New PC at DVinfo.net

Kyle Trambaugh · November 23rd, 2010, 08:39 AM

Please let me know how this will run Adobe CS5 Production Premium... Let me know if i need anything else!

Also, how should I configure my Hard disks?

Psu- Antec TP-750
MoBo - Asus P6X58D-E
Processor - Intel i7-950 3.06Ghz
GPU - nVidia GTX 470 1280MB
Mem - Corsair 12gb ddr3 1600mhz
Controller Card-Koutech IO-PESI330 PCI Express x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) --- MoBo only has 2 Sata 3 ports
OS drive - 640G WD Caviar Black Sata 3 7200rpm 64 mb
Storage drives - 2 ea 1TB WD Caviar Black Sata 3 7200rpm 64 mb
BR Burner - Lite-on IHB112

Randall Leong · November 23rd, 2010, 09:47 AM

Kyle,

I would ditch the PCIe SATA III controller card altogether because no current mechanical hard disk could saturate even SATA II, let alone SATA III. In fact, the maximum sequential transfer speed of your "SATA III" Western Digital Blacks barely exceeds the maximum practical bandwidth of even SATA I. Plus, that particular SATA III controller card lacks the RAID 0/1 capability that the Marvell SATA III controller on the Asus motherboard has. That card is a perfect example of spending extra money and getting practically nothing in return, especially since the chipset used on that card is significantly more likely to corrupt data than the motherboard's native SATA II controller.

Second, the Marvell SATA III controller (as built onto the Asus motherboard) does not work well in RAID (more specifically, it performs much slower than expected in RAID 0 mode).

Therefore, my recommendation would be to connect the OS boot drive to the primary SATA III port and set the motherboard's BIOS to boot from that controller. Then, connect the two storage drives to the SATA II ports (the ones associated with the native Intel ICH10R). And set the two storage drives as separate disks. If you want to use the two disks in a RAID 0 array, I'd strongly recommend adding a fourth hard drive as your output drive (this can be of a relatively large capacity and/or a slower spindle speed and/or connected externally via USB 2.0 or 3.0).

As for the 12GB of RAM, are you going to use three 4GB sticks? Or six 2GB sticks? You'll have a better chance of reaching the full rated (advertised) memory speed with three 4GB sticks even if they currently cost slightly more than six 2GB sticks of otherwise identical specs.

Kyle Trambaugh · November 23rd, 2010, 10:08 AM

Thanks for the input!

I planned to install 6 2 gig sticks on the mem...

Also, you suggested to use the SATA 3 port for the system drive, there are 2 (ea) on board SATA 3 ports... is there a reason I should not use the second port for my AV drive and use one of the Sata 2 ports for the export drive...

Randall Leong · November 23rd, 2010, 10:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kyle Trambaugh

Thanks for the input!

I planned to install 6 2 gig sticks on the mem...

Also, you suggested to use the SATA 3 port for the system drive, there are 2 (ea) on board SATA 3 ports... is there a reason I should not use the second port for my AV drive and use one of the Sata 2 ports for the export drive...

I had difficulty in running six 2GB sticks of memory at the memory's full advertised speed. I had to drop the speed down to the next-lower speed class in order to run stably. As such, the memory is running at only DDR3-1240 speed instead of the advertised 1600 speed.

Running six 2GB sticks of memory at Intel's official maximum memory speed of DDR3-1066 is no problem. But running those same six sticks of memory at anything above DDR3-1333 speed is a crapshoot (meaning that it may or may not work). Any memory speed above 1066 is considered overclocked when it comes to the memory controller on lower-end (non-Extreme) LGA 1366 platforms.

As for using the other SATA III port, you could (but I personally wouldn't recommend it, especially since the Intel SATA II controller is of higher quality than any current third-party controller chip).

Kyle Trambaugh · November 23rd, 2010, 10:27 AM

Did you use the XMP setting in the bios? I read somewhere that it helped...the mem speed

Randall Leong · November 23rd, 2010, 10:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kyle Trambaugh

Did you use the XMP setting in the bios? I read somewhere that it helped...the mem speed

I did, and my system did not run stably (in fact, my system went into an endless loop of reboots until the BIOS detected a problem). In fact, both Intel and JEDEC officially limit XMP support to only two ranks of memory per channel (this means with most 2GB modules, only one stick of memory per channel is supported - a total of only three 2GB sticks). All of Corsair's 2GB sticks are double-ranked, meaning that one stick already eats up two ranks.

Noa Put · November 24th, 2010, 06:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

Second, the Marvell SATA III controller (as built onto the Asus motherboard) does not work well in RAID (more specifically, it performs much slower than expected in RAID 0 mode).

Thats interesting to hear as I just bought that asus motherboard, currently I have one sata6g wd drive installed to sata III thats supposed to be used for video and after installing all asus drivers from the cd I get a message from the marvel controller upon startup where that one sata6g disk shows. I was planning to buy a second identical wd disk for raid 0 set up but when I read you comment I was curious how much the performance is affected if you put the disks in raid on on that marvell controller.

Is there not any increase in speed when you connect 2 disks or would I be better of just installing seperate disks? I use dslr and hdv footage currently but no uncompressed video.

Kyle Trambaugh · November 25th, 2010, 06:01 PM

Update...

I have the system up and running and after a bios update, I have the Corsair 12gb ddr3 running at 1600mhz with the XMP setting selected within the bios.

I put the system drive on #1 Sata III port and the video storage drive on the #2.
I have the other drive on one of the Sata II ports as

The Controller Card-Koutech IO-PESI330 PCI Express x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) WAS INOP OUT OF THE BOX

Adobe CS5 production premium will be here on the 27th :) $449.00 thanks to an educators discount!

Noa Put · November 26th, 2010, 02:51 AM

I updated the bios and selected xmp in the bios as well and I"m getting 1600mhz speed on my memory now instead of 1066mhz before.
I have one 6g drive connected to the sata III controller and a second one should arrive today, I will check the drive speed first of one disk and then connect the second one in a raid 0 on the second sata III port with that marvell controller and check speed again to see what I have gained, I"m curious. :) I"ll let you know if there is any change.

Noa Put · November 26th, 2010, 01:51 PM

Just tested with crystaldiskmark and checked the sequential read and write speeds, the western digital 1tb black drives reach a read and write speed of about 135mb, when I activated the marvel raid controller and link 2 equal WD 1tb black drives to a raid 0 I get 260mb read and 200mb write speed, not bad for a motherboard controller I think :)

Steve Kalle · November 27th, 2010, 04:33 PM

Just a bit of advice and a BIG WARNING about using WD drives in Raid - DO NOT USE them in Raid 0, 10, 5, 6, 3... because WD crippled them in order to force consumers to purchase their expensive RE3 & RE4 drives. Using the WD Caviar drives in Raid GREATLY increases the chance of all data being lost on those drives because they will 'time out' causing the Raid controller to think a drive has stopped working, and then the drive is reported as 'dead'. With Raid 0, this means all data is gone.

Furthermore, Randall can add more about his bad experience with WD Black drives and the problems he had while editing video. Plus, I vaguely recall that his PPBM5 scores got better after he switched to another brand of drives. The main problem with WD drives is their firmware and the disks constantly spinning down, which causes delays & issues when trying to scrub video.

Noa Put · November 27th, 2010, 06:07 PM

Thx for the warning, I noticed yesterday that the drives were spinning down as you said after some time of being inactive and that caused at least 10 second delay before the program I wanted to start opened.

I think I will replace the wd black with another brand and use the black drives in a external usb 3.0 docking station to store backup files.

Randall Leong · November 28th, 2010, 10:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Just a bit of advice and a BIG WARNING about using WD drives in Raid - DO NOT USE them in Raid 0, 10, 5, 6, 3... because WD crippled them in order to force consumers to purchase their expensive RE3 & RE4 drives. Using the WD Caviar drives in Raid GREATLY increases the chance of all data being lost on those drives because they will 'time out' causing the Raid controller to think a drive has stopped working, and then the drive is reported as 'dead'. With Raid 0, this means all data is gone.

Furthermore, Randall can add more about his bad experience with WD Black drives and the problems he had while editing video. Plus, I vaguely recall that his PPBM5 scores got better after he switched to another brand of drives. The main problem with WD drives is their firmware and the disks constantly spinning down, which causes delays & issues when trying to scrub video.

Actually, the warning applies primarily to the higher, more complex levels of RAID - RAID 3, 5, 6 or any combination RAID involving any of those three levels. Also, some of the 1TB WD Blacks manufactured in late 2009 have a firmware bug that also affects RAID 0 and RAID 1 performance and/or reliability. My particular 1TB Black is one of those drives with the firmware bug.

I investigated further, and discovered that my performance increase came not from the new hard drive, but from updating CS5 to 5.0.2. 5.0.1 consistently performed slower than 5.0.2 in my system, especially in SD MPEG-2 encodes.

Noa,

Your particular 1TB WD Blacks (WD1002FAEX, not to be confused with the WD1001FALS that I had) are perfectly fine for use in RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 10 (which is just a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1). Just don't use them in more complex RAID arrays than simple striping and/or mirroring. (In other words, you'll need to buy all RE-series drives only if you're going to use the drives in RAID 5, 6, 3 or any combination RAID involving one of those three levels; e.g. RAID 30.)

Steve Kalle · November 28th, 2010, 10:15 PM

Randall,

Those WD drives still have the spin-down problem, which can cause them to be dropped from even a Raid 0 array, and that is not good.

Randall Leong · November 28th, 2010, 11:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Randall,

Those WD drives still have the spin-down problem, which can cause them to be dropped from even a Raid 0 array, and that is not good.

Maybe so. But all of the other brands of desktop drives now start to spin down. My Seagates have been dropping out on the average of once per minute. And now they start to drop out of my Intel controller completely even in a non-RAID or single-drive configuration. I RMA'd those drives, and got back two different drives with the exact same problem. I noticed this when I got wildly inconsistent benchmark results from my Seagate 7200.12 hard drives in RAID 0: PPBM5's AVI test came back with an 80-ish second result one time, 267 seconds the next time. That's nearly a threefold difference.

Every single consumer desktop drive from every single manufacturer now spins down constantly (at least recent models). And my initial warning now applies to all consumer-level desktop drives, not just WD.

Which means that if you're going to use even RAID 0, you'll have to buy an astronomically expensive enterprise-grade hard drive from all of the manufacturers.

November 23rd, 2010, 08:39 AM	#1
Kyle Trambaugh Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Loogootee, IN Posts: 37	New PC Please let me know how this will run Adobe CS5 Production Premium... Let me know if i need anything else! Also, how should I configure my Hard disks? Psu- Antec TP-750 MoBo - Asus P6X58D-E Processor - Intel i7-950 3.06Ghz GPU - nVidia GTX 470 1280MB Mem - Corsair 12gb ddr3 1600mhz Controller Card-Koutech IO-PESI330 PCI Express x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) --- MoBo only has 2 Sata 3 ports OS drive - 640G WD Caviar Black Sata 3 7200rpm 64 mb Storage drives - 2 ea 1TB WD Caviar Black Sata 3 7200rpm 64 mb BR Burner - Lite-on IHB112

November 23rd, 2010, 09:47 AM	#2
Randall Leong Major Player Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: Melrose Park, Illinois, USA Posts: 936	Kyle, I would ditch the PCIe SATA III controller card altogether because no current mechanical hard disk could saturate even SATA II, let alone SATA III. In fact, the maximum sequential transfer speed of your "SATA III" Western Digital Blacks barely exceeds the maximum practical bandwidth of even SATA I. Plus, that particular SATA III controller card lacks the RAID 0/1 capability that the Marvell SATA III controller on the Asus motherboard has. That card is a perfect example of spending extra money and getting practically nothing in return, especially since the chipset used on that card is significantly more likely to corrupt data than the motherboard's native SATA II controller. Second, the Marvell SATA III controller (as built onto the Asus motherboard) does not work well in RAID (more specifically, it performs much slower than expected in RAID 0 mode). Therefore, my recommendation would be to connect the OS boot drive to the primary SATA III port and set the motherboard's BIOS to boot from that controller. Then, connect the two storage drives to the SATA II ports (the ones associated with the native Intel ICH10R). And set the two storage drives as separate disks. If you want to use the two disks in a RAID 0 array, I'd strongly recommend adding a fourth hard drive as your output drive (this can be of a relatively large capacity and/or a slower spindle speed and/or connected externally via USB 2.0 or 3.0). As for the 12GB of RAM, are you going to use three 4GB sticks? Or six 2GB sticks? You'll have a better chance of reaching the full rated (advertised) memory speed with three 4GB sticks even if they currently cost slightly more than six 2GB sticks of otherwise identical specs.

November 23rd, 2010, 10:08 AM	#3
Kyle Trambaugh Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Loogootee, IN Posts: 37	Thanks for the input! I planned to install 6 2 gig sticks on the mem... Also, you suggested to use the SATA 3 port for the system drive, there are 2 (ea) on board SATA 3 ports... is there a reason I should not use the second port for my AV drive and use one of the Sata 2 ports for the export drive...

November 23rd, 2010, 10:27 AM	#5
Kyle Trambaugh Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Loogootee, IN Posts: 37	Did you use the XMP setting in the bios? I read somewhere that it helped...the mem speed

November 25th, 2010, 06:01 PM	#8
Kyle Trambaugh Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Loogootee, IN Posts: 37	Update... I have the system up and running and after a bios update, I have the Corsair 12gb ddr3 running at 1600mhz with the XMP setting selected within the bios. I put the system drive on #1 Sata III port and the video storage drive on the #2. I have the other drive on one of the Sata II ports as The Controller Card-Koutech IO-PESI330 PCI Express x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) WAS INOP OUT OF THE BOX Adobe CS5 production premium will be here on the 27th :) $449.00 thanks to an educators discount!

November 26th, 2010, 02:51 AM	#9
Noa Put Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Belgium Posts: 9,510	I updated the bios and selected xmp in the bios as well and I"m getting 1600mhz speed on my memory now instead of 1066mhz before. I have one 6g drive connected to the sata III controller and a second one should arrive today, I will check the drive speed first of one disk and then connect the second one in a raid 0 on the second sata III port with that marvell controller and check speed again to see what I have gained, I"m curious. :) I"ll let you know if there is any change.

November 26th, 2010, 01:51 PM	#10
Noa Put Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Belgium Posts: 9,510	Just tested with crystaldiskmark and checked the sequential read and write speeds, the western digital 1tb black drives reach a read and write speed of about 135mb, when I activated the marvel raid controller and link 2 equal WD 1tb black drives to a raid 0 I get 260mb read and 200mb write speed, not bad for a motherboard controller I think :)

November 27th, 2010, 04:33 PM	#11
Steve Kalle Trustee Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 1,554	Just a bit of advice and a BIG WARNING about using WD drives in Raid - DO NOT USE them in Raid 0, 10, 5, 6, 3... because WD crippled them in order to force consumers to purchase their expensive RE3 & RE4 drives. Using the WD Caviar drives in Raid GREATLY increases the chance of all data being lost on those drives because they will 'time out' causing the Raid controller to think a drive has stopped working, and then the drive is reported as 'dead'. With Raid 0, this means all data is gone. Furthermore, Randall can add more about his bad experience with WD Black drives and the problems he had while editing video. Plus, I vaguely recall that his PPBM5 scores got better after he switched to another brand of drives. The main problem with WD drives is their firmware and the disks constantly spinning down, which causes delays & issues when trying to scrub video.

November 27th, 2010, 06:07 PM	#12
Noa Put Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Belgium Posts: 9,510	Thx for the warning, I noticed yesterday that the drives were spinning down as you said after some time of being inactive and that caused at least 10 second delay before the program I wanted to start opened. I think I will replace the wd black with another brand and use the black drives in a external usb 3.0 docking station to store backup files.

November 28th, 2010, 10:15 PM	#14
Steve Kalle Trustee Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 1,554	Randall, Those WD drives still have the spin-down problem, which can cause them to be dropped from even a Raid 0 array, and that is not good.