Building new PC for editing

[Evildead666]

I'd definitely say single ssd for boot, and one more for apps/Video edits if needed.
With 32Gb of RAM a scratch drive wouldn't be needed, especially with the RAID system of HDD's.
If all the backups are done to the HDD's, then that's fine, but if Daily backups of whole systems is going to be done to SSD's, I'd test it for a while, but have weekly backups to HDD's as well.
SSD's should be able to take a lot of wear and tear, and the tests done so far are pretty good for endurance.

http://techreport.com/review/25681/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-testing-data-retention-at-300tb

Quad channel memory will be huge for a multiple core/Threaded machine.
Don't skip out on cooling either if you can, for the CPU at least, not one of the things that gets changed frequently.

Asus is a pretty safe bet in the quality area, and the chipsets have been thoroughly tested by now, so all the bugs have been worked out.

[Umfriend]

No one is suggesting backing up to SSD AFAIK. What does "and one more for apps/Video edits if needed." mean? When is that "needed"?

[Evildead666]

Sorry, I was under the impression that backups and video editing were envisaged.
One SSD for boot/Windows, and one for Applications or as a video editing drive, (completely contradicting the not needing a scratch drive bit in my previous post, I had thought it meant Readyboost or SSD caching.) so the SATA III interface wouldn't be a bottleneck in I/O per second or throughput.

[Umfriend]

Isn't SATA-III limited to 6Gb/s per interface (as opposed to per channel?). And even if you could get 1Gb/s out of two SSD Drives, concurrent I/O for system/windows/apps vs scratch will be very limited. I would advise SSDs in RAID 0 then.

Again, I'm staying at 1 SSD and some HDDs for the workstation (or server, really depends on the whole home network situation).

[Umfriend]

OK, I was wrong about bandwith per channel/interface. The rest still stands although even as RAID-0 SSDs can increase performance, it appears to be limited to some cases. Boot times are not reported to diminish (often even increase as the RAID Bios needs to be read). Small random I/O does not improve apparantly, large sequential I/O does.

[Jammrock]

OS and applications can be together (I have the separate due to small disks). Data separate has the benefit that you don't have to restore your data after restoring OS. Images are not too big when compressed with BZ2, but of course still several GBs.
But Jammrock's argument is perhaps more pressing for this configuration.

SQL is a beast to tune properly. You have to balance memory, disk and CPU usage just right or you starve the OS and performance stinks. Just glad I don't have to deal with it anymore

[TransformX]

I would go for SSHD as the main storage:

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/barracuda-fam/desktop-sshd/en-us/docs/desktop-sshd-data-sheet-ds1788-2-1308us.pdf

[Umfriend]

If you're on a budget, sure, that might make sense. The initial config posted suggest the budget is not that constraining and in that case I would suggest going for a single SSD for OS/Apps/Data in the works. An SSHD may boot fast perhaps but I don't see it delivering anything near the perfomance of a SSD during use. The SSD part of the SSHD is just a large not so fast (for cache anyway) cache AFAIK and you'll have loads of misses during use.

[TransformX]

I meant for storage, not for boot and applications.
Instead of SSD + n HDDs go for SSD + n SSHDs

[Umfriend]

Ahhhh, I c (and should have understood). Why? What's the probability that that 8GB of SSD/Cache will have what you need from a 1/2/3/4TB drive?