RAID and Mastercam

[Müřlıń®]

I Put a new motherboard in my workstation.

It is a Dragon2.

 

I said what the heck and got another HDD.

I cant really tell it if makes my files open up faster or not.

 

How does Raid help with Mastercam? Or will it?

 

 

Murlin

[cadcam]

What type of raid are you running 0 or 1 and are these IDE?

[Müřlıń®]

When I look at the array type it says raid1.

using 2 80 gig maxtor ATA133 IDE.

 

HT shows up as 2 CPU's in XP

 

I hope Mastercam will get optimized for HT some day

 

Murlin

 

[ 12-21-2003, 05:22 PM: Message edited by: Murlin ]

[Rick Damiani]

RAID 1 is mirroring. The second drive is a copy of the first drive. RAID 1 provides good data protection, but consumes half of your installed drive space. Read performance can go up a bit (depedning on the quality of the implementation), but write performance suffers. RAID 0 (striping without paraty) can provide a real boost in performance (depending on the implementation), but makes the whole drive subsystem less reliable.

 

Personally, I'd not bother with RAID on a CAD/CAM workstation. It adds complicaiton without providing any tangible benifit. CAD/CAM applicaitions are computationally intensive, but are not big users of disk I/O. i.e. they are computaitonally bound, not I/O bound. Bigger returns on your dollar would be found in a faster CPU or more RAM.

[Müřlıń®]

Thanks Rick.

 

I wasnt sure if that would help Mastercam work better or not. Guess it might help speed up some of the other things I do with this PC.

I figured it was worth the 70 extra bucks for the other HDD since this board has raid.

 

Murlin

[cadcam]

Have you loaded mastercam on it and used it.

There has been alot comments made about using IDE and not SCSI raid.

 

SO far as tested the IDE raid does not get along with Mastercam,Were I know that SCSI raid does.

 

I have done these with SCSI raid 5 for a while.

[Chris Rizzo]

Hey Mulin,

I was thinking of the same thing last year... here's that thread.

[Rick Damiani]

Motherboard-based IDE RAID implementations are generally steaming piles of poo - to use a technical term. No cacheing means you are using the disjointed caches on the hard drives themselvs. No dedicated I/O coprocessor or I/O bus means that the CPU has to do all the RAID management, and all the intra-RAID traffic has to move hither and yon over the PCI bus. The best you can hope for under such conditions is a small loss in performance.

 

To do RAID right, either IDE or SCSI, you need an add-on RAID card that will implement the RAID level you have chosen in it's own dedicated hardware. FWIW, starting this year I'm specing serial ATA RAID for new servers/NLE/video capture systems using Adaptec's serial ATA RAID boards. Not as many channels as SCSI offers, but the servers I build rarely have more than 5 spindles anyway.

[Zero]

How's the Dragon2 running...do you like it? I've decided to take the plunge and build my own comp. I just got a p4 2.8 w/ 800 fsb and I'm shopping around for a mobo. I was looking at the asus p4p800 deluxe...looks like a nice board.

[Müřlıń®]

quote:

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Have you loaded mastercam on it and used it.

---

Yes it works good with both 9.0 and 9.1.

 

Rick I was mistaken about using Raid1.

My brother set it up as raid 0 and named the drive raid1. lol.

 

quote:

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How's the Dragon2 running

---

Super nice.

 

I have built a 3.0 GHz HT 800 FSB 1 GIG PC 3200

 

PNY vertigo 256 8xAGP with strife Raid.

 

Rick... the Dragon2 boared has a HIGHpoint raid controller chip built into the board.

 

This in not a dedicated CAD/CAM workstation, so I am trying to get the best of all worlds.

 

Runs internet games great with the new gigabit pro 1000 LAN.

 

Large solid files render very quickly on the new video card

 

I crunched a surface rough pocket on a large solid file, and it only took a couple minutes. VS the 10 min it took before.

 

 

cmr.....I did a search for raid and came up with tons of posts. I read most of them, but didnt find your post.....should have kept reading...heh

 

 

Murlin

 

[ 12-22-2003, 10:55 AM: Message edited by: Murlin ]

[Reece L Gibson]

I have been using raid for the last three years and it works great for me. It helped speed my applications up whether it is Mastercam or Inventor,like loading a 15 or 20 meg file is where I have seen it help.I noticed a difference. It depends if it is onboard or a add on card also.Results may vary.

[Müřlıń®]

So wonder how much performance loss I am getting with the onboard raid?

 

Seems like if it had its own chip on the board, it wouldnt be so CPU intensive....

 

Moving around in windows XP is VERY fast now.

That's the biggest diffrence I have found.

 

Large solid files open up rather quickly, but since I upgraded everything, I have no basis for comparison and cant tell what made the diffrence....LOL

 

 

Murlin

[gcode]

My company jsut ordered me a new Dell workstation

3.2g P4/800mhz FSB

1G 400mhz Ram

Quadro FX1000 video card

36g SCSI HD

 

I told the IT guy I'd rather have anothe gig

of ram and a regular IDE hard drive, but he didn't do it. He said we'd get the SCSI HD now

and add some more Ram later.

I'll report back when I get the new machine up and running.

[Rick Damiani]

Looking at the specs for the Dragon 2 board, I see that it has a seperate RAID controller and supports serial ATA RAID, so my comments about CPU performance don't seem to apply to this board. That Windows is noticeably snappier is a common consiquence of such arrangements. Any time you off-load disk I/O to a dedicated controller you gain a lot in system responciveness - that's why I still like SCSI for high-end workstations.

 

A note of caution here though: RAID 0 is less reliable than any other RAID configuration, as the loss of any drive will trash all the data. Being a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, I only use it for scratch/capture drives where the data won't stay long. On a home/game system that will get upgraded often and lives in a climate-controlled environment, this is not a *huge* concern.

 

Looks like a killer MoBo though. Every possible bell and whistle. A bit spendy, perhaps, but the best often is.

[Zero]

Yeah I was just looking at that Dragon2 as well...very nice. Looks like it offers the exact same stuff the Asus p4p800 deluxe does besides a different intel chipset..... I wonder which is better the nothwood/southwood set or the Canterwood set...anyone?

 

. I probably wont be running the EIDE RAID at my house...but hey you never know, I might end up screwing around with it.

[gcode]

I just checked on the HD specs on my new computer

Its 38g 15K rpm

The controller is a SCSI non-Raid.

Any feedback from the experts here would be welcome.

I know nothing about Raid, SCSI etc

 

Thanks

[Zero]

SCSI is nice...I guess. I haven't seen a big boost in performance by running scsi machines...which we've always had here until now with our new dell (which is EIDE). To me, I don't see the justification of spending all that extra dough for the scsi drives. One thing I can tell you is NEVER MIX SCSI AND EIDE DRIVES (if your scsi controller is on the mobo) or you're in for a nightmare of a time keeping it running good.

 

[ 12-22-2003, 01:31 PM: Message edited by: Zero ]

[Müřlıń®]

Thanks Rick....I'll prol change it to raid 1 because I don't need all that storage.

 

But I do want the best reliable data storage so mirror sounds good to me.

 

 

Murlin

[Rick Damiani]

SCSI is nice in a workstation becaue it off-loads disk processing to the SCSI controller. An IDE system will pause momentaraly when accessing the disk. SCSI-based systems don't, and that makes them feel much more responsive. The only downside I have noticed is the cost.

 

quote:

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One thing I can tell you is NEVER MIX SCSI AND EIDE DRIVES (if your scsi controller is on the mobo) or you're in for a nightmare of a time keeping it running good.

---

I have done this on a couple of occasions. Don't necessaraly reccomend it, but it dosn't cause insumountable problems, either.

[gcode]

I'm looking forward to running some time trials.

The project I'm working on now is a big solid,

72in long and 21in diameter.

My current machine is dying on this job.

It will be interesting to see how the new Dell

handles this big solid.

[Müřlıń®]

quote:

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I just checked on the HD specs on my new computer

Its 38g 15K rpm

---

Wow, 15k rpm.....

 

I never use a SCSI before because they were so expensive. But I heard they were the best....

 

Yeah Gcode, I know what you mean on working on an underpowered Workstation. I have been doing it for years.

 

I'm anxious to actually do some work with my new hot rod

 

That is, when I actually get some

 

quote:

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I probably wont be running the EIDE RAID at my house...but hey you never know, I might end up screwing around with it.

---

Well I can tell you this, since I have XP and it uses all those thumbnails and stuff, my machine zips thru those files very quickly.

Use to it would take forever for all those thumbs to generate.

 

I can open up a 50 MB solid file in about 1/4 the time it took me to on my other board.

I did upgrad CPU's also, but it was only from a 2.6 to a 3.0 so I would say that there is a chance that RAID is contributing somewhat in a boost in Mastercam's file handling performance.

 

Murlin

 

[ 12-23-2003, 09:41 AM: Message edited by: Murlin ]