[Leica] Image Editing System

[spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

Another somewhat biased opinion. :)

Both Geoff and Mehrdad are correct but the devils is in the details. 

The SSDs are like to last longer than the time you are like to own the 
computer that it is initially installed in (usually 3-5 years). This is 
regardless of whether the SSD is used as the O/S disk, the LR disk or the PS 
scratch disk. There are preliminary indicators of failures which can be 
caught if the right monitoring S/W is installed on your PC. As my knowledge 
of Windows is getting very much more hopelessly obsolete by the second, I 
won't recommend any.

SSD will typically only fail if there is a power "event" in the middle of a 
write. The simplest way to protect your computer and the SSDs is to plug 
your computer into a battery backed up UPS and run the supplied UPS 
monitoring S/W so it will shut your computer down in the event that the 
batteries runs out of juice. Note that you should connect everything that is 
connected to you PC through the UPS including monitors, printer, scanner, 
router, Ethernet cables, speaker power and etc. It's quite a number of wires 
if you actually sit down and try to figure this out for a fully loaded PC. 
In other word every single wire that comes from the outside and connects to 
your PC should be routed through your UPS. Particularly important if you 
live in an area that experiences lots of thunderstorms or power surges.

In Tina's case, I would just buy one of the bigger UPS which has the cable 
to connect to the PC to notify it to automatically shutdown. No particular 
brand but I would use a name brand (APS, Triplite,...) just to be on the 
safe side.

Note that it's not just the SSDs which doesn't like power events, regular 
HDDs can also be very grumpy by sudden loss of power. I speak from 
experience on this one so trust me. Battery-backed up UPS is like your dog. 
It is your best friend always and they have to be replaced in far fewer 
years than you like (ie. less than 5 is best).

Now as to whether setting on SSDs in a RAID configuration will make the 
system run faster, the answer is it depends how fast your SATA controller 
is, how good your CPU is, how fast is the PCIe bus on your MB,... I won't 
make everyone's eyes glaze over by digressing into the subtleties of file 
system caching, RAM speed and etc. I will only note that a SSD has a read 
speed of about 500 MB/s which is about 4 Gbps. This is getting fairly close 
to the theoretical speed of consumer SATA links of about 6Gbps. 

Now as for CPUs, Xenons are nice but they consume a lot more power and are 
usually optimized for server applications, not for PS & LR class of 
applications. For me it wasn't worth the incremental price delta. The latest 
generation high end i7 is good enough I think for Tina's needs. Using Xenon 
processors will also increase the price of the motherboard because you need 
a server grade motherboard, the RAM and the power supply and....

Windows vs Mac OS X should be a preference, not a religion. They are both 
tools which helps you to do something. Use the tool that best suits your 
need. :)

Regards,
Spencer

On Jun 9, 2013, at 10:57, Geoff Hopkinson <hopsternew at gmail.com> wrote:

> No idea on the MTBF figures, may well be so. However OS in the same array
> is what concerns me the most. Without that failure of a scratch drive is of
> no importance at all.
> Tina is very unlikely to set up any kind of RAID in any case so the point
> is moot for what she want s to do and how she wants to go about it (having
> a company build it for her) as a turnkey solution.
> I'm definitely out of here ;-0
> 
> 
> *Breathe in, breathe out, move on* -- Jimmy Buffett
> 
> Cheers
> Geoff
> http://www.pbase.com/hoppyman
> 
> 
> On 10 June 2013 00:51, mehrdad <msadat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> geof the mtbf of the ssd drives are very very low since there are no 
>> moving
>> parts and  much much better than hard drives, there is really
>> no difference between using three separate drives when one fails, u loose
>> all.  the best way is raid 10 which is mirroring and striping , i use
>> striped sdd for my os drives and every time something is updated, i do an
>> image back up, data site on raid 5 disk system. my lr library and scratch
>> disk are on the striped ssd and when i do major work , i back it up the 
>> the
>> raid drive.
>>  -------------------------------------
>>  regards, mehrdad
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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>> 
> 
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