It’s been a while since my last report. I’ve been traveling and hosting film and animation conferences. In the mean time I’ve been refining my Software test bed computer. I spent a lot of time researching what would be the best way to go and it has paid off. I expected a little bit of speed gain from my old Pentium Core II test bed, which was actually a bit faster in terms of CPU speed. I was surprised at the tremendous increase in productivity that I actually achieved.
Interestingly, my most used and intensive applications, which can now identify and use multiple cores were speeded up immensely, while the older single processor technology was not. This makes sense since the test bed, though using the slowest Core i7 processor, posts eight virtual cores. All eight actually function as real cores. Thus when I run Vue 7.5 Extreme on the system it sees 8 cores, uses all of them, and runs at least six times faster and sometimes more depending on the task.

The new Core i7 architecture streamlines dataflow greatly and when combined with the meticulously well designed Gigabyte Motherboard and Intel support chips we have an entirely new set of data paths, bypassing old bottlenecks both internally and in the motherboard design. The motherboard also has built in liquid cooling capability and enormous heat fins to keep the support chips cool even when you turbo up the speed. For this article I have not yet over-clocked. A survey of potential users convinced me that if used in a commercial setting, such a rig as this would not be likely to over-clock for reasons of reliability. But the real bottleneck in content creation is your hard drive system. Here’s my solution.

Consider installing SAS drives

Hard drives are the slowest part of your system. It pays to make a little effort here. I streamlined the test bed’s I/O with a three-tier (server-like) storage system. At Seagate’s suggestion, for tiers one and two, (tier one is fastest, two next fastest and so on) I opted for the enterprise-style SAS bus (Serial Attached SCSI) which is potentially faster and more efficient than the more typical SATA. The Gigabyte Mobo doesn’t accommodate SAS Drives so I incorporated a Dual SAS/SATA interface from LSI. (Their LSI MegaRAID SAS 8704EM2 RAID Controller) The controller slows up your boot a bit, but does the job nicely. It has a simple built-in utility for setting up your RAIDs.

Enterprise level SAS drives cost considerably more than standard drives because they are built for extreme reliability and efficiency. They run very cool and use far less power than standard drives. In my book, those extra dollars are well spent insurance. Sometimes your data is almost priceless. So take heed.

That said, I did have some data loss when I shut down my computer by turning off the power supply. The LSI interface has a huge data cache that needs to be transferred to disk at power down. The solution was to install the optional LSI battery pack for this interface. This keeps the onboard volatile cache live and well at all times. Of course you shouldn’t be cutting off the power supply anyway.

Start with reliability

To this interface I added extremely fast mechanical drives from Seagate as well as a pair of very large Desktop drives. For the bottom tier (tier 3,) I built a type 1 (fully redundant) RAID from a pair of 7.5K rpm Seagate Barracuda ST31500341AS, 1.5 terabyte SCSI drives with a 3.5 GB/s transfer rate. These are the standard 3.5-inch form-factor SATA drives and went into standard drive bays. These are ‘green’ drives that use 42 percent less power than standard drives and they have a large 32 megabyte cache and a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 750,000 hours. Considering one year has only 8766 hours… you do the math.

I divided this massive drive into two partitions. On one large partition for OS and Media storage and on a separate partition I put the frequent shadow backups for each of the other partitions. This yielded a very secure place to keep my OS and backups, and a very large drive for media archiving. Yet, this is a drive you can buy for around $130.00 each at this writing. Though this is my slowest tier, it is still remarkably fast.

The high-speed tiers

I decided to build type 0 RAIDs for Tiers 2 and 1. This RAID type provides no data redundancy, but does significantly enhance performance. Because there is no redundancy, I opted for extremely reliable, cool running, compact 2.5-inch enterprise drives. They are the same size as a laptop drive but a little thicker. I can fit eight of them into the space of just two CD drive bays or four in the space for one CD Drive bay. I tried both.

For home use I recommend the StarTech SataBay425BK drive bay. This is a beautifully built and inexpensive consumer drive bay that accommodates four 2.5-inch drives of either SATA, SAS or mixed. This is a nice option for those of you who are paying for your own setup. It holds the drives in handy pull out trays and costs well under $100. [Note: The first version of his bay I received had a manufacturing error and, though labeled for SAS drives, did not support them. This error has now been fixed. If you happen to get an old one (unlikely) they’ll switch it for you immediately.]

The enterprise class solution I tried is from AIC (Advanced Industrial Computer.) It is their attractive and functional High Density SFF 2.5-Inch SAS Drive Canister, Model BR-SAS28. This holds 8 drives in pop out trays. You can mix SAS and SATA drives in the bay. Although I highly recommend this solution because of its high quality cooling and build, there were two small problems. One, the canister is just slightly too narrow to fill the two drive spaces on my NXT Case, leaving about a 1/8″on each side. Also, the release buttons on the drive trays can stick, making it difficult to replace the tray. I had to rap the tray head on my desk to pop the button back out, but I doubt this is good for the drives. It’s only happened twice. Since then, I tried a little silicon spray and that seems to have worked. Both style drive bays are the hot swap variety.

Tier 2 ‘ worth the risk

For Tier 2 I went with the new half-terabyte Constellation SAS drives. These run at 10K rpm as well but have a faster 6.5 GB/s transfer rate and a remarkable 1.4 million hour MTBF. They also are the new 2.5-inch form factor and run extremely cool and fit my drive bays.
I decided to go out on a limb and set up a performance enhancing Raid 0 (no redundancy) which I only recommend if you have extremely reliable drives, because if either one of them fails, you lose all your data on both drives. I covered myself with the frequent backups and with this enterprise level of reliability; I was willing to take the risk for the performance gain. Therefore, tier two is all around speedier and has a faster transfer rate than tier three. I keep media that I’m working with here for efficient I/O. These two drives give me about a terabyte of very fast storage.

Tier 1 ‘ world’s fastest rotational drives

For Tier 1, I built another RAID 0 with a pair of blazing fast 15.2 K Seagate SAVVIO 74 GB drives. These are relatively expensive drives, but the price is coming down. At this writing they run about $500 each. These babies spin at 15K and have an industry leading MTBF of 1.6 million hours. This means they’re not likely to fail in my lifetime or yours. So I feel very confident with my RAID 0 configuration, especially since it too is backed up several times a day. (NORE: I do NOT use continuous shadow backup because it eats up way too many resources.) I have automatic backup at lunchtime and at 8:00pm when I’m not likely to be using the system. Since it’s an incremental backup, it doesn’t take much time. This way, in the worst case; I lose 4 hours work in my lifetime. I can handle that.

As a side note, the 6.5 Gb/s SAS bus doesn’t mean your drive data will transfer that fast, not by a long shot. It means that if you stack enough drives in a raid 0, you can achieve up to this rate.

As soon as I think they’re really ready, I will replace tier 1 with SSDs or Solid State Drives. I’ll move the SAVVIO’s down to tier two and use the current tier two as a fast place to install my most critical, speed hungry applications.

In later installments I’ll tell you about the amazing Freezone Elite CPU cooling system from CoolIt, the powerful ATI 8700 Workstation Graphics Adapter with 800plus stream processors and more. However, in my next installment I’m going to talk about Applications I’ve been testing, Including: 3DS Max 2010, Vue 7.5 Extreme, PowerDirector V7 Deluxe and GeoControl 2.