Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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Gettin one SSD potentially (doesn’t have to) changes the config from four 3.5″ to eight 2.5″ drive bays – so I can see where this comes from, the future is in SFF and smaller form factors. Something the Z820 could learn from, although I still like it better.
Yet it’s not a requirement, you could certainly have one SSD and at least four 3.5″ drives in a 7610.
P.S. My apologies to the Dell rep – I know I am making his life a bit more difficult. ;p
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[Lon Waitman] “the dell guy is saying that if i do an ssd boot drive (2.5 inches), that i have to do all ssd drives in the system”
Amazing BS… Just amazing… 🙂 Dell’s margin on SSDs is like… 100%? That would explain it… 🙂
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What is the graphics card in the T7400?
Adobe CS version?
When you’re done with a project, do you offload / archive the source files or keep it all on the internal drives?
Two options. One, you could try to update / tune your existing system to eliminate that choppy playback problem, and perhaps upgrade your graphics card and media drives. Two, just get a new one, configure it properly. With a limited budget, I’d recommend looking at (1) first.
Ideally you’d want to zero in what’s causing that choppy playback, regardless of how you proceed. Perhaps it’s something simple that’s easy to fix – then you can extend the lifetime of your existing system. If the drives are full, consider doing a full backup, replacing the drives with larger capacity, configuring them as RAID, restoring the data. Another option is getting an external archival storage (e.g. a bunch of USB 3.0 or eSATA drives) to free up the space on your internal ones.
How to zero in on the problem: run Windows Task Manager and Resource Monitor, and look at CPU, memory, hard disk activity during that choppy playback. Whatever is maximized (hitting the performance ceiling) is what likely needs attention. Look also at Pr settings, play with playback resolution and other settings. If you’re not sure how to do it, you can hire me or someone else to do it for you.
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Standard RAID levels (Wikipedia)
Best RAID level is the one that best suits your needs… 🙂 My personal favorite is RAID6 on 8+ drives with a good controller and SSD caching – implementing something like that usually costs upward of $2K for a good RAID controller, storage chassis, etc. – not including drives.
T7610 includes a very basic RAID controller (Intel RST) that supports RAID0, 1, 5. Its RAID5 performance is neither fast nor reliable so use with caution. It also has an on-board SAS controller that supports RAID0, 1 and 10.
If you describe a bit more what kind of projects you do, what are your storage needs – then perhaps one of the resident Cows will chime in with suggestions. Or you could hire one of the resident Cows to help you make the right decision with your storage configuration.
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MiniSAS is an add-on card you’d need to install. ATTO R680 and Areca ARC-1882x are the two most popular MiniSAS RAID cards for the Mac Pro. If you don’t need RAID, such a card is called an HBA (rather than a RAID controller), and it’s quite a bit cheaper. ATTO H680, for instance.
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[Andrew Migliori] “Since we’ll be going through a lot of projects, maybe an internal RAID0 would work out fine, and just swap out new drives per project?”
Swapping internal drives can be iffy – but not impossible. External drives are better suited for that.
PCIe (PCI Express) slots can indeed be expanded (Thunderbolt is actually one such technology) yet outside of Thunderbolt it’s rarely used for less than a dozen of drives for high speed applications.
What I would do in your case is look at it from the opposite direction: how fast is fast enough? … and go from there. Maybe a USB 3.0 or eSATA external box with four drives will be fast enough ($250-800), maybe a MiniSAS – with four or eight or even more – or maybe you will be fine with three internal drives in RAID0.
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[Daniel Schultz] “Even if I’m using RAID 1 for redundancy?”
USB 3.0 should be fine for RAID1 with two drives.
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[Jon Doughtie] “One oddity: I have an external hard disc dock that connects via USB2.0. If that is connected and powered up on a cold boot, it hangs the bootup. I simply shut it off before bootup.”
Perhaps USB is ahead of SAS/SATA in BIOS boot order?
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The link isn’t working.
With four drives, the bottleneck could very well be USB 3.0 – in reality its speeds are way below theoretical limits of 5Gbs and closer to half that, utilizing less than 50% of potential performance of four drives. Thunderbolt will be much faster here, provided the box has a decent RAID controller.
— Alex Gerulaitis | Systems Engineer | DV411 – Los Angeles, CA