Using PCIE

[FauntailJabuti]

Hi there, 

I'm new to the forum. I am tech professional in the VFX industry building my own rig. I basically use a ton of photoshop and some 3d app's. I am planning on building my second PC, and wondering if anyone has any thoughts about PCIE components, quality, size, performance and compatibility with other parts such as mobo and cpu. I need a ssd solution that will support my Adobe CC (photoshop, lightroom, bridge, after effects) as well as 3d apps like Maya and Zbrush among others. how does one use the limited capacity of PCIE as their primary disk for the installing of programs  without overtaxing the drive with necessary programs?

 

Thanks in advance for any and all wisdom shared on this inquiry!

[FauntailJabuti]

wow, thanks for the quick reply Cuda Cores! 

 

I live in the US. My budget is not as primary a concern as making sure the rig runs very well. 

 

Thanks in advance! 

[scottyseng]

10 hours ago, FauntailJabuti said:

wow, thanks for the quick reply Cuda Cores! 

 

I live in the US. My budget is not as primary a concern as making sure the rig runs very well. 

 

Thanks in advance! 

Hmm, I would either vouch for the Intel 750 series or the Samsung 950 for the primary drive. I'm not sure on how many programs you have, but 400GB should cover you?

 

As for the rest of the PC, do you like to overclock? Maybe consider a 5820K (Though if you can wait a few months, the new Intel CPUs are supposed to be released soon). It's quite fast when overclocked for the money you pay for it.

 

If you're using this for professional use, maybe consider a Quadro or FirePro GPU. I'm not sure how it is with software these days, but back in the day, my old Radeon 4850 would make Revit show all kinds of bizarre graphical glitches and getting a FirePro GPU fixed that (Though it costs so much).

 

You should get a second SSD (Probably SATA) as a running scatch / active project disk.

 

Finally, get hard drives to archive / backup the data on.

[leadeater]

12 hours ago, FauntailJabuti said:

Hi there, 

I'm new to the forum. I am tech professional in the VFX industry building my own rig. I basically use a ton of photoshop and some 3d app's. I am planning on building my second PC, and wondering if anyone has any thoughts about PCIE components, quality, size, performance and compatibility with other parts such as mobo and cpu. I need a ssd solution that will support my Adobe CC (photoshop, lightroom, bridge, after effects) as well as 3d apps like Maya and Zbrush among others. how does one use the limited capacity of PCIE as their primary disk for the installing of programs  without overtaxing the drive with necessary programs?

 

Thanks in advance for any and all wisdom shared on this inquiry!

If you are willing to use Windows Server OS you can use Storage Spaces with Tiering. Use a NVMe disk as the fast tier and standard capacity SATA SSDs/HDDs as the slower tier. I can personally vouch for Storage Spaces. I use 6 Samsung 850/840 Pro's to cache a bunch of 3TB NAS disks, 2.6GB/s read and 1.4 GB/s write but in small block I/O a single NVMe is much faster than my setup.

 

I guess the biggest question is how much storage you actually need and if something as simple as using a working scratch disk and manually coping to another location when finished is sufficient.

 

Also during the install of software, Adobe etc in your case, you can change the install location. You don't have to use the default location which is C:\Program Files. Even installing to their is fine you don't actually need the application to be on super fast storage only the project files.

[Captain_WD]

On 14.05.2016 г. at 5:26 PM, FauntailJabuti said:

~snip~

Hey there FauntailJabuti (love the avatar!)

 

The guys gave you some really good explanations. PCIe SSDs do deliver great performance and are perfect for performance-oriented applications that require extremely fast storage. They are quite pricey but offer better performance compared to regular SATA SSDs. Have in mind that these drives do take up PCI lanes and/or limit the usage of some SATA ports (depending on the motherboard) so it would be good if you post your build here and give as a budget or desired storage space so we can narrow things down a bit as there are 10TB+ SSDs out there but... 

 

If you need an extremely fast storage for some tasks or rather small applications you can also opt for a RAM disk, lowering the usable amount of your system memory. Post back if you want some info on that.

 

Captain_WD.