Hop
Senior Member
RCH_Projects said:... IMHO, for what I have an opinion on; ...
GPU - I don't think exceeding my video (GeForce 9300 GTX+) would make much difference with even heavy Alibre renders.
Save money and get a second, stock, video card and cheap monitor (if you have too, I can run two off of my GeForce). Run resource monitor on it (task manager).
The only time I get into trouble with Alibre is when resources (memory) gets cluttered or the CPU fan or others get dust covered.
This can come from IE hogging on a web site (a lot of Redeye quote part uploads), Alibre crunching exports (STL) and a mish-mash of intermediate applications.
When you choke it is too late. With Task manager running on the "back" monitor it doesn't happen. The extra monitor fills in as a great parking place for reference information while I work Alibre in the main window.
Case - I don't have internal drives. I put in (fairly cheap, very reliable) HD docking stations and rotate disk image backups. Full Tower "Cooler Master" with an extra quality fan or two - 6 External 5.25" Drive Bays (actually bays in the case on the front - not detached). I call this "Cloud computing". :mrgreen:
I use an SSD in one station for "CAD" (Alibre, Keyshot, Excel) files with continuous backup with Autosave to a compressed hard drive partition.
Otherwise I use WD Caviar Black 640 GB drives. More (even this) is wasted space and backup (clone) time.
I can touch a drive to check heat or vibration which is gratifying. What happens in the case (heat or while cleaning) has minimal drive impact.
I can pull the drives for dust control in an instant.
For not a lot of money I think I have a solid dream configuration (for the money). Others may clarify or offer other beneficial insight, or better opinions.
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Color added for emphasis to above quotation.
I meant to comment on this earlier and forgot… I agree 100% with this design philosophy, especially the external hard disk drive stations with image backups ready to swap in as needed. Thumbs up on both hands for that idea.
The problem with gigantic HDDs appears to be the unrecoverable bit error rate is not small enough to guarantee an error-free backup. For example, a typical unrecoverable bit error might be one in 10^14 reads. That sounds pretty low, but depending on the size of the drive, it could mean that reading the entire drive (as for an image copy) will virtually guarantee at least one unrecoverable error. Not good if you are doing image backups.
There are articles on the Web by more knowledgeable people than me who can shed some light on this problem. The gist of it, from what I read, is the increase in HDD capacity is not accompanied by a proportional decrease in unrecoverable errors. At some size point (we are talking very large RAID 6/10 sets used mainly for server farms) it becomes virtually impossible to keep a system up and running error-free. For more information you can look at this article.
Hop