FWP!

Right now I've got 4 HDD's in a RAID 5 array running off my LSI MegaRAID SAS card in my full tower case. It runs great, I get 550 MB/s sustained transfer speeds and it's mainly used as my "warm backups" where my processed photos and videos go after I'm done using them in day-to-day work. Anywho, I'd like to get a new case, and I'm not finding anything I like that can hold 4 HDD's, an optical drive, and a full size radiator. I was thinking about just throwing the HDDs in a DAS, but I'm wondering if any of the DAS's on the market accept/import existing RAID configurations. If I have to re-do the array and move the data off of them first, then move it back, then fine, I guess I'll have to do that, but I'm wondering if there are any out there that will recognize the config and not wipe my data. Thanks!

I'm the Infrastructure Architect at the company I work at, and in my free time (lol) I have been looking into what it would cost for a new physical host for to move our SQL DBs to. Our main business app relies VERY heavily on SQL and is used by around 500 employees on average every day. The complication is that it must reference data going back to 2006, and some tables have 10's of millions of rows. We have "cleaned up" the database as much as we can without purging needed data, and while the DB isn't huge at only around 250 GB, it gets hammered all day, every day, and we've started seeing issues with other application functions that go on in the background which also leverage other SQL DB's. One of the processes pulls millions of rows of data, does compares, and then updates other tables, every night, for multiple DBs. We have been working with the application vendor to see if we can figure out where the bottleneck is, and we're beginning to think we may need to move to a server with more horsepower (even though the current one only sits at around 40% CPU utilization, on average). And yes, all best practices are in place for NUMA spanning, OS optimization, and BIOS settings on the B200 M4s. Side note - we are on core-based licensing, right now the server is running as a 14 CPU VMware Windows 2016 VM and with 384GB of RAM, and SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition. The VM is given full resource allocation and CPU ready times remain at less than 5%. The Pure storage array does not seem to be hit very hard, it barely breaks a sweat most of the time. With that said, I was wondering what you guys would consider a kick ass SQL host in the $10k-15k dollar range. Ideally, two CPUs running at 3.5 GHz or above, whatever RAM, but I am open to opinions. I built one out at Puget systems with two Xeon 6226R's, 384GB of RAM, and some NVME SSD's. Then I would either possibly add a PCIe NVME card with a couple of drives running in RAID 0, or I could attach a FCoE LUN off of the Pure array for DB and log storage. Any input is appreciated!

Thanks, but after having it for a few years and working more and more on photos that are 35+ megapixels, I do notice the lack of resolution. My drone also shoots 4K video at 100 Mbits and I need to zoom in to the video to see if it is in focus or not, which gets old.

I have an old-ish Dell 27" 1440p IPS monitor that has been my main monitor that I use for photo and video editing, but with everything moving to 4k, I am looking to move to a 4k monitor. I browsed some of the LTT videos and the LG 27UK650-W is mentioned a few times, and the price is in the ballpark, but I was curious what you guys might think. My PC just got upgraded from a 7700k and 16GB of RAM to a 9900k and 32GB, and I am re-using my 1070 GTX. This monitor would run next to my "gaming" monitor which is a Dell 27" 1440p with 144Hz refresh rate. My website - www.azimages.net Link to LG I am interested in - http://a.co/d/1LPcEtc I appreciate any input, thanks!

I was actually going to post almost this same exact question as I have a 2600k and want to upgrade to something more recent for a couple reasons. I do a lot of photography work in Lightroom, and Lightroom does actually like to use all CPU cores, all 8 threads on my 2600 get slammed every time I move to a new photo. Also, the 2600k is only capable of PCIe 2.0 which means the 960 Pro I bought is only going to run at about half its bandwidth until I upgrade. Also cannot boot from the NVME (z77 chipset). The point of getting the NVME was to help Lightroom, but now I am seeing that the bottle neck really is my CPU. I'm also running two 27" 2560x1440 Dell displays. So I started looking at CPUs a few weeks ago, landed on the 7700k, but now I am hearing a lot of good things about the 8700k, namely that it has 6 cores with HT which might really help me in my situation. It would also future-proof me a little bit since I'd have to upgrade to the 3-series motherboard. If the 8700k will come out in December, that's better than expected (was figuring it would be next spring at the earliest), but right now it's quite a bit more expensive than what I can get a 7700k for and I'm not sure what the difference will be in Lightroom (and some occasional video editing and gaming) and if it'll be justifiable.