Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
If that statement sounds strange, it's not that we think it even remotely
possible that we'll suddenly become PC gaming enthusiasts. We want
those slots because fast video adapters can be used for more than just
rendering 3D graphics at blazing speed. They can also be used as very
high-performance math coprocessors, with the main CPU offloading
heavy-duty number crunching to them. For now, the main CPU of this sys-
tem will do the number crunching, but we wanted to leave the dual video
adapter option open as a possible future alternative to a very expensive
processor upgrade.
Disk capacity/performance
Disk capacity and performance tie with processor performance for top
priority in this system. Capacity is crucial, because video editing and ren-
dering simply eats disk space. Even a relatively small project may consume
100 GB or more of disk space, counting the original digital video files, ed-
ited clips, various work files, rendered clips in various formats, and so on.
Disk performance is also critical, because digital video files (particularly
HD files) are
big
. When we're working interactively with multi-gigabyte
files, the time required to read and write those files becomes significant,
so the faster the disk subsystem is, the better.
Our first thought was to use RAID 10 to increase disk subsystem perfor-
mance. The obvious problem with RAID 10 is that only half the actual disk
space is available to the system, so four 2 TB drives would provide only 4
TB of available disk space. The less obvious problem with RAID 10 is that
while it's faster than a single drive, it's not all that much faster. Instead of
waiting 30 seconds for that file to load, we might have to wait 25 seconds.
That's not much of an improvement in exchange for giving up half our
disk space.
The obvious solution would be to use solid-state drives. Unfortunately, we
wanted at least 8 TB of disk space. Installing 8 TB of SSDs would have cost
at least $25,000, and that's if we bought the cheap ones. We decided that
a hybrid disk subsystem made sense, with a single, fast SSD as the boot/
system/working-data drive, and several 2 TB hard drives to provide mass
storage. Installing an SSD large enough to hold our working data sets will
give us the best of both worlds.
Component Considerations
With our design criteria in mind, we set out to choose the best components
for our extreme system. The following sections describe the components we
chose, and why we chose them.
