** A Day at OcUK - Stelly's New System - EPIC CUSTOM BUILD **

rjk

rjk

Caporegime
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for hard drives. Those figures are ridiculous.

The revo doesnt play nice with CDM. dont worry about those figures.
 
Don
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for hard drives. Those figures are ridiculous.

The revo doesnt play nice with CDM. dont worry about those figures.

I was wondering about that to be honest :) I did think it was because of all the PCI slots taken up throttling the bandwidth...

As for the RAID card, I know right, I was like my god for Disks that is stupidly fast... I have them in RAID 10 just so you know :)


Just for info:
The Intel® RAID Controller RS25DB080, a second generation SAS-2/SATA-3 card with eight internal ports, delivers two 800MHz processor cores and a 72-bit DDR3 interface that drives 1 GB cache memory.

Stelly
 
Soldato
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Nice build but I would say, seagate drives in raid are generally kinda problematic. You might have been better with some western RE4's. With the cache infront it's not as if you'll notice the speed so much (if I understand how you have your raid configured. You went Revo as boot/sys and the 256MB SSD as the cache for the raid right?). Either way, I'd have gone with a greater number of RE4's or throw constellation's at it as you've already spent so much.

The other thing - why raid 10? With the drives you have, going raid 5 would have given better speed with a similar level of redundancy. If you want to go raid 10 there's no real reason to throw a £430 raid card at it unless it's just to be smug. You'd get another 60-100MB/sec out of the drives in raid 5 if the cards worth it's salt with no real loss in redundancy (raid 10 wastes half the capacity of the drives. Yes it can suffer a second drive failure but only if you're lucky with which 2nd drive fails - which is half the point of a raid in the first place, increasing your time to work against bad luck. Raid-5 would provide a speed boost and would also be able to suffer a drive failure without loosing data).

The rest of the hardware's very good but the storage setup has me a little baffled to say the least.

If needed i'll happily get my raid properly back on it's feet and show what I mean from the benchies. Mines on a £70 hardware raid card that needed modding to get it working on a regular pc...

There's a lot of good bits on this build but it does look to be a bit of a "money no object" style effort with cash thrown at parts assuming big wad spent would mean better performance rather than something with properly considered purchases, especially so when your most expensive part is ALMOST window dressing.

Now, i've made similar mistakes with "silly" builds (Scsi U2W in a home PC when it was the mutts nuts, had 2k budget for the build) but not for at least 10 years. I'm NOT hating either, I don't want this to be dismissed as troll bait or something, just pointing out some bits that could have been done better considering all the money spent.
 
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Associate
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Have to agree, the system is very nice, but the storage choice / configuration has me a bit baffled.

An 8 port RAID controller for £800, when you could have bought an LSI Megaraid 9260-16i (16 port) for under £550 (plus BBU). I doubt the Intel one is any quicker, and i personally trust LSI more than Intel when it comes to RAID controllers.

2TB of redundant storage - since you were going crazy on the spending, could have nabbed 4 x 3TB drives in RAID5. RAID10 is barely any quicker, and you lose 50% of your storage

Like i said, very nice build, just seems a lot of money for what you actually got.
 
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Soldato
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An 8 port RAID controller for £800, when you could have bought an LSI Megaraid 9260-16i (16 port) for under £550 (plus BBU). I doubt the Intel one is any quicker, and i personally trust LSI more than Intel when it comes to RAID controllers.

Its the same card, or VERY Close vairiant Intel RS25DB080 = LSI Megaraid 9260-8i. All Intel RAID controllers are re-branded LSI Controllers. ;)
 
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Ah i wasn't aware of that thanks. So £400 is reasonable then when you look at the price of an LSI Megaraid 9260-8i

I've got the 9260-16i with 12 x 2TB drives in RAID6 and it's performance is superb, averages around 400MB/s with great redundancy.

Once the 4TB drives drop to below £80 ill look at upgrading them all
 
Soldato
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Its the same card, or VERY Close vairiant Intel RS25DB080 = LSI Megaraid 9260-8i. All Intel RAID controllers are re-branded LSI Controllers. ;)

So are the Dell Perc's :p

Ah i wasn't aware of that thanks. So 400 is reasonable then when you look at the price of an LSI Megaraid 9260-8i

I've got the 9260-16i with 12 x 2TB drives in RAID6 and it's performance is superb, averages around 400MB/s with great redundancy.

Once the 4TB drives drop to below 80 ill look at upgrading them all

It's reasonable for the card but unless there's a good reason, still not reasonable for this build :)

As we are here, any suggestions for a decent raid 5 card with SSD cache (preferably one I can add of my own choosing).
 
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Don
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Liverpool
Hi Mercutio,

I thought that RAID 10 would have been faster then RAID 5, what I might do is backup the RAID 10 and then intialize as RAID 5 and test it.... see the difference in speed. As for the RE4s even though this build was a sorta no limit build I still could justify the cost of enterprise class drives.

Blimey Stelly, looks like you had fun!

I wonder what your reaction would have been if you finally got it home after watching it being built and it hadn't turned on... :p

We did test to see that it was booting so I was happy about that ;)

Stelly
 
Soldato
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Hmmm, depends on the number of drives. As you are using 4 i'd suspect better speeds from raid 5. Certainly with the card you are using it's rather a waste of the potential of it to run in raid 10.

Even if it's more neck and neck you get a full drives capacity back.
As for RE4's... hmmm they aren't THAT much more. They're like an expensive regular drive rather than a cheap one. Seagates in raid can be a bit of a handful so be prepared :)
 
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Ace PC. But never mind the spec, never mind whats in the box, never mind the PC speed, never mind the money. I'd love to spend some time @ OCUK just to see how the Pro Team perform. :cool:
 
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