For me, it's near perfection ( sandy bridge CPU are a really good ). Bundled with 2 big 26" screen, of course

skip the 2x Seagates, they will slow you down, and if u only have 4 ram slots get 2x 8gb sticks so u can upgrade later

otherwise a nice build

Henrik

Hi UK Pano,

what you are wanting to do is to eliminate all bottlenecks, you would need 4 or more hard drives in RAID-0 to match the speed of the SSD, though latency would still be slower on the HDD;s (eg. the time it takes to begin a command) If you wanted to use your HDD's it should be as  main storage (final place).

Use your two SSD's where one is for OS/APPs as you have suggested above, then use the second SSD for temp for Autopano and photoshop, it probably sounds very extravagant to just have an expensive disk like either of the two you have bought (they are really nice too!) just sitting and being temp space, but its here you will see an increase in the speed of things.

Memory size (RAM) is a compromise between size and speed, but because we are generally working on larger files I think it will be more beneficial to have larger ram sticks over smaller and faster, simply because even the slower ram is still fast enough to fill your SSD's or HDD's with data. It is different if you are making a gaming computer where the files being read and written are much smaller.

I would go with the cheapest and largest ram sticks that are compatible with your mainboard, I use Kingstons myself and they have been fine and were cheaper then both Crucial and Corsair, which both have excellent ram sticks if not some of the best.

Just to recap, that I put my words where my mouth is,
Everything is in RAID-0
I use currently
2x SSD's for OS/APP's
3x SSD's for Temp/Scratch disk
2x 4x HHD's for data storage.
I hoping to double all of these later in the year, but atm $$$ are a bit hard to come by ;-(
I have room for 12 ram sticks and I use 6x 8GB Kingston ECC (48GB total), again if $$$ possible
to double this too.  I haven't checked lately but I think this is the ticket to process the pano's really fast
and my Dual CPU's are overclocked from 2.6Ghz to 4.1Ghz with a total of 2x6 cores and 24 threads.

Getting into overclocking and configuring all this isn't just a plug'n'play job, in my case we have spend a lot of time fiddling with settings swapping things around, then do it all again ;-) which I think is a good argument for buying a Macpro if only it was fast enough :-) but certainly much more a plug'n'play affair. but each to their own!

I hope this is helpful if you have more Q's just ask away  and I will try and answer as soon as I can

Henrik

Hi Paul,

regarding partitioning the Boot drive; it probably isn't going to make any difference, as long as you provide enough space for windows to grow as it needs. Therefore i honestly don't think it is worth it.

Separating resources, I would only go as far as to have your OS and all applications on your C: drive, the second drive (D is purely for temp/scratch disk space which is really really fast. I do occationally drop some files on it, that I will have temporary, and having them there will speed up the process, but I am careful not to fill this drive up, as I wan't it to be fast and available.

What would be good to have too, which I haven't done myself yet, is once your machine and apps are all installed and you are happy with everything is to make a copy of the boot drive, so if something fails, you can easily format and move your copy back to the boot drive and be up and running in 30min instead of hours if not longer.

RAM, it all comes down to how much you are willing to spend, if you have the cash for fast 8GB stick, then I am all for it! However if you have to compromise, then I would go with more RAM over faster less faster RAM. I doubt that your board uses ECC, so you should be a lot better off as it will be easier to find suitable RAM.

I hope all this makes sense - I envy you on your new SSD's ;-) they are lightning fast

Hi, you are very welcome,

I would like if we put a sticky up on the hardware with some general guidelines, but maybe after you have build your system we can get some feedback on how you find the performance. If you don't mind, running a couple of test for us. Such as the PTGui Speedtest which can also be done on APG. So you have something to compare with.

I did some test on it on  my own system, and it made the process just that little bit faster. Now because I only have the previous generation SSD's they are a fair bit slower then your new ones, so you should see similar speeds to me, as I have RAID'ed all my disks with 2 or more disks on each, but when I transfer between my 4x HDD's of Black Caviar to my 3x SSD's I can peak at 1.4Gb/s but generally its about 3-400mb/s

I hope this is of some help to you, next comes building it, and that can have its own issues, I had wanted to put OCZ RevoDrives in my box originally we spend almost a month trying to get them to work, they just were not compatible with the board because of bad drivers. So i ended up going with just SSD's and later bought a couple of raid cards.
Most people probably think I am mad with my computer build, but its funny when I go to other forums, I have a little rig ;-) a modest one :-) My plan is to eventually have the 3 storage parts all with 8 SSD's each, to hit about 2GB/sec in transfer rate. This may not need 8 drives with the newer SSD's but i am still some time away from this due to lack of $$$.

Anyway, let us know when you start building

all the best

Henrik

One last thing .. was my understanding of using the second SSD as a dedicated "workspace" correctly understood?


Yes, you can make it dedicated if you like but i would call it tempoaray workspace, I have to admit that most of the time things just run from my storage which is a 4x drive RAID-0, but if you want that bit extra speed then yes. I mentioned it above as an option, my theory is that if you stick to keeping things moving across the three storage units (OS/Apps - TEMP - Storage), then I think you will get the max performance, providing all three are running at similar speed. Your proposed config is still a little short in the storage department, if you make it 4x 1 or 2TB 7200/10000rpm drives in RAID you will match and exceed the transfer speed of one of your SSD's but latency will still be slower (eg. response time).

Its a bit like a truck and a sports car, both can do 120 mph, but the sports car (SSD) will get to 120 faster! ;-)

I hope this makes sense

I think you can go ahead with your proposed build, you can always add later

Henrik

PS: I do know that Bo is right about what he says, but here and probably also in the UK, wages are higher and computers r cheaper. So it makes sense to have faster computers! To me Bo is GOLD