After much searching and waiting, I finally got myself a new workstation to replace my Precision 670. I now have a maxed out XW8400:
Dual 3.0 Ghz 5365 Clovertown Intel Xeon Processors (8-Cores)
8GB Ram (Once I get a 64bit OS)
QuadroFX 4600 Graphics Card (To power my 30″ LCD)
2x300GB 15k RPM SAS Drives (125MB/s each)
The XW8400 is currently one step behind the new top of the line XW8600, but the PCI-X slots, wider 3rd party support, and much lower price, weighted in its favor. I will be doing some tests and benchmarks in the near future, so stay tuned for the results. I am also curious to see if the Quadro4600 properly allows fullscreen overlay output in Prospect2K’s CineformRT Premiere mode, fixing the Geforce8 overlay problem.
I got a ridiculously good deal on everything, since I waited nearly a year for the perfect opportunity, but I now have a few extra parts that I am not sure how to best utilize:
I already had all the disks I needed, with a 74GB 10k rpm SATA drive for OS and 4x 500GB SATA RAID5 for Data. My Raid5 is only getting 60-80MB/s with the integrated Intel Matrix storage controller, which is less than I was hoping for, but my data will be secure. If I continue to use the Raid5, I won’t have any place for my new, SAS drives worth $1000 bucks apiece. Alternately I could replace my Raid5 with a single 1TB disk for quantity storage with less security, and use the SAS disks in Raid0 for high-speed capture storage.
So that leaves me with a problem/question that I am looking for creative solutions to:
I need a good external enclosure for either 2 SAS drives, or 4 SATA drives. With SAS, the key factor I would be looking for is speed, and with SATA, the key factor would be security. Drobo comes to mind for the SATA drives, but is there a cheaper option with the same level of security, or better bandwidth? Anyone know any good ways of externally connecting two SAS drives in Raid0?
Anyhow, export and render benchmark results to come, specifically with Premiere, AE, RedCine, and Cineform, plus a few FPS benchmarks for fun.
