Which would be better for a workstation? RAID0 vs SSD?

[sornywrx]

I have a friend that has an Dell Precision workstation. It's a few years old but had 8GB RAM and a single Xeon 2.4GHz quad core CPU (X5450). He is running 3D modeling simulations and we noticed his CPU was pegged at 100% the entire time. He wanted to max the memory out at 32GB and add a second Xeon X5450. We did that and he's still not seeing great performance. He believes that the hard drive is the bottle neck and I'd probably agree. It's a 4 year old stock 160GB SATA drive, nothing fancy at all. Not sure of the spindle speed.

He doesn't want to put tons of money into this but I am trying to decide whether or not it'd be best to grab a couple of decent 7200RPM 500GB SATA drives and run them as his boot drive in RAID0, get a single 10,000RPM Velociraptor drive, or get a single SSD. He needs more space but after only having only a 160GB drive I'm not sure if a 240GB SSD would be enough or if he'd want 500GB-1TB just for room to grow.

The RAID controller is just the standard Intel motherboard one that supports RAID 0,1, and 5 but I believe it's 3.0GB/sec. I noticed the 10,000RPM drives are 6GB/sec. Would that make a huge difference or would it be a waste to get a 10,000RPM drive?

Not sure where to go with this but I'm kind of leaning towards the 2 500GB 7200RPM SATA drives and running them in a RAID 0 array. Wasn't sure if SSD's were a good idea for workstations.

 

[biostud]

SSD+HDD for storage

 

[sornywrx]

SSD+HDD for storage

Will his onboard controller that's running at 3GB/sec be a limitation for SSD? I mean, that won't be a new bottleneck will it?

 

[KingFatty]

Are you able to determine if the CPU is still the limitation, even after adding the 2nd one? When you believe the drive is the bottle neck, what is the basis of that belief?

Maybe play around with various tools to watch your CPU usage, memory usage, drive usage, etc., and that may shed more light. With 32GB of RAM, maybe the hard drive isn't even being touched any more and the drive is not the bottle neck?

 

[sornywrx]

Are you able to determine if the CPU is still the limitation, even after adding the 2nd one? When you believe the drive is the bottle neck, what is the basis of that belief?

Maybe play around with various tools to watch your CPU usage, memory usage, drive usage, etc., and that may shed more light. With 32GB of RAM, maybe the hard drive isn't even being touched any more and the drive is not the bottle neck?

Before we installed the second CPU there would be periods that the CPU would be maxed out at 90-100%. After adding the second CPU we noticed a fairly good drop and most of the time it was running around 50-70% of the CPU. This was when running the "simulations" in his program though. While running normal Windows/system tasks the CPUs barely hit 10% and thats only briefly while launching Word/IE/etc. It's not even using near 32GB of RAM and seems like it was around 12GB at one time. I'm going to stop by later today to check it out myself and see if the HD is really running this hard. He says that generally when he's finished running a "set" (whatever it is that he's doing) he ends up with a 10GB file so he believes there is a lot of read/write going on. I noticed the last time I used the machine it wasn't very quick for an dual Xeon with 32GB and noticed the HD light was on constantly so I'm sure that wasn't page file usage. BTW, the software he is using is Autodesk Inventor which is supposed to be multithreaded.

But I think you're right, I need to take a look and make sure that the hard drive is the bottle neck in performance. Since we were dealing with an older possibly 5400RPM 160GB hard drive I just started assuming. The only other thing could possibly be the video card. I know he's not using onboard video but I'm not sure if it's an old card or some kind of professional class GPU.

 

[nk215]

If he is on Xp64, turn on kernel times in task manager and look for the red bar. It it gets high, your computer will lag regardless of the CPU green bar.

if he's on Win7-64, look for the disk tab in "resmon". Look at the HD queue. It it gets high, your computer will also lag regarless of the CPU usage.

If that is what going on, a HDD is definitely a bottle neck.

3D modeling is really CPU intensive. His CPU is way old for those type of work. a new HD may not help.

To double check, use ramdisk to see if you gain any performance. if modeling SW may not use the memory efficient and cache to the disk.

 

[sornywrx]

If he is on Xp64, turn on kernel times in task manager and look for the red bar. It it gets high, your computer will lag regardless of the CPU green bar.

if he's on Win7-64, look for the disk tab in "resmon". Look at the HD queue. It it gets high, your computer will also lag regarless of the CPU usage.

If that is what going on, a HDD is definitely a bottle neck.

3D modeling is really CPU intensive. His CPU is way old for those type of work. a new HD may not help.

To double check, use ramdisk to see if you gain any performance. if modeling SW may not use the memory efficient and cache to the disk.

He's running XP 64 and kernel times were already turned on in task manager. It was pretty low when compared to the green CPU usage bars. Don't remember exactly how low in comparison but I remember noticing that the red indicator would be pretty far below the green. I'm going to stop by today and run some basic hard drive benchmarks and see what kind of performance he's getting out of that old 160GB drive. For some reason I feel it's going to be pretty low.

 

[corkyg]

Not sure about the term "workstation." Sounds to me like he's running a stand alone machine. In which case, I echo Biostud's comment. The SSD for the OS and key programs with a large HDD for storage. I would avoid RAID0. Sounds to me like his work doesn't need that kind of risk exposure.

 

[sornywrx]

Not usre about the term "workstation." Sounds to me like he's running a stand alone machine. In which case, I echo Biostud's comment. The SSD for the OS and key programs with a large HDD for storage. I would avoid RAID0. Sounds to me like his work doesn't need that kind of risk exposure.

Yeah it's a standalone machine but I used the term workstation to describe a machine used primarily for business/professional type things and to do 'work', not grandma's Facebook computer or some kids gaming PC. Just as you'd denote a graphics card being for "workstation" type graphics of gaming type graphics.

But it does sound like SSD+large HD is a good idea. Since he's coming from a 160GB (that's taken a couple of years to run out of space) he's not going to need terabytes of storage.. I think a 256GB SSD + 500GB HD would be fine and unless I hear any advice otherwise I'm going to lean towards that for now.

 

[Zap]

3D modeling is really CPU intensive. His CPU is way old for those type of work.

I was thinking that too. His CPU launched in 2007.

How many threads does his software support? It may be still CPU limited, but not loading up all 8 cores (across the two CPUs) thus reporting lower overall utilization. Can his software be tested on a more modern system? Preferably a 2nd or 3rd gen Core i5/i7 that is overclocked. :whiste:

I'm still a fan of SSDs so it wouldn't hurt to grab some 240-256GB drive on some under $200 sale. Keep the old 160GB HDD for data storage.

If his time is that important and he can afford it, might be time to make the switch to a completely new rig.

Nice overclockable socket 2011 motherboard with 8 RAM slots $250
32GB RAM (4x8GB) $200
hex core CPU $600-1000
AIO liquid cooling $50-100
overclock that b*tch $free
time saved... priceless

 

[sornywrx]

I was thinking that too. His CPU launched in 2007.

How many threads does his software support? It may be still CPU limited, but not loading up all 8 cores (across the two CPUs) thus reporting lower overall utilization. Can his software be tested on a more modern system? Preferably a 2nd or 3rd gen Core i5/i7 that is overclocked. :whiste:

I'm still a fan of SSDs so it wouldn't hurt to grab some 240-256GB drive on some under $200 sale. Keep the old 160GB HDD for data storage.

If his time is that important and he can afford it, might be time to make the switch to a completely new rig.

Nice overclockable socket 2011 motherboard with 8 RAM slots $250
32GB RAM (4x8GB) $200
hex core CPU $600-1000
AIO liquid cooling $50-100
overclock that b*tch $free
time saved... priceless

I don't think he wants to get a new machine but I'll just tell him he's pushing the limits with this thing and it's maxxing out. He already spent $1200 on the 32GB (it was buffered ECC) and $200 on the 2nd cpu. If I would've known that I would've told told him to invest the $1500 in a totally new machine. I think I'll show him an SSD and see if he wants to go that route as one final upgrade to this thing.

 

[zephyrprime]

The drive system is not the problem if the cpu is pegging even with 2x4 cores. When the hard drive is being hit, that causes the cpu usage to go DOWN as it waits for the hard drive to get done. There is no point to running RAID0 mechanical hard disks nowadays since SSD is sooo much faster. For this guy, even though the IO system isn't his problem, it'd still be worth it to go with SSD since SSDs are cheap now and time is money. For someone making 6 figures or nearly 6 figures, an SSD can easily recoup it's costs in a few weeks if usage is intense.

However, like I said, the io system isn't his problem. Sorry to tell you this but this guy needs WAY more CPU power which means way more money. Probably a 4 socket system at least. I would also look into cloud services too if his software can utilize them.

Also, see if there is a version upgrade for his software that can use GPU computing capabilities. This is a long shot but the speed difference would be huge.

 

[Zap]

He already spent $1200 on the 32GB (it was buffered ECC) and $200 on the 2nd cpu. If I would've known that I would've told told him to invest the $1500 in a totally new machine.

Holy... :whiste:

That kind of sucks to spend $1500 without seeing much gain.

Is he able to return the RAM?

 

[sornywrx]

Holy... :whiste:

That kind of sucks to spend $1500 without seeing much gain.

Is he able to return the RAM?

I hadn't considered that... it was from Newegg and I just kind of assumed they wouldn't take used memory back. At least it wasn't his own cash, it was from his business funds. I told him about the SSD but told him that while he'll probably see a nice improvement in loading programs and things like that it may not make a huge difference in his simulations. Just booting the PC and doing normal things should be vastly improved (it takes 3-4 minutes to fully boot into XP-64 now) but that his simulations may not make a huge difference and that to see a major difference he's just going to have to get a new PC and maybe use this old power house as a spare. I think since he's already put $1500 in it he's going to go ahead with the SSD, which was a $239 256GB model.

 

[sornywrx]

While you guys are here, is there any reason I can't image his old 160GB drive to the 256GB SSD? I've never really dealt with SSD's a lot, at least not cloning a mechanical drive to one. I figured a drive is a drive but didn't know if I was missing something.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

While you guys are here, is there any reason I can't image his old 160GB drive to the 256GB SSD? I've never really dealt with SSD's a lot, at least not cloning a mechanical drive to one. I figured a drive is a drive but didn't know if I was missing something.

Should work fine, with one caveat. Google "SSD Alignment."

 

[dave_the_nerd]

There is no point to running RAID0 mechanical hard disks nowadays since SSD is sooo much faster.

Exception: Video editing scratch disk. (Although I'd prefer RAID-5.)

You're almost never doing random access: the two most important things are sequential IO and $/GB.

It's just about the only usage case where that's still true, but it's a usage case.

It's also true of audio editing, but frankly, a good single HDD will be adequate for that in most cases. (It's just not as demanding.)