Lenovo Thinkserver and photo editing

[slackermt]

I'm a photographer and have a ton of RAW images that I need to be able to store, plus I need a lot of horsepower to edit my images in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I'm thinking about purchasing a Lenovo ThinkServer TS440 70AQ000YUX. It has a Xeon E3-1245 CPU. I plan to replace the power supply with a Thermaltake TR2 that has an output for graphics cards that require dedicated power, and also install a Geforce GT 740 card. For hard drives, I'll mirror 2 512GB SSD's for my OS, then install some 4TB drives in the rest of the bays, possibly in a RAID. Does anyone see any issues with any of the above?

 

[kanewolf]

I believe the TS440 doesn't use standard ATX power supply. If you google "TS440 power supply" the pictures are hot-swap modular power supplies.
You will also see references to power adapter cables. I think you may have issues with your power supply path.
That E3 Xeon is not significantly better than an i7. It is still limited to 32GB RAM. You would do better to get an i7-7700 with DDR4. It will have more horsepower.

RAID1 for your OS is a waste. Have a good backup strategy and use it. Use that second SSD as scratch space for Photoshop.

RAID is not a substitute for backups. Don't get fooled into thinking your data is "safe" because it is on RAID.

 

[slackermt]

I believe the TS440 doesn't use standard ATX power supply. If you google "TS440 power supply" the pictures are hot-swap modular power supplies.
You will also see references to power adapter cables. I think you may have issues with your power supply path.
That E3 Xeon is not significantly better than an i7. It is still limited to 32GB RAM. You would do better to get an i7-7700 with DDR4. It will have more horsepower.

RAID1 for your OS is a waste. Have a good backup strategy and use it. Use that second SSD as scratch space for Photoshop.

RAID is not a substitute for backups. Don't get fooled into thinking your data is "safe" because it is on RAID.

I had wondered about the power supply. I see that the size of the hot swap stock power supply is different than that of an ATX. There is the adapter cable that would make it work, but would it may not even fit inside the case.

I'll rethink the RAID for my OS. I do have a NAS that I will use for backups, and I already backup all of my data to the cloud as well.

 

[kanewolf]

An HP workstation, Z800 or Z820 might be a better choice than the T440. You would get more cores, more RAM and a power supply that was intended to support graphics cards. But I don't know what your budget is like.