PC Configuration with NAS drives

[tim_hodges]

My current PC is getting a little slow and so i am on the look out for a new PC.

I do not want a Mac at this stage.

 

I was about to order a more powerful PC running XP with

- a 3gb memory

- dual processor (or a quad processor)

- three disks

- 1 System disc say a 160gb

- 2 data discs mirrored approx 750gb each

 

My intensive applications are

- CS3

- Lightroom

plus MS Office/Outlook plus Skype and AVG Anti Virus

 

All of this could be in one large deskside box.

 

I have also been thinking about an alternative option.

My question is how much would my performance suffer if the 2 data discs were housed in a Network drive unit-

networked to the PC via cable?

It is the performance of CS3 or 4 I am concermed about as I would have to spread the Adobe cache to the two

Networked drives

 

The reason is that I could then buy a PC with a smaller footprint with just put my programs on one modest sized disc

and put all my data on the Networked attached storage.

 

Your views will be welcomed.

Please note that I do not want this to get into a Mac v PC scrap as I am not entertaining a Mac at this stage.

 

Regards

Tim

[rffffffff]

I have a similar setup to you: one system drive (velociraptor) and four 750gb internal data drives in a raid 10 configuration with a quad core 2.66mhz cpu and 8gb of ram.

 

the internal drives will do 100mb/sec. Across gigabit ethernet, I can access NAS drives at ~40mb/sec

 

So, in real terms, the internal drives are 2.5 times faster, which is enough to make me copy the entire folder of images to the local drives before I edit the images, even if it means copying them back later.

 

My theory on this is to keep the stuff that I am actually going to edit and use local, then use NAS (which just happens to be older computers in different offices) for the long term storage. Once the drives fill up, I may make dedicated NAS computers with lots of drives, but only for archives, not for active images.

 

hope that helps.

[rnt]

The NAS drive would be slower than an internal SATA drive. Having said that, most small-footprint

computers have space for more than one drive, so you could have a system drive and a second SATA

drive for your swap files. If you truly need an NAS system (usually used when you need to access files

from multiple computers on a local network) for storing image files you can have one without a big

performance hit.

[howard_m]

you might also want to get something like an eSATA disk array (maybe 2 or more disks) and simply install an eSATA

PCI card in the new PC chassis.

[mendel_leisk]

"The reason is that I could then buy a PC with a smaller footprint with just put my programs on one modest sized disc and put all my data on the Networked attached storage."

 

How much smaller a footprint? At what price in performance and hassle, and: you now have two footprints and extra wiring, networking. Also, II would forget about modesty size disc for c:, they're not cost effective. Why spend $20 less for a drive that's half the capacity. 500 gig is the current sweet spot, I think.

 

My suggestion, get a regular case, put 3 500's in, nothing fancy, just c: d: and e:.

[steven_clark]

In practice with gigabit ethernet there is probably very little slowdown from the network connection, drives are never as fast in long transfers as their interface speed. The XP defragmenter doesn't seem to do the best job of coming up with large block of contiguous freespace so on a 1-partition system I found that I could actually load ~50MB TIFFs faster over 100Mb ethernet from a linux box than from my local hard disk after a couple years of operation even after running a defragmenter. These days I run 5 partitions across 2 drives (really 3 or 4 would have been sufficient) so fragmentation spreading from the browser cache to infect the filesystem where my pictures are stored is a thing of the past. With that configuration the network speed was still good enough to be used for 1-off archive saves.

[frank_skomial]

Read also here about the other NAS, it is more popular on Photo.net:

 

http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00E7lt