Good Hdd Setup For 3d Work?

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Hi all,

I am an ACAD user and I’m really keen to learn 3ds Max, 3d modelling and rendering is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time so I’m going to give it a go now. I’ve done as much research as I could and spec’d out what I consider a decent consumer level system since I can’t afford many workstation components right now, I’ve followed advice from other 3ds Max users to do this and I’m fairly certain it will suffice, however there isn’t much information on good hard drive setups and while scanning through this forum here I’ve noticed some (not much) mention of hard drives and the fact that they are important to a well performing graphics work system. So what exactly is a good harddrive setup for this type of use? I am not really sure how this type of software utilizes the hard drive, I’ve been getting some ideas from hardware forums but generally people there build computers for games or home theatre uses so I’m not sure if it will be adequate.. you know things like RAID, splitting OS and Apps between 2 fast harddrives also supposedly helps, some are throwing everything on Velociraptors and use slower hard drives for general storage.. that type of stuff.

Keep in mind I am just an amateur., I know this site has a lot of professionals that generally push pro level solutions but I couldn’t get any info on other sites so I need to bug you guys this one time.

Also, out of curiosity, what is a good consumer level GPU for running Maya? Since 3dMax started supporting D3D a lot of users are getting very good (usually better) performance out of gamer cards (albeit some bugs), I know Maya is still OpenGL only and as such serious users are going for the workstation cards due to the driver crippling from manufacturers in their consumer line. I’m just curious because I’ve picked something out for 3dMax use and I’m wondering about people in my situation who are instead wanting to run Maya and what they are choosing.

Thank you for your time.

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The main problem is that if you do moving graphics your going to start chewing up your computer at astonishing speeds. A half Terabyte can be easily spent on a months work easily. Theres not much that is more memory intensive than visual media. Appart form real high end engineering and medium range research. Speed is important because you want te be able to steram that data around.

However im not sure you hard drive is your priority number one, you gfx card is of a much MUCH higher priority. As is having 1-3 render slaves per artist.

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I am not really sure how this type of software utilizes the hard drive, I’ve been getting some ideas from hardware forums but generally people there build computers for games or home theatre uses so I’m not sure if it will be adequate..

Take the same idea and multiply it by a hundred, then you have the value you need since you WANT the uncompressed data, and may layer of those. So then multiply by 400.
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know things like RAID, splitting OS and Apps between 2 fast harddrives also supposedly helps,

Naah get a 64 bit os, the 32 bit oses are notoriously disk bound. But if you get a raid dont use onboard raid use a specialized raid card. You will be so happy when you blow your deck (its not quation of IF its a question of when)

important note: one thing to know about raids. Windows can not boot form a disk that has more than 2 terabytes of capacity, if it does the capacilty of that disk gets capped to 2TB. This is probably why they tell you to use 2 disks one for boot*. The operating sytems scratch can be on any disk not just the os disk.

To me the raid is more about data integrity than speed per see. I cant affiord to have a computer go down on me 2 days before deadline. Its jut way too costly to loose a 100,000$ contract because my hardware fails. I mean the chance is nit high. But the one time out of 999 when it DOES happen. So 200$ of a investment that saves me form catstrophes that i can not afford to take is a nobrainer deal.

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what is a good consumer level GPU for running Maya?

think of it thisway, if you have glitch that keeps annoying you for every day and every hour you work on the computer. How much are you ready to pay for that? A dollar a day? Howabout stability? 2 cdollars a day. The difference between a top of the line consumer card and a good workstation card is at the 300-500$ range So if you expect to use that card then its not much. Especially when it turns out the difference is not actually the full sum because of the small fact that companies pay tax differently. So the real difference is about 100-250$ just about a days salary. Blow one card and suddenly the gamer card COSTS you 100$ (trust me this happens). The workstation cards will be shipped the same day you blow one NO QESTIONS asked.

But es if its the newest perforance chip form nvidia ist should work. Anything else forget it. If it reads intel good luck with that.

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Since 3dMax started supporting D3D a lot of users are getting very good (usually better) performance out of gamer cards

Well it depends greatly on what you do, the gamer card is usually equal to the highest line workstation card so yes. But they are optimized differently. So if you expect to do games graphics then yes its a perfect choice. But if you want to do certain.

Its not about direct 3d versus openGl. Its about quality of components, the workstation cards get to pick the pieces that have least errors in rating stage.

*i prefeer to use a fast solid state drive for the os disk. San is also very usefull if you work in bigger team. Or if you get rich fiber channel

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Hmm.. ok, thank you for clarifying all of that for me, so if I understand you right I should concentrate on capacity more so than speed is that correct? Good thing about storage capacity is that I’ll always be able to expand internaly or externaly, I was just really unsure about speed requirements and I’m thinking having to reorganize everything by switching to raid for instance once I’m already set up is going to be a bit of a pain so I’m trying to get as much right as I can right off.

Fact is that I’m really just a beginner in 3d I just know the basics right now, top of the line tech comes with a hefty premium which I feel I’ll be wasting at the moment(and I won’t be able to write it off on my taxes ) so what I want to do is upgrade as my needs grow especially since technology evolves and prices drop so quickly.

Yeah, so again thanks a bunch for your help.. hopefully in the near future I’ll need the kind of rig you guys are working on, maybe one day someone will even pay me to use it

P.s very jealous of the SSD, I’d love to have one right now but I’ve decided to wait a bit on that too.

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Well speed is important, for streaming the stuff around*. You can not just take a usb 1 esternal drive and pump the data there. You just cant wait 30 minutes for those files. The problem is that you have 5 bottlenecks on your computer all of wich count.
[li]speed and size of gfx card[/li][li]speed of processor[/li][li]size of processor cache (extremely rarely speed)[/li][li]size of memory[/li][li]speed of your main bus and memory bus[/li][li]speed of disk drive[/li][li]disk capacity.[/li]You pretty much optimize things in that order, so if you have all else chekked you raid your station. But on top of that main raid you will need a good 3-10 TB of spare disk that has no speed considerations for archiving/backup purposes.

*optimally you shoudl be able to read full hd exr files form disk at at sustained trasfer speeds. Not many drives do this alone.

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I see, this is very helpfull. For external storage and backup I’m installing a SATA hotswappable bay, I think for that purpose it should be fast enough, and convenient. Internally I’ll start off with single drives and raid them later on if I don’t feel I need to spend money elsewhere instead.

Thanks.

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QUOTE(jid @ 03/31/09, 01:16 AM) [snapback]304423[/snapback]
I see, this is very helpfull. For external storage and backup I’m installing a SATA hotswappable bay, I think for that purpose it should be fast enough, and convenient.

Perhaps it rather depends on what you do. The problem here is that the time it takes to back thing up is time away form renders. Now if i put he fastest extarnal sata dirve in and do a project only backup, it still would take 1-3 hours to do. and to be honest id rather spend that time rendering when close to deadline. Wich is when the backups the most valuable.*

Start with one then see how you will do.

*so if you have a raid that mirrors then you never need to spend this time in the crunch. This means you can take some serious lapses on backup. So you can do it perhaps once a week or something. Offcourse if you have a version controll system on second machine then its a entirely different matter.