New System

[Franco1]

I went against all my beliefs and built a crazy system. My wife and I are expecting our first child so I went "all out"

What do you guys think?

Silverstone FT01B-W - Case
Silverstone ST70F - Power Supply
ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution - Motherboard
Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.33ghz + turbo (Zalman CNPS9900)
Mushkin 6GB (2x2x2) DDR3 1333mhz 6-6-6-18 - Memory
(3) Intel X25-M 80GB - SSD's (RAID 0 using Highpoint RocketRAID 3510)
(3) 1TB Western Digital Black - Storage (RAID 5 using ICH10R)
(2) XFX GTX 260 Core 216, 55nm, SLI @ 650mhz core/ 2200mhz memory - Video
LG Blu-ray/HD-DVD reader / CD/DVD Burner
LG CD/DVD Burner

+ some extra's like a card reader, fan controller, firewire card, etc.

I know I could have pushed it further, but I can barely hear it when I'm not pushing it and I didn't have to touch any voltages. Runs cool and quiet.

Any other ideas or recommendations?

Thanks...

 

[specialk90]

CONGRATS on your child!

I would DEFINITELY move the Raid 5 to the Highpoint and the X25's to the ICH10R. The Intel Raid 5 performance is not that good for writes & ok for reads. With the 'write-back cache' enabled, all you get is a nice spike in performance but then it falls off. I know all this because I had 4-150GB Raptors in Raid 5 and it was just too slow. Also, what is your stripe size for the Raid 0 and Raid 5? This is very important for maximizing performance.

3 X25's is overkill. They are so fast as it is that 3 of them in Raid 0 will saturate all but the best raid controllers and 3 of them might even slows things down when used for the OS. It doesn't look like you could even use more speed than 1 of them provide. Your 3-drive Raid 5 maxes out write speed at about 150-160MB/s and just 1 of the X25s can do more than that.

 

[Franco1]

I do a lot of conversion and compression/extraction using the Intel drives. Unfortunately, the Highpoint 3510 does not allow me to set a stripe size, but is capable of 700-800MB read/writes. I believe the default is 64k.

I'm not as concerned with performance with the ICH10R, just having the ability to retrieve my data in case a drive should fail is enough peace of mind for me. This is strictly for storage with the added benefit of some additional transfer speed and size as I was originally considering a RAID 1 solution. The stripe size is set to 64k.

 

[specialk90]

The 700-800MB/s reads have no where to write to and nothing can write to the X25's anywhere near 700MB/s so I don't see the point.

If you can, get another 1TB drive and change it to Raid 10 for much better performance and the piece of mind that up to 2 drives can fail at a time and you won't lose data.

I'm very curious, did you try the X25's on the ICH10R in Raid 0? If so, what stripe size and any benchmarks?

 

[Franco1]

I haven't even tried it. Didn't even consider it... until now. You have me curious so I may attempt to do this sometime soon. When I do I'll let you know. I'll run some benchmarks before and after for verification.