Grampy said:
Squilliam said:
Im considering the perspective that you wish to do free-lance work on your computer as well as gaming. So taking that into consideration you may be better suited to a home-built machine than a pre-built one as your needs may differ from those of the high end computer gamers who buy machines in your price range.
One professional looking computer case which is quiet, solidly built and comes with a locking mechanism for the front drive bays which will keep your most important asset, your I.P safer from being spirited away. It also helps you with presentation if you intend to bring clients into your home to show off the work.
Important consideration, time = money:
Raid and the humble solid state drive may very well be some of your better companions. Data security (Again its the I.P principle), performance and simplicity are perhaps some of the orders of the day here.
With a Raid 1 array of 2 * 1 TB drives you can be sure that if one of your HDDs go down you will not lose hours, days or even a weeks worth of data. Furthermore since you seem to be working with some large files the higher read speed coupled with the extremely high RAM quantities you demand will keep the pipes better fed.
With a SSD you get all the benifits of a Raid 0 array for your primary system drive with far better reliability and ease of setup and maintenence. Obviously some are designed as system drives and some are not, however since you'll be looking at the middle of the range options it won't be a problem.
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I always like the way you think (and the fact that you do).
I'm not too concerned about physical security or impressing visitors. I am concerned about data security from loss however and I strongly agree about RAID. If I do build or customize my own I will opt for a 500G drive just for programs and everything else on a networked RAID 0 drive which will cover all the computers in the house. Right now they are very inexpensive. Any particular reason why you prefer RAID 1?
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The storage subsystem on your personal computer is the weakest link. For that reason it should be given some special attention IMO to alleviate potential bottlenecks. For example if you use an SSD you could probably do away with the idea of Raid on your system drive.
That G.Skill is $140 on Newegg right now but unfortunately I had to do some digging and its not the longer life single level cell. One of these could easily replace a Raid 0 array and do it much more reliably at that.
I like the Raid 1 type arrays for system data because the drives are huge and its a total PITA to reload that information if one drive fails. Its very cheap to install a pair of 1TB drives and you generally get better performance than smaller drives. Furthermore you generally read data far more than you write it so the read speeds are IMO more critical in day to day use and in that respect Raid 0 has little advantage over Raid 1.
