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Drewdupont
Rated PG
Joined: 21 Dec 2005
Posts: 1
Location: 1723 Olive St. W. Suite 100 Stillwater MN 55082
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 Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 02:14:57 Post Subject: GOD BOX for Photoshop CS2 |
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I could realy use alot of help with desiging the specs for this GOD box because I need to have it built and up and running in about 14 days!
I am a professional photographer for 7 years now. I know nearly everything there is to know about digital cameras and related accessories yet I admit I know little about computers. Infact I know just enough to be dangerious. I am building a system that is intended to run all my editing software aka, Photoshop CS 2 Paint Shop Pro 9.0, extensis portfolio 7, Capture one and various Raw batch converters.
If money were no object wich it isn't in my perticular situation because I made a deal with the local PC store that I will make $200 payments every month until the system is paid off. then what sort of machine is nessasary to make photoshop CS 2 screem who's your daddy!!
Keep in mind I will be working with very large files. 22 mega pixel images from a Hasselblad digital back and 16.7 megapixel images from a Canon EOS 1DS Mark II and I will be batch processing heavy filters in long sets of 3,000 or more images at a time.
SENDING FILES TO CLIENTS KEEPING SAFE
A few things are given, I will need Firewire 800 Firewire 400 (standard) "for compatibility" USB 2.0 ports I will need a Gigabit Ethernet connection. And I already have Broadband internet in a Black Box configgeration so that the new GOD BOX will be protected from viruses Physicaly because it will never see the internet.
GETTING RID OF THE BOTTLE NECK
Faster Hard Drives ..
I am told that I should for best performance use a seperate Hard Drive for my opperating system a seperate drive for my PhotoShop scratch Disk and a seperate drives(s) for storage I am thinking along the lines of 2 320 Gig raid drives in a mirror configeration serial ATA i think thats the fastest anyway??
1 question would it improve or reduce my system performance to have programs on yet another HD from my OS Drive ?? ?
I know that I need a dule processor system with dule core 64bit processors. Given the amount of heat that produces I will likely want to invest in the best Cooling system money can buy
Are there quad processor computers for PC like there are for apple aka the Mac G5 Quad ?? if so can they run windows and does photoshop support the use of the other processors?
whats the best processors / motherboard for PC ,? ! want to fit it all into a gigantic server tower case so size is no issue!
The Hard drives for the scratch disks should be verry fast like a Raptor drive and the ones for my storage may be slower because they are just for storage not for working files
Can anyone tell me when MAXELL will be coming out with their Holographic Optical Storage Media in Caddys because that is the way to go I am told, something like 120 MBP/s Transfer rates and 1.6 terrabytes storage capacity with a 50+ year Archive life!
Also I am verry concerned about cooling my system and quiet opperation, of course performance is most important for me and I am willing to sacrifice noise for performance but I am told that liquid cooling is the way to go. any advice for whats the best?
Someone said that they took their liquid cooling system and mod it to run right through a mini refrigerator like the one's everyone brings with them to collage and they get a 80% boost in performance but they had to scale back the cooling because the first time they did it, it produced too much condensation and nearly caused a short, anyone have plans for this kind of mod ??
whats the best cooling system?
Sound is of no importance I dont listen to sound on my computer Tube amps are the way to go , but vinel is still even better yet.
I dont have a clue about what to get for a video card, i dont know how demanding photoshop CS 2 is on the video cards i know it needs atleast 32 mb and recomends 64 mb so i dont even know if it would even utilize a 256 mb video card or would it be a waste of my money. Keep in mind I am not going to be doing any gaming on this machine it is strictly photoshop and storage.
I am at a loss of how much ram I should get well i know that photoshop can only handle 4 gigs of RAM I am leaning twards more because I expect that soon photoshop will have a new release in a few years that will fully utilize all 8 gigs ??
What is the Fastest RAM for big projects.. Someone explained to me that some ram is like sports cars they have a higher top speed but can only handel two passangers and other cars are like bullet trains they are not as fast but when loaded down with alot of "passangers" it is alot faster than having the "sports car" doing all the work going back and forth 8 times more than the "train" could do.
I think the ram I was looking at was Dule Channel DDR PC8000
in GIG or 2 gig sticks??
Comments anyone?
How would you improve it..
Please email me if you have any ideas to improve the performance of my system.
Also I am accepting names for the god box .. it has to be a powerfull name , or a historic name ,. or some kind of mithilogical God or Goddess .
Have fun
Thanks
_________________
Organic Photography
1723 Olive St. W. Suite 100
Stillwater MN 55082 |
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Little Bruin
Boo Boo
Joined: 07 Apr 2003
Posts: 667
Location: Pic-A-Nic Basket |
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Hellfire
Rated XXX
Joined: 05 Aug 2003
Posts: 3473
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| Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:54:59 Post Subject: |
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Lots of stuff here...
For your drives, get the Western Digital Raptors for your OS and programs, put into a Raid 0 for the best speed possible, or into a mirror config for safety..
For the storage, get SATA 2 (3Gb/s) drives. Whatever size you want.
For the CPU, get at least the AMD X2 4400. The 4400+ has 1mb cache on each core, giving you 2mb of cache. I don't believe PS takes advantage of multiple processors. The X2 shoudl give you plenty of horsepower and growth.
Ram, Corsair makes some great highspeed/high quality ram. Don't think you coudl go wrong with their ram. 2GB would be min I would recommend, especially to start with. Get the 1GB x 2 sticks. Then if you have ram issues, you can add an additional stick or two. You definetly want it in Dual Channel mode.
For liquid cooling, I don't get much into that. I stick with good fans and cpu coolers and don't have any problems. Currently I have the Zalman Fatal1ty coolers and they are working great.
For Video card, go with at least the GeForce 6800. Would recommend the 7800 they're not too much more expensive. Can't say much for the ATI line, I'm not an ATI fan.
For the MB, DFI makes some VERY nice boards. Also, I'd recommend Gigabyte, Abit, ASUS as well. |
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Doctor Feelgood
Arrrrghh!
Joined: 07 Apr 2003
Posts: 20349
Location: New Jersey
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| Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:00:23 Post Subject: |
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WOW! One of the most comprehensive posts ever... So much to cover, I'll start with the hard drives.
Presently, SATA 3Gbps drives are the fastest. If you want the best speed for your large file processing, perhaps a RAID 0 array (striping) would be in order. This type of configuration provides no fault tolerance, so you should have this array backed up somewhere, meaning another drive. Or, you could look into a higher level of RAID, perhaps 5, which requires at least one more drive, but gives speed and redundancy.
Having a separate drive for the operating system / applications is a good idea. Most new motherboards will support 4 SATA drives by default, so having a 3 drive RAID array and a stand alone OS drive would not be a problem. The higher end nVidia nForce4 boards have the SATA 3Gbps support onboard.
Firewire is also available on some boards, but not all. Again, higher end nForce4 boards will have it, so you need to shop around. If you find a board without it, it is easy to add via a PCI expansion card.
I need to run... Maybe this will get people talking with more advice...
Welcome... Jason |
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BeerCheeze
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Kilamon
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Joined: 22 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:07:08 Post Subject: |
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| Drewdupont wrote: | | I could realy use alot of help with desiging the specs for this GOD box because I need to have it built and up and running in about 14 days! |
Challenging!
| Drewdupont wrote: | | I am a professional photographer for 7 years now. I know nearly everything there is to know about digital cameras and related accessories yet I admit I know little about computers. Infact I know just enough to be dangerious. I am building a system that is intended to run all my editing software aka, Photoshop CS 2 Paint Shop Pro 9.0, extensis portfolio 7, Capture one and various Raw batch converters. |
Hmm so lots of I/O and large files. k.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | If money were no object wich it isn't in my perticular situation because I made a deal with the local PC store that I will make $200 payments every month until the system is paid off. then what sort of machine is nessasary to make photoshop CS 2 screem who's your daddy!! |
Wish I could make that deal for my motorcycle restoration.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | Keep in mind I will be working with very large files. 22 mega pixel images from a Hasselblad digital back and 16.7 megapixel images from a Canon EOS 1DS Mark II and I will be batch processing heavy filters in long sets of 3,000 or more images at a time. |
Noted.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | SENDING FILES TO CLIENTS KEEPING SAFE |
Eh? You want to use PGP for your email? Weird heading...
| Drewdupont wrote: | | A few things are given, I will need Firewire 800 Firewire 400 (standard) "for compatibility" USB 2.0 ports I will need a Gigabit Ethernet connection. And I already have Broadband internet in a Black Box configgeration so that the new GOD BOX will be protected from viruses Physicaly because it will never see the internet. |
What do you mean by a "Black Box configuration?" Did someone feed you that term? It's not a networking term that I've heard and I've been doing networks for 15 years.
| Drewdupont wrote: | GETTING RID OF THE BOTTLE NECK
Faster Hard Drives ..
I am told that I should for best performance use a seperate Hard Drive for my opperating system a seperate drive for my PhotoShop scratch Disk and a seperate drives(s) for storage I am thinking along the lines of 2 320 Gig raid drives in a mirror configeration serial ATA i think thats the fastest anyway?? |
Yes, but wait til you see what I have in mind. You'll think it's better because of the magic of striping!
| Drewdupont wrote: | | 1 question would it improve or reduce my system performance to have programs on yet another HD from my OS Drive ?? ? |
The performance increase for program loading would be negligable, but you are going to be working with very large files and most of the apps you stated previously are able to have a seperately defined swap area and swap is going to be important for these files, just like your storage of the same files.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | I know that I need a dule processor system with dule core 64bit processors. Given the amount of heat that produces I will likely want to invest in the best Cooling system money can buy |
Who the hell told you that *s#!7? You don't -need- a dual core system unless you're doing a LOT of multitasking and even then, most business applications aren't designed to use both cores. I speak from experience (read my sig). Sure, the dual core is the P0w/-\ and omg I love it, but it's also problematic because of microsoft's implementation for core management and there's a tradeoff for overclocking and reliability. In any case, getting a dual core chip is up to you, but I advise caution. Read some reviews, check your product literature and then make an informed decision. If your software is indeed made to take advantage of multiple cores/cpus, then go for it but otherwise, you'll only ever be using one core for any given app. I usually do quite a bit of core management and set specific applications to run on a specific core simply because of that very fact.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | Are there quad processor computers for PC like there are for apple aka the Mac G5 Quad ?? if so can they run windows and does photoshop support the use of the other processors? |
There are, yes, but like I said, your software may not support this. You'll need to readyour product literature (RTFM).
| Drewdupont wrote: | | whats the best processors / motherboard for PC ,? ! want to fit it all into a gigantic server tower case so size is no issue! |
Ok, best is a subjective term. I'm going to use DFI because they have a board that has 8 SATA connections, half of which are RAID5 compatible, plus 2 EIDE ports, plus the floppy, 2 firewire, 8 USB2 and lots of other goodness. You'll like it. It's the same as mine.  It pwns. However, you might not like the flashy colors and others in the forum may tell you to get MSI cause they think it's the best, but whatever. The best is subjective. Leave it at that.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | The Hard drives for the scratch disks should be verry fast like a Raptor drive and the ones for my storage may be slower because they are just for storage not for working files |
Ah, but young padawan, you can use the scratch and storage in one area/disk. I'll give my final evaluation below. 
| Drewdupont wrote: | | Can anyone tell me when MAXELL will be coming out with their Holographic Optical Storage Media in Caddys because that is the way to go I am told, something like 120 MBP/s Transfer rates and 1.6 terrabytes storage capacity with a 50+ year Archive life! |
With uncompressed storage capacities achieving 1.6 TeraBytes per disk and data rates as high as 120 MBPs, holographic technology is a true breakthrough in optical media. These features, along with a long archival life, make holographic media a compelling choice for storage and archival requirements. The first generation of holographic media with 300 GB of storage capacity and a 20 MBPs Transfer Rate is scheduled for release in late 2006. For more information on Maxell products, please visit Maxell's Web site, www.maxell-data.com.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | Also I am verry concerned about cooling my system and quiet opperation, of course performance is most important for me and I am willing to sacrifice noise for performance but I am told that liquid cooling is the way to go. any advice for whats the best? |
There you go again with that word, best.  On my system, I have a ThermalTake Sonic Tower. It achieves a normal operating temperature average of about 36 degrees Celsius. I'm running a 120mm fan through it and there are 4 other 80mm fans in my system. There is some noise but others seem to like the XP90 so, whatever.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | Someone said that they took their liquid cooling system and mod it to run right through a mini refrigerator like the one's everyone brings with them to collage and they get a 80% boost in performance but they had to scale back the cooling because the first time they did it, it produced too much condensation and nearly caused a short, anyone have plans for this kind of mod ?? |
Eh, not me. I don't do water cooling. There's too much maintainence.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | whats the best cooling system? |
Whichever one works for you.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | Sound is of no importance I dont listen to sound on my computer Tube amps are the way to go , but vinel is still even better yet. |
omg. If you were able to put all your music on to your computer, then you'd know the magic of digital music. See, once it's all in an MP3, WMA or other format, you can transmit it to any other device either via network, wireless speaker set, portable device or whatever you care to use. You can't use vinyl in the car, but you can use mp3 player! Get with the times!
| Drewdupont wrote: | | I dont have a clue about what to get for a video card, i dont know how demanding photoshop CS 2 is on the video cards i know it needs atleast 32 mb and recomends 64 mb so i dont even know if it would even utilize a 256 mb video card or would it be a waste of my money. Keep in mind I am not going to be doing any gaming on this machine it is strictly photoshop and storage. |
No worries. Most of the good video cards now are pretty inexpensive and even a low end card is likely more than you'll need.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | I am at a loss of how much ram I should get well i know that photoshop can only handle 4 gigs of RAM I am leaning twards more because I expect that soon photoshop will have a new release in a few years that will fully utilize all 8 gigs ?? |
RAM is good for you because it'll avoid some disk swapping. Now, the files you'll be working with are 22megs PLUS so you're not going to be able to get away from it entirely unless you create a ram drive as your swap space. But no worries, I've considered this already.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | What is the Fastest RAM for big projects.. Someone explained to me that some ram is like sports cars they have a higher top speed but can only handel two passangers and other cars are like bullet trains they are not as fast but when loaded down with alot of "passangers" it is alot faster than having the "sports car" doing all the work going back and forth 8 times more than the "train" could do. |
 Tell that person to put down the crack pipe. Go read this article. It's a good basic introduction and it's explained pretty well with lots of pictures. Big props to Cheese for writing with lots of pictures.
| Drewdupont wrote: | | I think the ram I was looking at was Dule Channel DDR PC8000 in GIG or 2 gig sticks?? |
heh. Don't ever say that again. Who ever gave you that line of crap needs to have it fed back to them.
| Drewdupont wrote: | Comments anyone?
How would you improve it..
Please email me if you have any ideas to improve the performance of my system. |
Right then...
Start with a case. Pick one you like. I can recommend the Lian-Li cases as they are easy to work with, made from aluminum to disspate heat better and pretty light. They're also very basic, though, due to market saturation, there are a lot of products for them like case skins, window panels and a lot more. I use an MGE Quantum case and it's a monster of a case with all steel construction, enough size to fit Grimace's lard a$$ in (maybe not large enough for Hack's butt though) and has an LCD display to display cooling. It also has enough real estate that you can paint it up and mod it if you want. A lot of people like the ThermalTake Armor case and it seems to be pretty prevalant. If you look around a little, you'll find a case that fits your personality and then you can read up on the reviews for the case to make sure it doesn't suck. There are some cases out there that are complete trash so be sure to read a review about anything you're interested in before you buy it.
Once you have a case, move on to a motherboard. Naturally, you'll need to consider your case to make sure your board will fit, but most cases will fit most all motherboards with a few exceptions like mATX (Mini ATX like this one). Check your case and motherboard specification to ensure they match. Look for ATX, form factor size and the like. However, now for the real meat: The motherboard. Get the DFI LanParty UT SLi-DR. I say this because it's a board with 2 controller chips for SATA drives, as I mentioned before. This board can handle 8 sata connections and half of those can be configured to do raid0, raid0+1, or raid5. Now, keep this in mind as I progress here...
Case, motherboard, and now RAM. I doubt you'll be overclocking, but you'll still want fast ram. Corsair and OCZ all make great ram but if you check out DFI-street.com, you can see that not only does the motherboard have a community to support it, there's a recommended list and a whole explaination of how ram works so just scroll down to find the "best" ram for you. You can make an educated buy using all the information that I've provided. You'll notice that the list has "2x512mb" listed and that refers to the number of modules and their size so a 2x512 is 2 modules at 512 megabytes each (for a total of 1 gigabyte). With the amount of data that you'll be processing, I advise you to hit the maximum amount of ram that you can afford and that XP will support. As of November 2004, Windows XP will only support 4 gigs of ram. You'll need 4x1gb worth of ram. The motherboard can only have 4 sticks/modules of ram so each module must be 1 gig in size. I've provided enough information here for you so that you can make our own informed decision about the speed of the ram that you buy; cross reference it to the DFI-street board to ensure that the ram you pick is compatible with the board (and your wallet will have to be interrogated as well).
As far as video goes, I would suggest an nVidia 6600 class card. They're a good quality, even for gaming, and will display all the colors that you need in any video resolution that you require for 2D editing. Prices on them are really quite good, in fact, and Pricewatch has them listed at $89 -- be sure you get the PCI Express version!!
For hard drives, and this is where your true power will lie, you'll need 5 of them and split them like this: 2 drives (small, 60gb is fine) running in a raid0+1 configuration. This will be your logical C: drive, where your boot partition, windows, programs and apps all live. The files and storage and majority of your data goes on to the second sata controller, the one with raid5, in a raid5 configuration. You'll need 3 drives for that and, as the article says, you'll lose one drive to the array so get at least 3 250gb jobbies so you can have 500gb of storage (half a terabyte!  ). In fact, you can go larger if you want and even expand this out later by adding a fourth drive. Really, once it is in a raid5 config, you can swap out all the drives one at a time later and expand the array so, for instance, you have 3x250gb seagate drive (always use the same model of drives for maximum reliability and performance) and then you're getting close to capacity so you buy another drive, plug it in and tell the array to expand. Once it's completed, you tell windows to expand that drive and *bang* 250gb more storage. I've done this all over the place and never had much of a problem. Now, the beauty of the raid5 is that it's striped, just like the article says, so you can read those files faster and get more done. Until you realize the beauty of striping, you'll never understand why this raid array will be the heart of your system. Naturally, both of these types of raid are fault tolerant, reducing the need to perform ritualized backups.
Then, you'll want to pick a CPU. As discussed, you'll need to read the manual on your products to determine your capabilities for multi-tasking, load sharing and etc. Once you've figured that out, you'll be ready to pick a CPU. The DFI SLi-DR is capable of handling any 939 chip (AMD only) so you can buy an inexpensive single core and upgrade later just by swapping the CPU. This is great when your programs have finally moved in to the multithreaded state and you want to see the performance boost.
As for cooling, you can use most any solution you like from water cooling to a passive air system. Pick the one you like best (oho, that word again) and run with it. I like the air cooled engine for my motorcycle because it's lower maintainance and I chose air cooling for my PC for the same reason. Yes, it's louder, but if you look, there's a fan listed in the reviews section here that has golf ball dimples so it's supposed to be quieter. Using 120mm fans will also make your system quieter because the blades can move slower to achieve the same amount of air flow. If you read up on positive pressure and negative pressure case and air flow design, you can learn a lot about cooling.
Finally, you'll need to power all of this. Again, check out the recommendations on DFI-Street. Get a power supply of at least 600 watts with a native 24 pin connector and SLi capability. DO NOT SKIMP ON THE POWER SUPPLY. It will be the one thing in your computer that is more important than your motherboard. It supplies juice to all your components and you need to have solid, clean power. In fact, you should also get a UPS (Battery backup) for your computer. A good UPS will clean the power that is fed to your computer, normalizing it and reducing voltage 'noise' as well as making sure you don't lose any data if you're working when the power goes out.
| Drewdupont wrote: | Also I am accepting names for the god box .. it has to be a powerfull name , or a historic name ,. or some kind of mithilogical God or Goddess .
Have fun
Thanks |
I vote "Pallas Athena" for Athena is the goddess of knowledge and a patron of arts and crafts which would include painting or, in your case, photography. You could expand on that by doing some nice case art. |
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Spire
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Joined: 01 Aug 2003
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Location: Up to my Nipples in Alaska
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Doctor Feelgood
Arrrrghh!
Joined: 07 Apr 2003
Posts: 20349
Location: New Jersey
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| Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 19:22:06 Post Subject: |
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Yeah, RAID 0+1 would need 4 drives... My suggestion was to do RAID 5 with 3 drives. Now that I think of it though, do the nForce controllers support it? I only know they do 0, 1, and 0+1...
And on Cheeze's suggestion for ATI for 2D performance... My experience is different. Slightly different, but in 2D and 3D cad/modeling environements nVidia is prefered over ATI. Actually, I just finished 3 days of training today on Solid Edge, and you had to bring your own PC to the class... The guy from Solid Edge highly recommended that I ditch the ATI card for an nVidia card... Yeah, not quite the same as photos/graphics, but similar. |
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Little Bruin
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Spire
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BeerCheeze
*hick*
Joined: 14 Jun 2003
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| Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:39:11 Post Subject: |
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I think if you want SATA 3.0GB RAID 5 then you need to buy an add-in card, which is expensive. The cheapest one I found was for $254.00 and it uses PCI-X, so you'd need to get a server board to support it.
Also, I don't really recommend RAID 5 for speed. It is actually slower than RAID 1 because of the over head of parity math.
As for the ATi -vs- nVidia I don't know enough (or any) about Solid Edge. It's very possible (and probable) they work with nVidia to optimize for them, or have special drivers from nVidia. ATi is not known for working with other companies in my experiences.
However, I am NOT a graphics expert, nor do I pretend to be one. My professional experiences are in OSes, Hardware, Network, and Security. So to say I'm wrong on the graphics is not hard to do. |
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Kilamon
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Joined: 22 Mar 2005
Posts: 811
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| Posted: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:53:33 Post Subject: |
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No, look at the DFI page about the motherboard:
| Quote: | Serial ATA with RAID
# Four Serial ATA ports supported by the nForce4 chip
- SATA speed up to 3Gb/s
- RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1
- NVIDIA RAID allows RAID arrays spanning across Serial ATA and Parallel ATA
# Four Serial ATA ports supported by the Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip
- SATA speed up to 1.5Gb/s
- RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5 |
It clearly states RAID 5. I have the board at home and though I haven't bought the disks yet, I'm planning to run raid5 for my boot/main partition. In fact, once I'm ready to go to raid5, I'll only have 1 partition.
I have a whole room of servers running behind me with raid configurations and they're all doing raid1+0 (2 drives) and raid5 (3 or 4 drives). The raid0 is striping on a disk, no redundancy. the +1 here is mirroring, adding that level of redundancy that's required. It's 2 disks. I just fired up one of the server managers here to double check this. These are HP Itanium servers with HP wide ultra3 SCSI drives 10,000 RPM. Pretty speedy in their own right. On the raid0+1 arrays, I am achieving 133.2mb/s according to HDtach and 96.5mb/s on the raid5 array. This is pretty poor. ...
*wanders off* Ok.. found the problem one of the DBAs changed the stripe size to 8kb. I'll report new tests next week when the drive finishes restriping to 64kb. hmm checking another server here, one sec...ftlog who changed the stripe sizes...Apparently my servers are all banged up. I'll get back to you with valid tests.
Anyways, I know it's possible to get a 148mb/s out of raid5 on these HP stations. I'm looking over the graph data in HDTach and they have some WD drives in a Raid0 on the 3114 chip listing at 74.5mb/s (4x sata) and a raid5 ATA listing at 174.9mb/s so raid5 is definately the way to go, even in ATA. All you need to do is consider how the technology works and it's obvious.
I dunno though. It looks like this might be more of a YMMV thing. The thread at DFI seems to have some pretty widespread results.
You know, in retrospect, this guy might be better off just getting 4 hard drives and doing raid5 on a single partition. It's easier administratively and according to my research, it might even be twice the speed depending on the hard drives.
Ok, here's my final word, to Drew and everyone else:
Do what ever you want to do that feels right for you. It's pretty obvious that benchmarks from other systems will only take you so far. I know that the DFI SLi-DR will do all the raid you want/need so there's no requirement to get a special controller.
Here's a link to wikipedia on RAID. |
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