Comments on HDD setup for P9X79WS build?
DeePeeBee Jun 27, 2012 3:48 PMFor testing with the PPBM5 benchmark my build is set up as follows:
Asus P9X79WS
i7-3930K
Noctua NH-D14 cooler
2 kits of 4x4 F3-12800CL9Q-16GBXL GSkill Ripjaws (DDR3-1600, CL9-9-9-24)
GTX 570 HD (2.5GB GDDR5)
120GB SSD for my OS
3 x 1Tb Caviar Blacks for everything,including Pagefile
A very sparse Windows7 Pro SP1 installation (I wonder if I could use the smaller version without the media support??)
All of Harm's Windows tweaks - no anti-virus, disconnected from internet after downloads
Premiere Pro (6.0.1) and Adobe Media Encoder (6.0.1.31) from Adobe's cloud
I ran a few PPBM5 runs with 16Gb of RAM and then put in the second set - started up without a hitch even tho the new kit was way newer and even has a different physical setup. I was even able to squeak the new sticks in underneath the Noctua cooler by taking out one of the fans temporarily.
The PPBM scores went from 44, 119, 64, 46/5 to 44, 75, 52, 4 without any overclocking.
I've been trying out various overclocking modes - nothing I can do will let me operate with a 48 multiplier, yet I am quite stable at a 4.7 OC with the RAM set to 1600 and with my CPU Vcore Voltage in Offset mode set at +0.200
That gets my scores to 37, 71, 44, 60/4 which I am very happy with! And I am enormously grateful to Harm, Bill and all of those who take the time to answer questions in this Forum - and to those who ask the questions that many of the rest of us have as well.
My next step is to quit playing with the machine and put it to work converting my HD DSLR footage (Canon 5DMarkII) to short videos (5min or less).
This means I will have to come to grips with deciding how to set up my disk system for operations vs for benchmarking.
I'll keep the 3-disk AID0 but I also have:
one Velociraptor 600 Gb, 6Gb/s;
one Hitachi 2Tb, 6Gb/s;
one SSD of 60Gb, and
one SSD of 90GB.
I also have a separate external back-up system and
an external Blu-Ray burner.
I'm thinking of using:
The 120 Gb SSD with my OS on one of the Intel 6Gb/s ports
The 600 Gb Velociraptor on the other 6Gb/s port for pagefile, renders, media cache
the 3 Caviar Blacks in AID0 on the 3Gb/s Intel ports for projects, media
the Hitachi (to do a daily back-up of the AID0) on the fourth 3Gb/s port
the 60 Gb SSD as an external clone of my OS drive.
that leaves the two Marvell ports to play with and I would try out the SSD cache using the 90Gb SSD with the Velociraptor and then with the Hitachi.
After I see where my bottlenecks are, using some of my actual footage as my personal benchmark, I will consider another Velociraptor to create a Raid 0 on the Marvell ports, or another Caviar Black for a 4-disk Intel Raid 0.
And if I still think I need more speed, I will make the jump to an Areca raid controller.
The PPBM5 benchmark was a great tool and if the #6 version is available soon, I would certainly use that to help zero in on the best configuration.
I also plan to back off on the overclock multiplier by running some additional tests and also looking at using a negative offset mode.
I haven't used the warp stabilizer in PP yet, but I understand it slows everything down, so that will be one of the factors. Is the stabilizer dependent on clock speed, ram, disk I/O??
Any criticism, comments, suggestions from any of the forum moderators/readers will be more than welcome.
Thanks,
Dorothy

