I had to sell TWO of my servers to get this thing and im just breaking even. One of which had a 2.0TB drive plus 4GB Ram and an assortment of other things. I realized that with the current cost of dvd storage having 2.0TB of space to store my media is worthless. and as for raid, ive actually found that my raid array is very slightly slower then a single drive when doing video encodes. I am however contimplating running everything on ramdisc's if I can for this encode to see if that will speed it up being that its the new FB stuff and all that jazz.
I'm not an avisynth man...nothing wrong with it I just never got into it. I've been using freebsd to do all my encoding and trying to run avisynth under wine is a headache I've thus far avoided. I'll be running x264 that im custom compiling with gcc 4.3 using core2/ssse3 optimization plus the ssse3 optimizations that x264 now has. I have a working mingw/msys that has 4.3 running and can successfully compile x264 with core2/ssse3 so I'm hoping that will be blistering fast. I'll use gcc 4.3 in bsd also to make some very fast versions of everything as well (saddly mplayer/mencoder/ffmpeg refuses to work with gcc4.3 & core2 but i can at least use prescott/ssse3 for that part of it.
As for content...lets just say I have some VERY high quality 720p and 1080p source to use...thats first up on my list after i do some benchmarks and run that megui benchmark in this forum since some of those guys helped me out on designing this bad boy.
I'm trying to figure out which version of freebsd 6.2 to use. the options are i386 & ia-64. problem is i believe ia-64 is for itanium/itanium2 and not for what im running. in fact i dont believe that ia-64 will even work with my setup. I'll figure it out at some point once im home this weekend before the cpu's all come in. Its going to probably take a week or more to get this thing running at peak and to get everything all compiled where its close to how fast it can be, and then a good 2-3 months to get it perfect. The whole system is going to be in a constant state of flux...and then once i get it exactly how i want it, back it all up, format it to get any misc stuff leftover from the testing process that could be causing a slight slowdown, and loading it all 100% perfectly knowing its best setup.
My big problem tonight is power supply...i gotta buy a 2U EPS12V power supply tonight so that it ships out for this thing to use asap. It also has to be a front mount supply that has the cord running to the back like the one thats in there now. I'd really enjoy a modular powersupply where i can add the wires i want (my buddy got this guy a few months ago and said it was sweet
http://www.xoxide.com/ultra-x-connect2-uvblue.html ...i want something similar in idea, althoguh i can deal with less blue lights). recommendations are welcome and encouraged!