Various Apps, need best speed

looks like allot of that stuff is overkill and will not noticeably make your render times faster.

Instead of all that ram and SSD drives get a faster clocked CPU or just wait a bit for the nehalem chips.

 

SSD is not going to be fast when you put it up against a RAID 0+1 setup. I would buy 4 drives and Strip drives 1-2, and mirror drives 3-4. The money you save can buy a Internal scratch disk, or a External one.

RAIDS are fast, Reliable and offer solid back-ups, which can repair a broken set quickly. If the need comes up. I have been running them for years, and only had one fault. One drive failed, I took out the old one, put the new one in. rebuilt the mirror all in about 40mins.

 

Not really that much difference, but 32gigs of ram is still a pretty high price too and it won't make any difference on rendering speed.

You might be better off seting up a render farm using Qmaster with Shake or Maya that you can use your other macs and pc's to crunch.

I would also get the 3870 instead of the 8800gt.

 

Render times are not really effected by drive speeds or a whole bunch of ram.

It's how fast your CPU can crunch the data.

A normal hard drive and a nice amount of ram say 4-10gb will be pretty much the same speed as crazy raid setups and 32gigs of ram.

There are advantages to extra ram and faster drives, but not really when it comes to rendering.

I have my mac pro running Compressor and 2 instances of Handbrake at the same time and using almost using 100% of my 8-core CPU power but I still have 5gigs unused out of the 8gigs of ram I have installed.

You could look into hardware powered render accelerator cards maybe if you know what type of format your using.

 

You're ridiculous. You're comparing one drive versus a RAID setup? Regardless, I would set 4x X25-M's in whatever RAID combo you want against 4x 15k Cheetah's in the same configuration any day. SSD is superior period(.) Here's a link to an absurd example http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/13/battleship-mtron-the-absurdly-fast-ssd-raid-array/

I think that your render times are dependent largely on the processors. Wait for the new Mac Pros to get your best performance boost. SSD's are nice for OS/App drives as the random access time is usually .1 millisecond and sequential read is insane (typically around 200 Mbs/sec). I think that for your application though it's just not there yet. I'm sure you're aware of the MLC vs SLC semantics, however you mention in your post that you're looking at a 250Gig SSD. That capacity means MLC and it also means it's a non intel drive. SSD's are so new that I really caution people against buying a re-branded second rate drive. Intel at the moment has the only drive controller that can get decent write performance (Samsung has only posted FUD as of this post), and they only make drives with 160Gig capacity ATM. If you go SSD (as I did, and I recommend it) don't skimp. At this point you're an early adopter and you're paying the premium.

 

I'd go RAID 1+0 before I would go RAID 0+1....

S-

 

Just get the standard config Nehalem setup when it comes out.

Get like 8-16 gigs of ram.

And a extra hard drive.

Just wait and use your imac till Nehalem comes out.

It can't be to long now.