How much of a difference will SATA 3.0 make over SATA 2.0 with a RAID 0 and a single SSD?

twanto

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Aug 14, 2002
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I've got a single Samsung 840 Pro and two WD Blacks (750GB) in RAID on a P55 board running an overclocked i5 750 (3.9Ghz). I'm wondering how much of an improvement an upgrade to a new Z97 system will make in photo tasks. I run a lot of heavy Lightroom work and Photoshop, sometimes stitching time series of 900 photos, @ 50mb each, or doing image stacking in Photoshop. This is pretty CPU intensive and I would guess that the upgrade might help a bit here. It is clear to me it wont' make any difference in games (e.g., http://techbuyersguru.com/i5CPUshootout2.php). But I'm wondering if it might make a difference on the SATA bus. My guess would be not much. [But I'm also interested in upgrading to USB 3.0 (which my add in card never works properly with Windows 8) and the increased processing efficiency of the newer architecture]. I'm considering an i5-4690K. I may also just skip the upgrade and juice up my RAM (I only have 8GB which I hit the limit on with some of these tasks). I'd like your thoughts on these issues. Thank you.

Edited to add: I keep my Lightroom catalog and previous on the SSD which is also my Photoshop scratch disk.
 
Solution
SATA III and SSD will give a performance boost. A two drive RAID0 isn't going to give you much of a boost (you might get 2-5%). RAID0 also gives you twice the chance of losing everything on both drives (one drive dies - both lose 100% of the data).

I do a lot in photoshop, and even with the files on the SSD, you won't see a huge performance boost in opening the files. The biggest performance gains will be RAM and CPU (a core i-7 can give you 20-35% boost over a core i-5) and 16GB of RAM makes a big difference in processing multiple files. Depending upon how many you are opening, you might even consider 32GB of RAM (I would go with 16GB first, and watch RAM utilization).
SATA III and SSD will give a performance boost. A two drive RAID0 isn't going to give you much of a boost (you might get 2-5%). RAID0 also gives you twice the chance of losing everything on both drives (one drive dies - both lose 100% of the data).

I do a lot in photoshop, and even with the files on the SSD, you won't see a huge performance boost in opening the files. The biggest performance gains will be RAM and CPU (a core i-7 can give you 20-35% boost over a core i-5) and 16GB of RAM makes a big difference in processing multiple files. Depending upon how many you are opening, you might even consider 32GB of RAM (I would go with 16GB first, and watch RAM utilization).
 
Solution
I can't speak to your specific application but I have done several builds for photo / video enthusiasts and the things most asked for a user box intended to serve both for gaming and most things Adobe are:

I7 CPUs
CUDA Capable GFX card
RAM ..... more and faster is always better
Storage subsystem with top notch transfer rate.
 
You don't want an i5 with only four cores for your task levels. You want either an i7 or a Xeon for the additional thread processing and I'd recommend the Xeon since it's much cheaper. Single core performance is also much improved with Haswell Refresh architecture over the Lynfield architecture of your chip as seen here:

2d9p82o.jpg




Do you use or plan to use SLI/Crossfire and is overclocking a compulsion regarding any new processor? The Xeon doesn't support it like the K series chips but it really doesn't need it either. It offers about double the single core performance of your current chip and almost three times the overall performance factoring in the additional threads not to mention that most any current supporting board IS going to be both SATA III and PCIe 3.0.


What is the model number of your current memory modules?
 
Well I just typed a long answer and when I submitted it the system told me I was banned. WTF?

Anyway....

I did some quick tests comparing an Ivy Bridge i7-3770 with same turbo clock as my i5-750 with lightroom exports and preview renderings and found the i7 has a miniscule advantage, nowhere near 20-35%. So there does not seem to be any use for hyperthreading in LR.

Yes, I do plan to overclock and SLI, so a K series is a must. My memory model is PC3-10700, Gskill F3-12800CL9-2GBRL
 


It's a relevant comparison if we are comparing the utility of an i7 or any other processor with hypterthreading or more cores. The comparison you posted had different clock rates, so right off the bat it is not relevant because I'm running my i5-750 as fast as the newer chips (including both Ivy Bridge and Haswell). The question is about the behavior of a specific program and whether it would make a difference for me. A generic benchmark in that case does not help in that situation. Does that make sense?
 
Well, I could show you plenty of benchmarks using the i5-4690k@4.7Ghz versus the 4790k at stock speeds that show for things like video processing, threaded 3D particle movement and editing huge raw vector graphics, that the i7 just crushes the i5 when it comes to those kinds of tasks, at least in threaded processes, but I don't think it would help much. Seems you've got it under control.
 


Yes, I don't do much video or 3D rendering type stuff. I mean, occasionally I will do some video stuff but it's not much of my workload. Thanks for your input.