Which Build and what drives for a raid? One for Harm Maybe :)

Question

Hi, I've been waiting to get an evga sr-2 but they are so hard to get a hold of at the moment I was starting to wonder whether I should go for something like this in the meantime. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-031-OB
I always wait longer and do big upgrades instead so am willing to wait another month if necessary to get my hands on an sr-2 but was looking at Harms Beast spec on the premiere pro benchmarks and noticed he gets pretty impressive results from a single i7
Just wondering if overclocked sr-2 running at 4.2Ghzplus is worth twice the money.
Also, No matter which board i end up with the first step will be using their onboard raid to run a raid 5 array with 6 discs. (they don't do raid 3)
Eventually I plan to get an areca card but don't know what drives to use. WD Re4's (2Tb) seem to be pretty good for raid and critical use for at £200 they are a lot more than WD blacks. Just wondering what to do for as it's alot of money especially if I decide to get an areca card and use raid 30?
Thanks, Michael.

Answer 1

Michael,
As you can see, Chris' top rank in the PPBM5 Benchmark reflects the enormous power of dual X5680's. Admitted, it is much more expensive than a similarly overclocked single i7-980X, like Studio North. However there is a distinct advantage of a dual Xeon system, in the sense that you will have 12 DIMM slots and can easily use the very affordable 2 GB sticks to get 24 GB, which saves a lot in comparison to 6 x 4GB sticks on a X58 mobo. Or you can expand memory to 48 GB should you desire so.
You may have seen this review already, but in case you missed it, look here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/08/17/evga-classified-sr-2-review/1
If you consider that there will be further improvements in multi-threading and in some exporter modules in CS Next, the advantage of more cores and more memory will probably increase over a 980X.
As for disks, the WD RE4's are a great choice. Depending on your storage requirements, and your timing for an Areca controller, it may make sense to start with the 1 TB version or the 1.5 TB version and then later add another 6 x 1 TB or 6 x 1.5 TB. That will give you a 12 disk array with the same gross capacity as 6 x 2 TB for approximately the same amount, but because of the larger array will give you better performance or in the case of 1.5 TB models even more storage capacity. I would advise against the Caviar Blacks because of the TLER issue.
Planning ahead for the Areca, you have to keep in mind a way to transfer your data from a mobo array to an Areca array. You may have to first create a new 6 disk array on the Areca, copy your data from the mobo array to the new Areca array, then move one disk at a time from the mobo to the Areca and define it first as a hot-spare and then expand the array. You have to do that for all the existing disks, but that way you have no problems in getting all your data on the new array intact. I probably would use a Raid3 or Raid5 with one hot-spare, so you end up with 11 x Raid3/5 plus one hot-spare, or a 12 x Raid6.
Hope this helps.