Multiple SSDs for scratch/swap still important?

[etherealfocus]

Looking into a 4K video editing box, Premiere+After Effects. It'd be used for semi-complex projects up to about an hour in length.

Saw a few benchmarks on a boutique builder site a while back but can't find the link now. Upshot was they found a lot of value in having OS and swap on one SSD and scratch on another, but not much additional benefit in putting swap or apps on a dedicated drive. Unfortunately their tests didn't include 4K or NVMe SSDs.

The build I'm considering is:

Ryzen 1800X
<X370 Taichi, mostly for the dual M.2 slots>
32GB RAM
GF 1060 6GB
M.2 #1: 500GB 960 Pro for OS/apps/swap in 20Gbps slot
M.2 #2: 1TB 960 Pro for scratch in 32Gbps slot
8TB Barracuda Pro for storage (maybe RAID1? mobo raid is sketchy at best to me).

1. Worth it to add a separate swap or apps drive, esp. given it'd likely have to be SATA?

2. Am I better served by a 1TB 960 Pro or a 2TB 850 Evo? 2TB 960 Pro would be stretching the budget hard, but workable if needed.

3. Unsure how important video card is; suggestions? Downgrade and jack up the RAM to 64GB?

4. Think the RAID1 is worth it? Softraid and mobo raid are both sketchy at best to me, and not seeing a ton of value in spending up on a good hardraid card.

I'm leaning more toward just backing up to a USB HDD every night and using cloud storage as last line of defense. Haven't looked into which provider would be best yet... 10TB on Google Drive is 100/mo which seems a bit steep.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

1. No. You already answered that. ("not much additional benefit.") If there were benefits, putting swap or apps on a slower SATA drive would likely still be counterproductive.
2. Since you have the big ol' SATA drive for archival storage, logically you'll want your scratch drive to be the fastest thing that's big enough for the current project(s) you're working on. So I'd go with the 1TB 960 over the 850 EVO.
3. If you intend to use the ray tracing/renderer a lot, then a midrange GPU like the 1060 is as low as I'd go. 32GB should be enough RAM to get you off the ground - if you go w/ 2x 16GB DIMMs now, you can always add two more later, finances permitting.
4. There's no performance benefit to RAID1. You plan on having good backups, right? That said, there's nothing wrong with Windows software RAID. The bias against software or motherboard RAID is an old one.

For a cloud backup solution, Crashplan or Backblaze will do unlimited storage for $60/year, but you'll likely run into transfer cap issues w/ your ISP

You don't need to be limited to 2x m.2 devices - PCI-E slot adapters are plentiful.

 

[etherealfocus]

1. Kinda figured, just making sure.
2. Agreed.
3. Probably not a ton, but it will be a consideration. Maybe move up to a 1070 just to be safe? Also, I was leaning toward an ITX build but that caps me at 32GB until 32G DIMMs are available... imagine those will be a while? Think I'd better switch to mATX for the 64GB limit?
4. Yeah, it was for redundancy... but I'm going with a Pro drive rather than a cheap Archive drive so seems a bit unnecessary. Also, 8TB USB drives are cheaper than internal drives without the config hassle of RAID.

Gotta ask though, if mobo/sw raid is good now, why do we still have $500+ raid cards? It can't just be the capacitor.

This machine will be at an office with a business FiOS connection; pretty sure they don't do transfer caps. We've hit several TB a month before without issue. Crashplan/BB sounds like just the ticket. Do you have a preference? I've used CP before but only familiar with BB from their HD reliability data dumps.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

4. Yeah, it was for redundancy... but I'm going with a Pro drive rather than a cheap Archive drive so seems a bit unnecessary. Also, 8TB USB drives are cheaper than internal drives without the config hassle of RAID.

A single drive point of failure is a single drive point of failure, no matter how much you spend on the drive.

Gotta ask though, if mobo/sw raid is good now, why do we still have $500+ raid cards? It can't just be the capacitor.

Most Operating Systems have good built-in software RAID now. Booting from a software RAID is a bit of a PITA, but for storage volumes there's basically no drawback. That wasn't true ten years ago. One of the biggest advantage is array portability between systems.

Motherboard RAID is still usually crappy.

The RAID cards exist for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is people will buy them because they're hidebound traditionalists.

This machine will be at an office with a business FiOS connection; pretty sure they don't do transfer caps. We've hit several TB a month before without issue. Crashplan/BB sounds like just the ticket. Do you have a preference? I've used CP before but only familiar with BB from their HD reliability data dumps.

Cool.

I'm a Crashplan customer, but from everything I've read they're both good services.

 

[etherealfocus]

So you think RAID is still a good idea even with daily USB drive backups? I know Crashplan can be configured to dump data to a USB drive on a regular basis long as there's a connection. Sure, the HDD in a cheap USB enclosure won't be as good as a BC Pro, but it'll also be offline except during backup ops so way less risk of surges etc. Seems reasonable to me.

Array portability is awesome when it works, but I had some nasty issues with it several years ago on a Server 2008R2 box. Is that fixed in 2012/Win10? I assume it wouldn't work to just dump it in a machine with an older OS?

Did some Googling though and I'm convinced: hardraid with BBU and writeback cache seems worthwhile for serious servers running RAID5/6 but way overkill for a simple raid1. That said, you think raid1 or a USB drive is better? 3-2-1 does demand offline storage

Also, it occurs to me to ask: does softraid need 10 Pro or will it work fine on Home? No biggie but 50 bucks is 50 bucks lol

 

[dave_the_nerd]

So you think RAID is still a good idea even with daily USB drive backups? I know Crashplan can be configured to dump data to a USB drive on a regular basis long as there's a connection. Sure, the HDD in a cheap USB enclosure won't be as good as a BC Pro, but it'll also be offline except during backup ops so way less risk of surges etc. Seems reasonable to me.

I think you're on the right track here. I don't think RAID is a good idea for your application; not because it doesn't have its uses, but because it's not necessary.

Generally speaking, the simplest solution that meets your needs is the best solution.

Array portability is awesome when it works, but I had some nasty issues with it several years ago on a Server 2008R2 box. Is that fixed in 2012/Win10? I assume it wouldn't work to just dump it in a machine with an older OS?

I haven't had any issues with mdadm portability between Linux systems or when upgrading Windows to a newer version. Never tried it the other direction - why would you?

There's always a potential for problems, but if you do it By The Book™ you're usually going to be fine. Computers are usually deterministic.

Did some Googling though and I'm convinced: hardraid with BBU and writeback cache seems worthwhile for serious servers running RAID5/6 but way overkill for a simple raid1. That said, you think raid1 or a USB drive is better? 3-2-1 does demand offline storage

If you're doing local storage on a server and need the best performance you can get from spinning drives, yeah, a hardware RAID card with all the trimmings is your best option. You'll find setups like that in SME spaces, although a lot of those installs are being replaced by externally hosted services now. Cloud is all the rage.

But in those situations, you're also talking about an application's primary storage, not archival storage. Which makes difference - you only really need sufficient performance.

For workstation use, SSDs make all the RAID talk kind of academic.

Also, it occurs to me to ask: does softraid need 10 Pro or will it work fine on Home? No biggie but 50 bucks is 50 bucks lol

I'm pretty sure it's available in 10 Home. It was in 7 Home.

 

[etherealfocus]

Ok, starting to come together. Did some digging and found a few improvements - cheap B350 mATX mobo with dual M.2 (yeah, I know one of the slots is 20Gbps instead of 32; shouldn't matter much for the 960 Evo boot drive), switch to 1700X since 1800X is only 3% faster according to userbenchmark (200mhz, meh), etc.

I did boost the GPU to a 1070, which I'm feeling a little hesitant about... found a few build guides saying the 480/580 are as fast or faster than the 1070 in Premiere and CUDA isn't all that useful either. Dropping to a 580 would $130ish, although I'm not a fan of space heater GPUs especially in a smallish case.

How's this look? https://pcpartpicker.com/list/TMhrsJ

 

[dave_the_nerd]

That looks about as reasonable as any rig with $1k spent on disk space can look.

If you're not interested in overclocking, you should probably consider an R7 1700 instead of 1700X. Not overclockable, and includes a cooler, which saves you money on the Hyper212 too.

I would probably stick with a 1060. Everything you're saying sounds like it makes the GPU side of things less important, and I didn't think it was all that big a deal to begin with.

At only 185w, I wouldn't say the 580 is a space heater, exactly, and the mATX cube isn't all that small, but the nVidia cards should all run cooler.

 

[aigomorla]

1. Worth it to add a separate swap or apps drive, esp. given it'd likely have to be SATA?

scrap / swap drives were mostly used to extend the life on your main / expensive SSD.
However we have learned that the life expediency of said SSD's were grossly under calculated.
(meaning they last a lot longer then we thought they would)

So no its not worth it anymore, as you would want to replace said SSD anyhow for a larger as you outgrow its capacity.

2. Am I better served by a 1TB 960 Pro or a 2TB 850 Evo? 2TB 960 Pro would be stretching the budget hard, but workable if needed.

I dont think you would need a 2TB unless u intend to save the projects directly to your SSD.
Which then i feel it would be a waste of storage?
I would only save the projects i am currently working, on the SSD for faster load up, and access, but then move the finished projects over to a mechanical drive like a HGST 6TB or a WD Yellow... Definitely wouldn't touch seagate.

But definitely get a NVME drive, however you may need to put a sink on it, if your going to be reading from it heavily, as they do get hot, and then start to throttle. I dont know how often premiere does reads and writes and not works off ram, but if its quite frequently, i would get something like this to keep the NVME drive cool and not throttle:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/4mm-Copper-...986285?hash=item2823e648ad:g:QaIAAOSwj85YQB0M

 

[etherealfocus]

dave-

1. All the Ryzens including the 1700 are overclockable... https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Overclocking-AMD-Ryzen-7-1700-Real-Winner
...Which of course is another argument for getting it instead of the 1700X... sold. there's another 100ish saved

2. Fair enough on the vid card. 1060 it is. Any benefit to the 6GB config or is 3GB equivalent for non-gaming use?

3. I agree $1k is a crazy amount to spend on storage (and it's more when you consider the 8TB USB drive + cloud backup subscription) but don't see any good way to trim it. Could probably drop to a 256GB boot drive but that could get a little cramped and would save less than $100. Dropping to 512GB on the scratch would be ok for the short term but this machine will be used by two people each doing several projects at once and needs to have breathing room for both. Rather spend the money up front than have to upgrade later.

I could arguably cut the internal HDD and just rely on the USB for backups, but really if downtime exceeds a few hours a year it's worth it to just spend the $300 or whatever.

And yes, before anyone mentions it we are using a quality dedicated surge protector.

aigomorla-

1. Benchmarks I've seen do show substantial value in having a scratch drive separate from OS/apps/swap. They were done on 850 Pros, so I'm wondering if the NVMe switch has obviated the need. I still think a separate boot drive makes good sense on a workstation though, don't you?

2. I know a lot of Seagate consumer drives are sketchy, but I've seen nothing to implicate their Barracuda Pro and Enterprise Capacity lines. The Backblaze reports don't have statistically significant data on pro drives aside from the Hitachis (and P value is probably still unpublishable for those).

3. For $13, it couldn't hurt.
NVMe drives in general and 960 Pro/Evo in particular are known to throttle during heavy use due to heat anyway.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

3GB should be fine if you're just using it for compute, as long as the VRAM bit-width and clockspeed are the same.

My comment on storage costs was an attempt at humor. My dad's rig is the same way - he mostly uses it for audio editing. So he wanted a solid midrange CPU, a quiet case, and lots of hard drives and SSDs.

 

[aigomorla]

Well 960 NVMe is about 6x faster then a 850.
So if you had a swap/scratch file on a drive 6x slower, i can not see how you would get improved performance as it would be a bottleneck.

I will NEVER trust seagate again.
Just this year i have lost 4 seagate NAS drives.
They all decided to die on me 1 month apart starting from January.
I hate the RMA policy they have on warranty starting on manufacturer date and not purchase date as well.
But yeah, 4/6 seagate nas drives i have had all died right outside warrenty period.
From now on i will only get WD Yellows or HGST's

 

[etherealfocus]

Sounds good...

If you had 4 of them die it's probably a bad batch... I forget the serial number rule but the ones that come from their China factory are supposed to be garbage. Didn't know about the warranty starting on manufacturer date though, that's ridiculous. Guess I'm sticking to WD/HGST :/