Best Hard Drive Setup for Solid Edge 1

[gjacc]

I'm ordering a new workstation for SE + Internet, etc. with a price limit of $3000. Research has led me to the Dell T5400 with following setup:
Quad Core Xeon E5405 (2.00GHz)
4GB (4 DIMMS)
nVidia Quadro FX1700
no monitor, no mouse, ...

Dell Storage options I'm considering now:
1)two 73GB SAS 15k RAID 0
2)two 160GB SATA 10k RAID 0
3)300GB SAS 15k

My question is what is the ideal hard drive configuration?
SAS vs. SATA ?
RAID 0 vs. 2 Hard Drive's (1 Page File drive)?

I will need at least 70GB of space and it seems from past SE experience (since v5) that hard drive throughput is the performance bottleneck.

Thanks!
Greg

 

[swertel]

Save yourself quite a bit of money.

Go with the T3400. The XEON processor doesn't buy you anything in a workstation. Servers, that's another story, but the Core2Duo is much better bang-for-the-buck in workstations. And the quad-core doesn't buy you anything that a dual-core doesn't get you, yet. How long do you plan on keeping this computer?

I just priced a T3400 with an Intel Core2Duo E6850 (3.0GHz), all else being the same, for $400 less. That included the 80G SATA 10K RPM hard drive. I would save even more money by only buying 2Gb of memory (2 DIMM) and then buying the second gig through new egg. Same goes for the second hard drive. You want the higher clock speed per core because most of SE is still single threaded, although advances are being made with each release.

SAS hard drives aren't "workstation" grade, they are server grade. I've heard, but not seen specific numbers, of workstations not gaining a noticible increase in performance with SAS. The numbers show SAS is better, but those are server comparisons for what I've seen.

The same goes for Raid. You won't see performance in a RAID workstation FOR SOLIDEDGE USE over a well configured two HD system until you start getting into the 6 or 8 harddrive RAID configuration with striping and parity.

1st HD is OS and applications. 2nd is page file and data. Splitting up the hard drives to separate the OS from apps and page file from data also helps. Defrag often.

--Scott

http://wertel.eng.pro

 

[gjacc]

Thanks for the feedback Scott.

On the CPU: Reason #1 is I also use this workstation for ANSYS (forgot to mention this)
Reason #2 is that Xeon is the Solid Edge "recommended" processor:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.c.../solidedge/overview/system_requirements.shtml

I'm also going with Win XP Pro (required by IT people) and planning to keep this system for 1-3 years.

I thought SAS would be more reliable longer term but maybe for workstation use this is overkill?

Can 4GB be used by Win XP?

I am confused with the OS, apps, pagefile, data files recommendation- Which are best kept on separate hard drives?
Thanks,
Greg

 

[swertel]

ANSYS = quad core. Most definitely!

The problem with SAS drives in a workstation is that your mobo is set up for a desktop machine, not a server. The hard drives themselves are great, but every other component in your workstation is workstation class and therefore the SAS don't perform as well in workstations as they do in servers. If you run any computer clusters for ANSYS solve blocks, then the SAS may be beneficial, but your workstation better have dual NICS and the motherboard that can handle the data transfer.

OS separate from page file, that's the most important.
Apps can be with the OS.
Data can be with the page file, but as you write your outputs - like when the solve block goes out of core - you are probably also paging to disc. Data likes to be on a drive all its own. Usually that's a network drive, unless you are solving stiffness matrices. Then all you can do besides buy a 3rd HD is to pair it up with the page file.

--Scott

http://wertel.eng.pro

 

[beachcomber]

"And the quad-core doesn't buy you anything that a dual-core doesn't get you"

- WHEN UPDATING VERY LARGE DRAWINGS EDGE WILL USE ALL 4 CORES.
I see it regularly where the CPU is hitting 100%.

bc

 

[kjoiner]

Hello,

I started looking at the T3400 recently and it looks like a better price than the 390. What video card are you looking at for the T3400? Thanks.

Kyle

 

[gjacc]

I ended up getting the following Dell T5400 for under $3k:
WinXP x64 Edition
Quad Xeon 2.0GHz
4GB Ram (4 dimms)
nVidia Quadro FX1700
2-160GB SATA 10k hard drives

Thanks for all the feedback!
Greg

 

[swertel]

Consider partitioning your hard drives.

After you install windows, load partition magic, or some other appliction, and create a partition that is the size of the windows install plus a little room updates. You applications are then installed on the same hard drive, but the second partition.

Same for the second hard drive. Set your page file size to the same max and min limits, and then partition the hard drive to be just a bit larger than that. The remainder of the hard drive can be used for data.

By partitioning your hard drives, you limit the movement and scanning of the drive to find your data, thus should improve your I/O.

--Scott

http://wertel.eng.pro