System Builder Marathon, December 2010: Value, Compared

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]I think 1GB is entry-level for a high-end user and would love to have more. In fact, I think a RAID 5 with at least 3 1TB drives providing 2TB capacity would be a smart move, using a professional controller and maybe even a hot spare. But you know how well that would go over with the majority of readers, who continuously argued against capacities over 1TB last year.What I'm saying is that you and I might agree about a few things, but that's not going to sway the majority. I've even found it easier to justify a BD-RE drive with the majority and hey, at least you can use that for backups[/citation]

Wouldn't a raid 10 be better now that you're talking professional controller anyway? no overhead, and 4 drives for read access with the right controllers.... But ofc that's 4 drives - way over the budget for ordinary people. Anyway. I'd say at least a single 2tb drive for storage would be needed in the real world these days. They're rather cheap, and it doesn't hurt to have half a drive left empty if you don't need it after all.


ps. I built a bluray drive into my parents i7 system that I gifted them last year (present for 25 years wedding aniversary thingie), and to date I don't think they've even used it.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]Wouldn't a raid 10 be better now that you're talking professional controller anyway? no overhead, and 4 drives for read access with the right controllers.... But ofc that's 4 drives - way over the budget for ordinary people. Anyway. I'd say at least a single 2tb drive for storage would be needed in the real world these days. They're rather cheap, and it doesn't hurt to have half a drive left empty if you don't need it after all.ps. I built a bluray drive into my parents i7 system that I gifted them last year (present for 25 years wedding aniversary thingie), and to date I don't think they've even used it.[/citation]You lose less capacity with RAID 5 than with RAID 10. You don't even need a professional controller for RAID 0 or RAID 1, so I don't see why it would be a necessity for RAID 10. On the other hand, four 1TB drives on a RAID 10 with Intel's controller would be far cheaper than three 1TB drives on RAID 5 with a professional controller.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]You lose less capacity with RAID 5 than with RAID 10. You don't even need a professional controller for RAID 0 or RAID 1, so I don't see why it would be a necessity for RAID 10. On the other hand, four 1TB drives on a RAID 10 with Intel's controller would be far cheaper than three 1TB drives on RAID 5 with a professional controller.[/citation]

You need a professional controller for hardware raid 5 checksum, and you need hardware controller to do reading from all mirrored drives - software controllers only read from one ....

 

[Olle P]

I find the SSD debate interesting, but would like to discuss an entirely different matter:
The evaluation of graphics performance.
I think it goes without saying that one can expect the budget rig to be feeding a fairly low resolution monitor, whereas the high end machine will be connected either to one high resolution monitor or more than one monitor.
Therefore it makes no sense to compare the frame rates at the same resolutions.

The best option, IMO, would be to increase the SBM budgets by some 20% to include proper monitors. This will introduce the element of balancing raw graphics power versus affording a monitor good enough to make use of it. And for the high end rig it's a matter of having a single monitor and SSD or a triplet of monitors with high end graphics.
The comparative tests are to be run using the native resolutions of the designated monitors.