The Need for Speed

[Dans_D60]

Hello all. We do a lot of weddings and with 1,500-2,500 images per wedding, that’s a bunch of post processing. Our workflow is not for everyone. But we have decided that no image will leave our studio without post processing. So the 300-400 images that will wind up in the bride’s first edition magazine book (AKA proof book) and website - sucks a lot of time between RAW conversions (all our images are RAW) and filters and airbrush and shadow enhancements and etc … so we wanted a workstation dedicated to post processing. No emails, or other programs, just speed.

Looked at all the usual suspects: Dell, gateway, HP, and even Apple (yes we do own Apple MACs in the studio). After reviewing all the systems, we decided to basically build our own. Here is what we did:

- ASUS P5B-DELUXE motherboard
- Coolmaster enclosure with 600 Watt PS
- Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor overclocked
- 4 Gig DDR2- 800 main memory
- 2 GeForce 7900 Display Adaptors
- 2 twenty-one inch Dell LCD displays
- Internal 500G RAID 1 (2 x 500G) SATA II for application software (Photoshop etc)
- Internal 500G 10,000 RPM RAID 0 (2 x250) SATA II for high speed cache (Photoshop cache). No software.
- 2 Terabytes of RAID 1 SATA disk storage boxes for image storage and retrieval (this was transferred from the previous Dell)
- All the other stuff like DVD player, keyboard, Wacom Tablet, Mouse, etc.

Zoom Zoom … it really smokes!

A little nervous about building it on my own and of course I will be responsible for any warranty issues. Normally we buy from Dell and Apple. But was able to build exactly what we needed (Dell could not provide the dual internal RAID 1 and RAID 0 configuration and many other “photo” dedicated stuff) and saved a little in doing so. The build was pretty easy. Took only three hours from boxes on the floor to a fully running system.

It is fast! The new Intel Core 2 processors live up to the hype. Cold boot of XP Pro to screen ready in 12 seconds. Loads Photoshop CS2 with all the custom plug-ins in under 5 seconds. 1Ds MK II Raw conversion in 1 second.

Been up and running for about a month. Has condensed our average wedding post processing from 12-14 hours to 4-6 hours. Even have time to sit by the pool!

Let me know if you want the details. This is a digital photographer’s dream machine.

….Dan http://www.danpettusphoto.com

[Brian Puccio]

Did you check to see if the marginal increase in disk I/O was worth it for SCSI or did you skip over SCSI simply from a budgetary point of view?

[tim]

Holy crap, how much did that cost?!

[Dans_D60]

Did you check to see if the marginal increase in disk I/O was worth it for SCSI or did you skip over SCSI simply from a budgetary point of view?

SCSI was considered but the cost was to much. The new SATA II are rated at 3G second and the 10,000 RPM drives are on par with SCSI drives....

Dan http://www.danpettusphoto.com

[Dans_D60]

Holy crap, how much did that cost?!

Minus the LCD displays and the external RAID 1 disk arrays (moved over from the previous DELL), the investment in the rest of the systems was just shy of $4,000 U.S that includes some software that we did not port like XP Pro and a few others. Photoshop was license ported to the new monster box….

…Dan http:www.danpettusphoto.com

[EOS_JD]

Does Photoshop take advantage of the extra RAM? i thought anymore than 2Gb could actually slow the system down?

[In2Photos]

....THUD...

Sorry had to pick my jaw back up. That is one hell of a machine.

[Jim G]

Good god. I want one.

12 seconds bootup? I dread to think of what mine is and I just reformatted so there's not even much on it to slow it down...

Nice job building a dream machine :)

[matthewlrigdon]

Do the hard drives you picked out use the new tech that Intel's been pushing, where you use Flash memory in the drive to improve boot up?

[Dans_D60]

Answer a few of the above questions:

Photoshop will take advantage of the extra RAM of you set the “boot.ini” with the “/3G” option switch. Photoshop is one of the few applications that will make use of ram above the 2G limit. What’s more impressive is how to segment the disk arrays. Loading Photoshop (or other apps) from the RAID 1 and use the high-speed 10K Rapture RAID 0 disks exclusively for cache is a significant performance improvement.

Fast boot time is related to 1) super fast computer and memory, and 2) I don’t have anything load as part of the boot process. No office, no email, no word, no spy-ware, no virus protection, and so on. The computer is protected on the internal net through firewalls and NAT. Access to external sites, email, website administration and so on is done on another computer with all the virus and spy protection stuff.

My problem now is I can't fit everyting in the post processing office! More computers = more space

http://www.danpettusphoto.com/postprocessing.jpg

…Dan

[Baadil]

Looks like a great setup. :-)
Would you mind sharing some more details on the external array?

Thanks.

[matthewlrigdon]

I be curious to hear what Services you were able to safely kill in Windows. There's quite a few that are only needed in server situations, so a good number can be deactivated.

[Dans_D60]

Looks like a great setup. :-)
Would you mind sharing some more details on the external array?

Thanks.

Link to Accordance site below where I purchase these external disk RAID boxes. You need to install your own drives. I purchase 500G SATA II pairs from the local CompUSA. Pricing from Newegg may be a bit less expensive

http://www.accordancesystems.com/
http://www.newegg.com/

[Dans_D60]

I be curious to hear what Services you were able to safely kill in Windows. There's quite a few that are only needed in server situations, so a good number can be deactivated.

For the most part I just left XP Pro alone as I selected the minimum configuration when I did the original installation. XP Pro SP2 does a pretty good job of not installing things you don’t need for desktop use like Web Services and FTP. I “may” need to expand a bit if we decide to do more on this fast machine besides photo post processing. Several of the other applications require extra XP services including the .NET install that right now is not installed.

We have six XP Pro and three OS-X machines. I like the Apple OS-X for client previews using the built-in applications like i-Photo.

We even purchased a MAC Mini and directly tethered it to our 50 inch plasma screen for our Custom Portraiture client sessions. Works great and we can show a much closer version of the image to actual size and color depth.

That said we have found the XP-Pro machines are much faster with bulky applications like Photoshop. Over the past few years these boxes have come so close in user interface and performance it’s now a toss up especially that Apple has gone Intel house-wide.

…Dan http://www.danpettusphoto.com

[Baadil]

Thank you Dan for the info. I am curious though, did you get any performance advantage by selecting external mirror raid rather than simply getting a nice internal SATA raid card?

[Dans_D60]

Thank you Dan for the info. I am curious though, did you get any performance advantage by selecting external mirror raid rather than simply getting a nice internal SATA raid card?

No performance advantage from the external RAID storage. The ASUS motherboard actually has two RAID controllers with seven channels of SATA available. Don’t really need super fast access as these external devices are used to store images and not used during the processing phase. Once the image is read into memory, all caching and other storage is performed with the internal arrays. The other reason for external systems is in case a failure of the main computer system I can simply attach the external boxes to a backup computer and be back online in minutes. Not as fast but won’t stop production.

Dan … http://www.danpettusphoto.com