Price/Performance value

[B Snyder]

I'm very happy I decided to post my question about the Acer computer here. I just ordered a new computer from John today and look forward to receiving it next week. I'll be sure to post my experiences after I've used it for a while. John was very helpful and provided clear, understandable answers to my many questions. Thanks John!

 

[John M]

Striping is a not a good idea. If you have ever paid for data recovery you'll know why. You double your probability of a total loss. A RAID 5 2+1 setup gives you some performance increases along with fault protection. Furthermore, unless the RAID card utilizes the PCI-E or a PCI-X bus, you're going to hit a nasty bottle neck.

Also, a quad core for a design station is silly. More clock on a dual core is better suited to that application. Also, no flavor of Windows is particaularly good with SMP, and Adobe stuff is notoriously bad. Unless you're Johnny multi-task, its not the best fit. Also, be leary of anything that has "1" slot available. This means the memory isn't double pumping. While bench marks have shown that dual channel doesn't really give the as advertised performance increase, not running matched pairs of ram is a handicap nonetheless.

Any time I use RAID 0 I also recommend good backups. You can't deny the speed/price ratio here and that's what I was looking at. Disk space is cheap, meaning it doesn't cost much to back up even several workstations to another device "just in case" while enjoying all the throughput in daily operation.

The cheapie RAID card (PCI express) benches at 115 mb/sec average and 140 mb/sec peak. That's plenty of improvement over a single drive's 65 mb/sec. The same drives on an onboard RAID controller peaked at 240 mb/sec but did the same average throughput. For the lower price range, it's very attractive. When using this variety of RAID, it's best to stick with the simple 0 or 1 as they don't present any calculation load to do their job.

Onboard/software RAID does have its limits and that's why we also offer more "robust" workstations - albeit in a different price range. I'm working on the page for our Sign Gremlin, the companion to the Sign Monster, that'll use onboard RAID for a mirrored OS/program disk and a striped array for design files. This means you never have to worry about a total OS reload and I hope you're backing up design files anyway so a failure in the stripe would be more of an inconvenience than a problem. It'll be in the $1300 price range - a tremendous value compared to the other solutions on the market.

And finally, for this sytem we settled on a simple mirrored setup, an overclocked Core2Duo at 3.2 gHz, and 3GB of DDR2 in dual channel. It'll chew through most tasks with no problem at all. This setup does SuperPi 1M in 15.7 seconds (google it to compare to other systems). There are 2 extra drive bays when more storage is needed. When file sizes get really big, we can talk about another machine

 

[eforer]

I have no doubt its fast, but with a RAID 5 you still see a significant improvement over a single drive. A PCI express RAID card is fine, but a regular pci raid card is a toilet and you are way better off with on-board.

IMO the best setup is what I'm doing. I stripe two raptors for the os and applications, setup a 2gb swap partition (fat 32) and run that all off a PCI-E Raid card. I then use the on-board RAID to do a RAID 5 array for storage using a 2+1 setup. You need a mighty power supply to support all that + optical, but its worth it. I also slipstreamed a copy of windows so I can reinstall with all my drivers when the stripped array fails, which is not an if, but a when. I have lost dozens of hard drives in the last 10 years (yes going back to my school computers and teen years!) and accept it as inevitability.

Also, benchmarking transfer speed alone isn't that useful, a reliable bench mark that actually a/b the performance of a RIP handling files from a RAID 0, 5 or a single drive would be more valuable. The processing overhead will probably make the speed garnered from a stripped array negligible. That combined with heinous reliability, and I don't think its a great choice for one's only storage.

I also use an additional webserver dedicated to offsite backup. Its a Free BSD box like my regular webserver, but its dedicated to just offsite. It appends every night at starting at 1am and is almost always done by the time I come in at 8am.

 

[B Snyder]

eforer- I appreciate your input on the subject. This entire computer buying process has been enlightening.
Please remember the title of the thread. The "value" part is of significant importance too. I had a certain amount of money budgeted for this computer and obviously I'd like to get the most for my money. Had my budget been different I may have spec'd a computer similar to yours. Time will tell (and I will share), but I think the level of quality and service I am going to receive is fair for what I am paying for the computer.

 

[John M]

10 years ago I was still working for an ISP doing server administration. 15 years before that I was working on an Apple II with a 40 column, monochrome green display. I'm not really old; I've just been doing this a long time! I'm used to systems with thousands of users who depend on nearly 100% uptime 24/7. I've built dozens of x86-based servers and I've bought servers with six-figure price tags when they were appropriate.

The Sign Monster thread has a real-life A/B comparison. The original Athlon 4000, single HD system took 55 minutes to export an 8GB EPS file from Corel. The new system took 3 minutes. The hard drive benchmark on that machine showed 200 mb/sec average throughput. The results were a combination of processor power and storage speed.

That thread also has a graph showing the "regular" Western Digital drives in RAID 0 vs. a pair of Raptors in RAID 0. The "normal" drives win handily, plus they have 4 times the capacity of the Raptors. Fast drives are great for applications like database or email servers. Graphic design needs sustained maximum output along with large capacity and SATA1 comes in second place.

RAID 5 really needs at least 4 drives to gain a speed advantage over a single drive. I typically use RAID 5 with hot-swap bays any time I need a little insurance against a drive failure. An array in 0+1 is also a good choice for speed and reliability. Features like this add to the cost, which is why other sign design machines are in the $3-7k range.

My recipe is simple, and anyone is free to copy it. I mirror (or mirror + stripe) the OS/Program drive and stripe the storage and scratch drives. Data on the storage array can be backed up regularly to "slow" standard storage in case of failure. Storage can also be RAID 5 if you've got the room and budget. The customer is always free to change things - that's why they're custom built. If you've got the budget, we can build it.