I was trying to spec out an upgrade for him that for just a couple
of hundred bucks he could see some really decent gains without
dumping his entire rig. I was also looking at component reuse down
the road. The 10K RPM drive could be moved to anything he buys.
Only the RAM might have to be tossed - and it's relatively cheap.
If he already has the drive, then naturally you would move it to a new system. If it's an older generation Cheetah, like a 9 or 18 GB, then many of the newer, cheaper IDE drives will outperform it in many areas--most notably sustained transfer. It's still far from unusable however ;-)
A full-blown SCSI upgrade with dual-cpu, all new memory and
motherboard is gonna be at least $1,500 to $2,000. If he can
afford it/justify it, then he should go for it. I got the
impression that he was trying to be frugal.
Aren't we all. Upgrading an existing, older system rapidly reaches a poor ROI versus swallowing hard and getting a new ship.
If you can afford it, SCSI is a good choice from a performance
perspective. Your drives are going to be more expensive (about
$100 more per drive on average), but you do get the gains in
performance.
Quite a bit more than $100. A 146 GB Cheetah will cost you $1,000, whereas a 200GB Maxtor or WD will cost you $350--soon much less. I'd rather have three (3) 200GB drive--that you can stripe or use for data integrity with RAID 5--over a single 146GB drive almost any day.
Do you REALLY need that kind of performance for editing stills? I
say you don't. A 10k RPM IDE drive on an IDE100 controller will be
more than enough. Anything beyond that is just doing it 'cause you
can.
When they come out with a 10K IDE drive that will be the case, but they do not exist yet. SATA is next, but HD manufacturers are reluctant to force their SCSI cash cow to compete directly with IDE. They've been avoiding that like the plague for years now, even though the technology has existed for quite some time.
If you're saving 3-4 hours a week with only a few seconds saved per
file, your volume is probably much different than most
photographers. Let's say you save 10 seconds per file operation.
To save a minute, you've opened six files. 60 minutes is 360
files. For 3-4 hours of savings, that's between 1,080-1,440
files/week, or more than 200 images a day. That's a lot of volume.
It's easy to justify a few thousand dollars in hardware at that
kind of volume. If you're someone who is only moving say 50 images
a week, it's a lot more difficult.
Yep, Ron and a few others have a heavily optimized workflow that can reap benefits from small tweaks. Most of the corporate world wouldn't be any more productive with a maxed out P4 3 GHz over a Celeron 500. But then again, Word ain't exactly a resource hog either ;-)
I primarily do video. My main system (I have five) is a dual
2.4GHz with 1Gb RAM, an U2W SCSI with a Medea 4/120 VideoRaid,
Matrox G550 dual head and a removable IDE drive bay for archiving.
It's a screamer.
That's similar to what we use and recommend. At 2.4 you're running Xeons, but there's little difference between expensive Xeons and competing, cheaper Athlon MP's. The only thing that REALLY cranks on a P4-class processor and leaves ANY AMD chip in the dust is Lightwave. If you're a Lightwave user, AMD's are a waste as the P4 trounces them by a ridiculously large margin. 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, and even our Canopus DV Storm SE Plus realizes little difference between the two, as long as everything else is equal.
When all is said and done, SCSI still rules the high end, but at a cost. Especially on heavy transactional web servers that hit the DB a lot for small amounts of information.
Brendan
--
Blah, blah, blah, camera, blah, blah, blah, lenses, blah, blah, blah, no ego.
