drives
Nvidia 8800 GTS 640mb Card
16GB DDR2 800 MHZ RAM
Gigabyte Motherboard
Win 7 Pro

This machine was finally defeated when handling my 5D3 files with heavy layers in CS6, Exporting and Editing 5D3 files in LR4 and Rendering video in Premiere pro CS6. It simply couldn't keep up with my catalog.

My Newest Machine 

ASUS Sabertooth X79 Mobo
Intel i7 4930K OC'ed to 4.2 GHz w/ H100i cooler
64GB of 1866Mhz DDR3
Nvidia GTX 770 4GB card
240GB SSD + 180GB Intel SSD
10TB RAID 5 of storage.
Win 7 Pro

This rig simply flys through my huge LR catalog and my PSD's. Editing in Premiere is a breeze and I thought I'd post a geekbench score if anyones interested. 

Total Cost - 3000$ for everything.


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## kennephoto (Nov 18, 2013)

Dude wow! That's crazy! What does 64GB of ram do? I'm running a 4770k with 16gb of ram ATI7970 with 2 1TB, 2 500gb drives a 256gb SSD and a 1TB usb 3.0 external. I really don't know what RAID is, I have some vague knowledge but not enough to know to use it or not. Mines pretty quick in Lightroom, prolly not as quick as yours, although I'm running 2 27" 2560x1440 monitors which is tasking. But congrats on that build I'm jealous!


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Nov 18, 2013)

kennephoto said:


> Dude wow! That's crazy! What does 64GB of ram do? I'm running a 4770k with 16gb of ram ATI7970 with 2 1TB, 2 500gb drives a 256gb SSD and a 1TB usb 3.0 external. I really don't know what RAID is, I have some vague knowledge but not enough to know to use it or not. Mines pretty quick in Lightroom, prolly not as quick as yours, although I'm running 2 27" 2560x1440 monitors which is tasking. But congrats on that build I'm jealous!


Raid or Redundant Array of Independent Disks is a method of increasing redundancy of your hard drives. one of the drives can fail without losing your data. Depending on the controller, it can be faster than a single disk or slower. Raid 6 is now becoming popular, it allows for 2 disk failures. You give up storage capacity for redundancy.

I used to run a raid array of four 10,000 RPM disks in my PC, but moved to using a separate NAS with six standard 7500 rpm 2TB drives. SSD's are very fast now, and pretty reliable, but they are too expensive to build a large raid array, so I use them as boot disks to boot and hold my programs and my lightroom catalog.

I generally retire one of my 7 pc's each year, I've just been buying Dells lately, because they are cheaper than I can build one for. That seems to be changing, the problem is that every time I build my own, I see feature creep, and end up over building for what I really need. Every time I spec one out, dual Xeon E7-4870's want to creep in, and at $5300 per processor, I just buy a $700 pc from Dell. The $20+ K machine would be fast though.


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## kennephoto (Nov 18, 2013)

I just looked up that processor on newegg and wow 5300 bucks! I wish I could build that computer and benchmark it haha I'm sure it would do crazy things. Guess I will have to do more reading about raid, sounds complicated to me.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Nov 18, 2013)

kennephoto said:


> I just looked up that processor on newegg and wow 5300 bucks! I wish I could build that computer and benchmark it haha I'm sure it would do crazy things. Guess I will have to do more reading about raid, sounds complicated to me.


 
Its for servers, and really would not be much benefit for what we do, but if 1000 users were accessing a pair of them, then it would be doing its job.

The big issue is that the newer processors are only marginally better than 3 generation old I7's, so a upgrade doesn't do all that much. Investing in SSD's will give a big performance jump compared to a new processor, and power usage is reduced as well. Adding memory can also give you a performance boost, assuming you are memory limited with say 4GB. Even 8GB can be too little.

Eventually, its time to upgrade. Soon we will be seeing DDR4 memory and hopefully some big memory bandwidth improvements.


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## RLPhoto (Nov 19, 2013)

kennephoto said:


> Dude wow! That's crazy! What does 64GB of ram do? I'm running a 4770k with 16gb of ram ATI7970 with 2 1TB, 2 500gb drives a 256gb SSD and a 1TB usb 3.0 external. I really don't know what RAID is, I have some vague knowledge but not enough to know to use it or not. Mines pretty quick in Lightroom, prolly not as quick as yours, although I'm running 2 27" 2560x1440 monitors which is tasking. But congrats on that build I'm jealous!



Having 64GB of RAM future proofs my machine like my old one did with 16GB of RAM. I also have the neat feature of creating RAM Disks, Which can be useful for editing a selection of photos extremely fast.


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## JPAZ (Nov 29, 2013)

So, after weeks (or more) of planning, I, too, made a jump. Just got my new PC home.

i5 460 @ 3.4 with 16gb RAM, a 256 SSD for the OS and software and a RAID 0 (mirror) of two 3 TB Toshiba HDD's. I've got 6 USB 3 ports, DVI video out with 4 GB video RAM running Win 7 pro.

Sofar, I've installed Indesign, PS CS4 and PS CS6 as well as LR 4.4, DxO Pro 8. Just testing with some Photoshop images, the difference between my old Core2 Duo and this new machine is remarkable.

Now, I begin the labor of moving about 800GB of photos and data to the new machine, but I am looking forward to it!


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## dgatwood (Nov 29, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Raid or Redundant Array of Independent Disks is a method of increasing redundancy of your hard drives. one of the drives can fail without losing your data. Depending on the controller, it can be faster than a single disk or slower. Raid 6 is now becoming popular, it allows for 2 disk failures. You give up storage capacity for redundancy.



My general advice is that you should not use RAID unless your goal is to increase performance or capacity beyond the limits of a single drive. The purpose of the redundancy in RAID is not to improve reliability, but rather to help ameliorate the colossal loss of reliability that would otherwise occur in a multi-drive set.

There are two main problems with using RAID:

1. You usually build RAID arrays using hard drives that are substantially identical, because otherwise you take a significant performance hit. The odds, therefore, are good that any mechanical flaw in one will also be present in all the others. Now bear in mind that most of the operations performed on one disk are also being performed on all the others—the same seeks, the same head parking, the same number of powered-on hours, etc.—which means that a staggering percentage of those mechanical flaws tend to show up at about the same time. When one disk fails, the odds of a second disk failing before you can clone the first one is pretty high, and if the second disks fails during that interval, the odds of a third disk failing before you can clone either of the first two approaches 100%.

2. The mean time between failures (MTBF) for a set of _n_ drives is equal to the MTBF of a single drive divided by _n_. So if you have five drives, you are five times as likely to experience a failure as if you have only a single drive, assuming your failures are, in fact, random rather than being caused by a design flaw.

The additional parity disks compensate for #2 somewhat, though not completely. They do nothing to help with #1. And that's not even factoring the added risk of catastrophic data loss caused by bugs in RAID controller firmware. When you factor that in, your need for backups is likely to be *significantly* greater for a RAID array than for a single drive of equivalent size (assuming such a drive exists).

Also, although it might go without saying, it is still probably worth pointing out that even under ideal circumstances, RAID is not a substitute for proper backups. That file you overwrote is still gone whether you're using a RAID volume or not.

In short, unless a single hard drive can't keep up with your throughput needs (e.g. if you're working with uncompressed 4K video) or you cannot buy a hard drive big enough to meet your needs, you're almost always better off not using RAID, and instead using an additional hard drive as a true backup. With that said, if you absolutely have to have a single volume with larger capacity or faster performance, RAID is a good solution.


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## Arctic Photo (Nov 29, 2013)

dgatwood said:


> Mt Spokane Photography said:
> 
> 
> > Raid or Redundant Array of Independent Disks is a method of increasing redundancy of your hard drives. one of the drives can fail without losing your data. Depending on the controller, it can be faster than a single disk or slower. Raid 6 is now becoming popular, it allows for 2 disk failures. You give up storage capacity for redundancy.
> ...


Very well said. RAID is overkill for 99.999% of private use. Just stick in an extra back up drive.


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## JPAZ (Nov 29, 2013)

Re: RAID. You are correct but.........

I have had a single drive failure 3 or 4 times over the past years and was really glad I had a mirror RAID. This meant I just swapped out the bad drive for a new one. 

This does not replace backups. I do a continuous "cloud" backup (Crashplan) and also do periodic external drive backups alternating a variety of WDD external drives for this purpose.


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## wickidwombat (Nov 30, 2013)

i'm travelling so much i use a drobo mini with raid for all my stuff it is super fast due to its thunderbolt connection and hybrid drive array which has a 64GB msata SSD which stages the data for very fast access it has 4 x 1.5TB thin HDDs for main storage. I only have it setup for 1 redundant drive failure.


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## hediz (Nov 30, 2013)

dgatwood said:


> Mt Spokane Photography said:
> 
> 
> > Raid or Redundant Array of Independent Disks is a method of increasing redundancy of your hard drives. one of the drives can fail without losing your data. Depending on the controller, it can be faster than a single disk or slower. Raid 6 is now becoming popular, it allows for 2 disk failures. You give up storage capacity for redundancy.
> ...



I agree with this, specially with having same models etc. At work we had one array with 10 drives that over 5 days had 6 drive fails. At least we had good backup but data was lost.

Privately I run the small NAS-drives with mirrored disks and then I backup to other disks


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## RustyTheGeek (Dec 27, 2013)

I'm a bit late to this thread but I'd like to comment on a few things... (RAID Array Strategy and Backups)

*1st - RLPhoto* - great machine. However, RAID5 is outdated and risky. Either go RAID6 or change things and use multiple RAID1 volumes. RAID5 is less reliable and difficult to recover in the event of a failure, esp if you are not using an enterprise class controller. I didn't see a RAID controller listed and I hope to God you are not putting a RAID5 array on a cheap single chip non-cache, non-battery (possibly motherboard) controller! It's better and easier to have multiple volumes on separate disks/arrays instead of one large volume on one array. When disks fail, you won't lose access to everything, only part of your data. For instance, I have 3 - 2TB RAID1 Mirrors, one for older stuff (archive), one for current stuff before POST and a 3rd for recent stuff after POST. I also have a few single internal drives that act as synchronized backups to the RAID volumes. Oh, and you should also have hot spares installed along with at least a couple of spare identical drives on the shelf to maintain drive consistency when you have to replace one later. And finally, how do you plan to back up a 10TB volume? More important, how do you plan to _restore_ it? Do you know how and have you done it yet to be sure it works? It is extremely tedious, stressful and time consuming to restore 10TB of data or a 10TB volume all at once. In fact, you really need another RAID array 10TB volume to back it up to. Hence the reason why I create multiple 2TB volumes as I need them. The archive volume for instance doesn't need to be backed up very often since it rarely changes.

*2nd - JPAZ* - I certainly hope you meant that you have a *RAID1* (mirror) because if you really have a *RAID0* array, you are NOT PROTECTED from a drive failure. RAID0 IS NOT A MIRROR ARRAY. There is NO REDUNDANCY. If one drive fails, you lose the entire volume, regardless of which physical disk the data is stored on.

*3rd - dgatwood* - I think there is nothing wrong with using a RAID Array but unfortunately most people do not really understand RAID so they do not plan, implement or maintain it correctly. Doing RAID well is not easy, cheap or simple. It is often misunderstood. I think using RAID is a good idea for adding some physical drive failure insurance, provided it is done right with the proper respect for the technology. But when things fail, most people are not equipped to handle the problem or did not use the right technology and at that point would have been better off staying with a simpler individual drive design. It's the restore/recovery phase of RAID that tests the design limits and is usually the hardest, most stressful part, even with a good backup in place.


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## JPAZ (Dec 27, 2013)

My typo....it is RAID 1, not RAID 0!


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## Drizzt321 (Dec 27, 2013)

RustyTheGeek said:


> I'm a bit late to this thread but I'd like to comment on a few things... (RAID Array Strategy and Backups)
> 
> *1st - RLPhoto* - great machine. However, RAID5 is outdated and risky. Either go RAID6 or change things and use multiple RAID1 volumes. RAID5 is less reliable and difficult to recover in the event of a failure, esp if you are not using an enterprise class controller. I didn't see a RAID controller listed and I hope to God you are not putting a RAID5 array on a cheap single chip non-cache, non-battery (possibly motherboard) controller! It's better and easier to have multiple volumes on separate disks/arrays instead of one large volume on one array. When disks fail, you won't lose access to everything, only part of your data. For instance, I have 3 - 2TB RAID1 Mirrors, one for older stuff (archive), one for current stuff before POST and a 3rd for recent stuff after POST. I also have a few single internal drives that act as synchronized backups to the RAID volumes. Oh, and you should also have hot spares installed along with at least a couple of spare identical drives on the shelf to maintain drive consistency when you have to replace one later. And finally, how do you plan to back up a 10TB volume? More important, how do you plan to _restore_ it? Do you know how and have you done it yet to be sure it works? It is extremely tedious, stressful and time consuming to restore 10TB of data or a 10TB volume all at once. In fact, you really need another RAID array 10TB volume to back it up to. Hence the reason why I create multiple 2TB volumes as I need them. The archive volume for instance doesn't need to be backed up very often since it rarely changes.



RAID5 does indeed have some dangers, although on ZFS RAIDZ (sorta like a RAID5) it avoids the write-hole and other dangers like that on top of all the other awesome features of ZFS.

That aside, in a machine like that, I'd go for RAID1+0/0+1. It'll give you more of a boost in performance while still giving you high levels of availability. Although for Lightroom at least, beyond a certain minimum read latency/speed, CPU is best for going back and forth between images to view them. At least until they are all cached.

I'm thinking I might upgrade my machine when the next Tick comes out from Intel. Haswell is great, but considering I'm still on the original Core i7-920 (lynfield?) that jump will be massive.


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## RLPhoto (Dec 27, 2013)

RustyTheGeek said:


> I'm a bit late to this thread but I'd like to comment on a few things... (RAID Array Strategy and Backups)
> 
> *1st - RLPhoto* - great machine. However, RAID5 is outdated and risky. Either go RAID6 or change things and use multiple RAID1 volumes. RAID5 is less reliable and difficult to recover in the event of a failure, esp if you are not using an enterprise class controller. I didn't see a RAID controller listed and I hope to God you are not putting a RAID5 array on a cheap single chip non-cache, non-battery (possibly motherboard) controller! It's better and easier to have multiple volumes on separate disks/arrays instead of one large volume on one array. When disks fail, you won't lose access to everything, only part of your data. For instance, I have 3 - 2TB RAID1 Mirrors, one for older stuff (archive), one for current stuff before POST and a 3rd for recent stuff after POST. I also have a few single internal drives that act as synchronized backups to the RAID volumes. Oh, and you should also have hot spares installed along with at least a couple of spare identical drives on the shelf to maintain drive consistency when you have to replace one later. And finally, how do you plan to back up a 10TB volume? More important, how do you plan to _restore_ it? Do you know how and have you done it yet to be sure it works? It is extremely tedious, stressful and time consuming to restore 10TB of data or a 10TB volume all at once. In fact, you really need another RAID array 10TB volume to back it up to. Hence the reason why I create multiple 2TB volumes as I need them. The archive volume for instance doesn't need to be backed up very often since it rarely changes.
> 
> ...



Wow. Quite a response rusty and duly noted.

I have a 8TB NAS for backups but I preferred having the storage internally for speed and also carbonite allows unlimited online backup of internals storage. As for RAID 5 reliability, I ran a raid 5 on my old machines mobo controller. I had one disk fail in its usage and rebuilt the array with the Intel rapid storage program. It was pretty easy.

so far the machine is fantastic. It rivals the new mac pro in most benchmarks.


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## mackguyver (Dec 27, 2013)

I just built a new machine and would gloat about the specs, but it's a rookie toy compared to this! You definitely get the builder award! I'll have to run the geekbench on my machine to see how it compares. Will post my results if they come even remotely close...


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## Drizzt321 (Dec 27, 2013)

I wouldn't trust any motherboard so-called RAID support. It's generally just half-hearted silicon implementation with mostly software RAID drivers sitting on top of it. Plus, if your motherboard dies, it's chancy if you can recover the array. If you stick with full software RAID (such as what Windows provides) it's much more portable and you have pretty good odds of recovering an array through a mobo/controller failure. Plus, you've got plenty of cores & CPU horsepower these days to make the amount of CPU overhead not really worth acknowledging. 

Now if you've got a high-quality 3rd party RAID card with battery-backed RAM, that might be worthwhile. But probably not for what you need.

Personally, I want bonded 10GbE to a NAS with 10-12 disks running FreeBSD with ZFS 0+1 that has 64GB of RAM for the ZFS cache.


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## RLPhoto (Dec 28, 2013)

Drizzt321 said:


> I wouldn't trust any motherboard so-called RAID support. It's generally just half-hearted silicon implementation with mostly software RAID drivers sitting on top of it. Plus, if your motherboard dies, it's chancy if you can recover the array. If you stick with full software RAID (such as what Windows provides) it's much more portable and you have pretty good odds of recovering an array through a mobo/controller failure. Plus, you've got plenty of cores & CPU horsepower these days to make the amount of CPU overhead not really worth acknowledging.
> 
> Now if you've got a high-quality 3rd party RAID card with battery-backed RAM, that might be worthwhile. But probably not for what you need.
> 
> Personally, I want bonded 10GbE to a NAS with 10-12 disks running FreeBSD with ZFS 0+1 that has 64GB of RAM for the ZFS cache.



Well let's also consider that this system was built with a future proofing of around 4-6 years. HDDs might be 10TB by then and I'll just migrate over to those with my data. 

I haven't had issues with mobo raid chips but if I do, I'll be sure to post it here.


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## WPJ (Dec 29, 2013)

RLPhoto said:


> Hello fellow CR users,
> 
> I tend to lapse in upgrading my equipment. I use my stuff until it cannot function or it frustrates me into improvising a alternate way of doing things. When that fails, I consider upgrading my stuff and my PC was one of those long neglected pieces of kit.
> 
> ...



nice setup, my only thing to mention is you probably don't need to over clock so just don't. To be that gain over risk isn't worth it in the long run.


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## mackguyver (Jan 2, 2014)

Well, mine's not quite on the same level, but not too bad given that I only spent about $500 on my upgrade - new Mobo, CPU, and PSU. Too bad the 64-bit test won't work in the trial mode.


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## mackguyver (Jan 2, 2014)

P.S. plus $75 for a Noctua NH-U14S CPU cooler. It's absolutely amazing and knocked 50 degrees C off the stock cooler at load. The fan that came with my 4770K was garbage, the worst Intel has ever included and was barely enough to keep the CPU for thermal shutdown.


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## wsmith96 (Jan 4, 2014)

Awesome PC RLPhoto - that should last you for a few years 

I used to build my PC's too, but ended up getting tired of "building - dinking with" and ended up purchasing refurbished workstations. I found myself always trying to keep up with the Jones' regarding CPU, RAM and Video Card and ended up tinkering more than using the PC.

HP has a refurb program called HP remarketing where you can get their business products (not consumer) for a good price if you shop the site regularly. For those interested - just google HP remarketing. Their business products hold up real well - my first workstation is 10 years old and is still kicking. My second is pushing 5 years old and still holds its own. I could dump some money into it to improve the performance ( which is nowhere where you guys are at right now - my geekbench score was 1816 with a multiprocessor of 7054), but there's a point where the PC is limited and additional hardware won't help you.

Damn you...now I have PC G.A.S..... ;D


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## RLPhoto (Jan 9, 2014)

mackguyver said:


> Well, mine's not quite on the same level, but not too bad given that I only spent about $500 on my upgrade - new Mobo, CPU, and PSU. Too bad the 64-bit test won't work in the trial mode.



That's a great score. Per core, if you had a 6-core machine, would be right around 21,000 pts.


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## mackguyver (Jan 9, 2014)

RLPhoto said:


> mackguyver said:
> 
> 
> > Well, mine's not quite on the same level, but not too bad given that I only spent about $500 on my upgrade - new Mobo, CPU, and PSU. Too bad the 64-bit test won't work in the trial mode.
> ...


Thanks and I'm really pleased with it. The only downfall is that my ancient laptop now seems so slow, I'm ready to throw it out the window!


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## wsmith96 (Jan 10, 2014)

mackguyver said:


> RLPhoto said:
> 
> 
> > mackguyver said:
> ...



Time to upgrade - it's the never ending battle


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