Curious because I'm thinking of going with SSD drives for my next generation of crunchers and found some drives that mount in card slots instead of a drive bay using SATA.
This advice may be worth no more than it costs.
For crunchers the name of the game is to spend every dime you can muster on the best performing / dollar GPU. If you start with that premise, then you select motherboards and CPUs (in that order, I might add, paying attention to "lanes" and stuff). If what I've read and experienced myself, RAM is only semi-important if everything else is in order first.
But the very last thing you care about is HDD performance. I'm not saying you don't care at all, I'm just saying it is of *least* impact.
Spending $10 on HDD is $10 you don't spend on GPU and other resources.
You were concerned about noise? Really? You've got ten or so CPU fans running and who knows how many GPUs with their fans cranked-up, and the power supplies and their fans, and you're worried about the whir of some HDD motors?
I understand the mounting concern. Since I'm not seeing your "shelf" I can't address that, but I'm thinking some plastic zip-ties would fix that, and they are cheap.
I don't have any PCIe socket storage, so I can't sing its praises or curse it, but I can say that my concern would be your concern. You only have so-many "lanes" available to the CPU via PCIe slots. Crunching Einstein, my gut tells me that using any PCIe resources you don't have-to is potentially bad juju.
My real two-cents-worth here is the advise to think long and hard about spending one dollar on anything that does not increase crunching-ability.
Now how did I know you would react like that, tbret? As usual you cut right to the chase and give good solid well thought out opinions and information.
Considering out former debates about heat dissipation, that is definitely on my mind, and leads into the main problem. Noise. The microphones on the other side of the wall in the studio are not your $25 Radio Shack specials, so anything that raises the ambient noise level IS a concern, even a spinning hard drive. Noise is cumulative so all sources have to be considered.
Since my last post on this thread I've had time to surf around and take a look at some SSD drives. I had no idea they were consuming that much LESS power. Less power = less air I have to move. In keeping with your comment on fans, this kills 2 birds with one stone. Less mechanical noise and, more importantly, less air movement noise. Obviously this level of concern about noise is well beyond what the normal user is going to have.
But, we're kinda getting off-thread here. I'll try and post a picture in another thread of the rack setup when that room looks less like a war zone. Gets messy when you start to rebuild your setup.
Concerning PCIe lanes and bandwidth. I agree with your comment and share the same concerns. Hence this thread asking if anyone had any thoughts or experience with PCIe SSDs. My largest GPUs, Nvidia 750 and 760, are not even using half of the available bandwidth running 2 tasks each with each card set to "High Performance". This may change with more modern mobos and cpus.
Lots more research to be done before I jump on the SSD bandwagon.
I believe you recently deployed a Pi. If this is true you might want to consider loading the Pi OS (which ever one your using) on to an external USB drive and keeping the "/boot" partition on the card. I have read where data integrity becomes an issue with constant reads and writes on those cards. I did it on my Pi setup and it was quite painless. Here is how. The boot partition will also get written when kernel upgrades are done but when adding/deleting apps it will not be effected.
Thanks for the tip, robl. I had not thought of that for the pi. I don't plan on really using it long term for crunching, but that's nice to know if a problem crops up. For now crunching is basically something for the pi to do while I build the TNC (terminal node controller) module for controlling ham radio rigs.
Now how did I know you would react like that, tbret? As usual you cut right to the chase and give good solid well thought out opinions and information.
Considering out former debates about heat dissipation, that is definitely on my mind, and leads into the main problem. Noise. The microphones on the other side of the wall in the studio are not your $25 Radio Shack specials, so anything that raises the ambient noise level IS a concern, even a spinning hard drive. Noise is cumulative so all sources have to be considered.
Phil
If noise is that much of a problem did you consider building a double wall between the rooms? A double wall only takes the width of a 2X4 with some insulation in it and some drywall on it, with an air gap between it and the original wall, so about 6 inches. As you know sound does not travel in a vacuum, so building a second wall will essentially provide a dead air space between the two walls and little to no sound will travel between the rooms.
I have even seen people hang rugs from the ceiling to prevent sound transmitting from one room to another, ie shared walls in homes. The air gap is the key, NOTHING must touch one wall to the other to make it work the best.
If noise is that much of a problem did you consider building a double wall between the rooms? A double wall only takes the width of a 2X4 with some insulation in it and some drywall on it, with an air gap between it and the original wall, so about 6 inches. As you know sound does not travel in a vacuum, so building a second wall will essentially provide a dead air space between the two walls and little to no sound will travel between the rooms.
I have even seen people hang rugs from the ceiling to prevent sound transmitting from one room to another, ie shared walls in homes. The air gap is the key, NOTHING must touch one wall to the other to make it work the best.
I'm about a year away from building a "proper" studio. Until then I have to make do with what I have. I have an acoustics engineer down in Indianapolis designing it for me. If I had not been off work for the last few months we would have broken ground this fall. It will have double walls and ceiling, both about a foot thick.
I'm thinking of trying out a SATA SSD. I found some under $50 that are large enough for crunching without wasting capacity. I figure for that price if it won't work out then I didn't break the bank, and it keeps it off the PCI bus. Prices are falling which is a good thing.
I switched to SSD storage for my crunching systems quite a while back. I went with the older Intel X25-E SLC 64GB SSDs that I found on E-bay for a good price. To date, the SSDs are running very well. My main reason for switching was due to heat generated by hard drives. Since I prefer to run my systems open air, I had to direct small fans towards the hard drives. Heat has not been an issue with the SSDs.
I'm thinking of trying out a SATA SSD. I found some under $50 that are large enough for crunching without wasting capacity. I figure for that price if it won't work out then I didn't break the bank, and it keeps it off the PCI bus. Prices are falling which is a good thing.
If you are running Windows, the size used by the OS keeps increasing over time, even if you are just doing the monthly updates without installing additional software (it is the WinSXS folder). I just replaced a 40 GB Intel drive that was giving warnings about not enough capacity with the above-noted 120 GB Kingston drive for that reason, after about 4 years of not particularly heavy use (Win7 64-bit). Also, it does not hurt to over-provision the drive to maintain high performance over time. I use a 95 GB partition, and leave the remaining 25 GB unpartitioned, after first doing a secure erase using Parted Magic to wipe the drive completely clean (even new ones may have a few test areas written).
That is a bit of overkill, and a 60 GB drive will be perfectly fine for crunching (I use a couple of them too), but the space on a larger than necessary drive is not entirely wasted.
Interesting point Jim. You are right though. I think I'll go a bit larger, even though I'm running Linux. The price difference is not that much. These are dedicated crunchers, so every little bit helps.
About half my "mini-farm" is offline right now while I strip stuff out of cases and go open air. I have the first one in the rack and fired up. No fans except PS, GPU, CPU. It cooled off about 7 degrees C.
Jeroen, are you running SATA or PCI for your drives? And after looking at specs I don't see how one could even come close to overheating as little power as they use. Also, I'm really leaning towards the Intel drives.
Jeroen, are you running SATA or PCI for your drives? And after looking at specs I don't see how one could even come close to overheating as little power as they use. Also, I'm really leaning towards the Intel drives.
I am running SATA drives currently. The Intel drives have been reliable for me and put out very little heat. Prior to the Intel X25-E SSD, I ran an Intel 520 SSD which was also reliable.
RE: Curious because I'm
)
This advice may be worth no more than it costs.
For crunchers the name of the game is to spend every dime you can muster on the best performing / dollar GPU. If you start with that premise, then you select motherboards and CPUs (in that order, I might add, paying attention to "lanes" and stuff). If what I've read and experienced myself, RAM is only semi-important if everything else is in order first.
But the very last thing you care about is HDD performance. I'm not saying you don't care at all, I'm just saying it is of *least* impact.
Spending $10 on HDD is $10 you don't spend on GPU and other resources.
You were concerned about noise? Really? You've got ten or so CPU fans running and who knows how many GPUs with their fans cranked-up, and the power supplies and their fans, and you're worried about the whir of some HDD motors?
I understand the mounting concern. Since I'm not seeing your "shelf" I can't address that, but I'm thinking some plastic zip-ties would fix that, and they are cheap.
I don't have any PCIe socket storage, so I can't sing its praises or curse it, but I can say that my concern would be your concern. You only have so-many "lanes" available to the CPU via PCIe slots. Crunching Einstein, my gut tells me that using any PCIe resources you don't have-to is potentially bad juju.
My real two-cents-worth here is the advise to think long and hard about spending one dollar on anything that does not increase crunching-ability.
Now how did I know you would
)
Now how did I know you would react like that, tbret? As usual you cut right to the chase and give good solid well thought out opinions and information.
Considering out former debates about heat dissipation, that is definitely on my mind, and leads into the main problem. Noise. The microphones on the other side of the wall in the studio are not your $25 Radio Shack specials, so anything that raises the ambient noise level IS a concern, even a spinning hard drive. Noise is cumulative so all sources have to be considered.
Since my last post on this thread I've had time to surf around and take a look at some SSD drives. I had no idea they were consuming that much LESS power. Less power = less air I have to move. In keeping with your comment on fans, this kills 2 birds with one stone. Less mechanical noise and, more importantly, less air movement noise. Obviously this level of concern about noise is well beyond what the normal user is going to have.
But, we're kinda getting off-thread here. I'll try and post a picture in another thread of the rack setup when that room looks less like a war zone. Gets messy when you start to rebuild your setup.
Concerning PCIe lanes and bandwidth. I agree with your comment and share the same concerns. Hence this thread asking if anyone had any thoughts or experience with PCIe SSDs. My largest GPUs, Nvidia 750 and 760, are not even using half of the available bandwidth running 2 tasks each with each card set to "High Performance". This may change with more modern mobos and cpus.
Lots more research to be done before I jump on the SSD bandwagon.
Phil
RE: I believe you recently
)
Thanks for the tip, robl. I had not thought of that for the pi. I don't plan on really using it long term for crunching, but that's nice to know if a problem crops up. For now crunching is basically something for the pi to do while I build the TNC (terminal node controller) module for controlling ham radio rigs.
Phil
RE: Now how did I know you
)
If noise is that much of a problem did you consider building a double wall between the rooms? A double wall only takes the width of a 2X4 with some insulation in it and some drywall on it, with an air gap between it and the original wall, so about 6 inches. As you know sound does not travel in a vacuum, so building a second wall will essentially provide a dead air space between the two walls and little to no sound will travel between the rooms.
I have even seen people hang rugs from the ceiling to prevent sound transmitting from one room to another, ie shared walls in homes. The air gap is the key, NOTHING must touch one wall to the other to make it work the best.
RE: If noise is that much
)
I'm about a year away from building a "proper" studio. Until then I have to make do with what I have. I have an acoustics engineer down in Indianapolis designing it for me. If I had not been off work for the last few months we would have broken ground this fall. It will have double walls and ceiling, both about a foot thick.
I'm thinking of trying out a SATA SSD. I found some under $50 that are large enough for crunching without wasting capacity. I figure for that price if it won't work out then I didn't break the bank, and it keeps it off the PCI bus. Prices are falling which is a good thing.
Phil
I switched to SSD storage for
)
I switched to SSD storage for my crunching systems quite a while back. I went with the older Intel X25-E SLC 64GB SSDs that I found on E-bay for a good price. To date, the SSDs are running very well. My main reason for switching was due to heat generated by hard drives. Since I prefer to run my systems open air, I had to direct small fans towards the hard drives. Heat has not been an issue with the SSDs.
Jeroen
RE: I'm thinking of trying
)
If you are running Windows, the size used by the OS keeps increasing over time, even if you are just doing the monthly updates without installing additional software (it is the WinSXS folder). I just replaced a 40 GB Intel drive that was giving warnings about not enough capacity with the above-noted 120 GB Kingston drive for that reason, after about 4 years of not particularly heavy use (Win7 64-bit). Also, it does not hurt to over-provision the drive to maintain high performance over time. I use a 95 GB partition, and leave the remaining 25 GB unpartitioned, after first doing a secure erase using Parted Magic to wipe the drive completely clean (even new ones may have a few test areas written).
That is a bit of overkill, and a 60 GB drive will be perfectly fine for crunching (I use a couple of them too), but the space on a larger than necessary drive is not entirely wasted.
Interesting point Jim. You
)
Interesting point Jim. You are right though. I think I'll go a bit larger, even though I'm running Linux. The price difference is not that much. These are dedicated crunchers, so every little bit helps.
About half my "mini-farm" is offline right now while I strip stuff out of cases and go open air. I have the first one in the rack and fired up. No fans except PS, GPU, CPU. It cooled off about 7 degrees C.
Jeroen, are you running SATA or PCI for your drives? And after looking at specs I don't see how one could even come close to overheating as little power as they use. Also, I'm really leaning towards the Intel drives.
Phil
RE: Jeroen, are you
)
I am running SATA drives currently. The Intel drives have been reliable for me and put out very little heat. Prior to the Intel X25-E SSD, I ran an Intel 520 SSD which was also reliable.
Jeroen
RE: It will have double
)
Are you putting-in active bass-traps? Geeez man. A foot?