New Transcoding Rig

[Robmoo]

I have a second PC that I use for transcoding videos when the DW or DD aren't using it. It has a Core i7 920 oc'd to 3ghz, 3GB memory, and an AMD 5870. I use MeGui to transcode because it works well and is what I know. I can usual transcode a HD video it 3-6 hours. I'm thinking about building a new transcoding rig using the LGA2 2011 socket:

Asus P9X79 PRO
Core i7 3930K
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB
Corsair Vengance 4GB x4
Hitache 1TB 7200rpm HD

I'll use my current case, psu, and video card. I'd like to set up the SSD and HD for Asus's SSD caching.

Has anyone tried something similar yet? I haven't tried GPU transcoding yet.

What do you think?

[hello_hello]

I don't know anything about SSD caching but I'd still be very tempted to run two hard drives as a single RAID-0 volume (about twice the speed of a single hard drive). I actually have four drives in my PC running as 2 RAID-0 volumes and when I've got to use a PC with a single hard drive many tasks feel like watching paint dry no matter how fast the CPU.

The faster CPUs get the more a single hard drive becomes a bottleneck. I'm not saying a single hard drive wouldn't be able to keep up with the reading and writing required for a 3-6 hour encode but I couldn't go back to using a PC with a single hard drive. Just a thought....

[Ghitulescu]

Simple: why?

[Groucho2004]

The 3930K is currently an excellent option for x264 encoding, it's even faster than the 990x and half the price.

Have a look here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-3960x-3930k_10.html
towards the bottom of the page.

There is a lot of BS floating around about the importance of hard drive speed for encoding tasks. Let me give you a little example:
Let's say you want shrink a 35 G Blu ray down to 22 G with x264 to fit on a single layer BD-R. If you have a fast processor, this can be done in 2 hours, depending on the settings.
Writing 22 G in 2 hours means an average rate of 3.13 MB/second. Hard drives nowadays, even cheap ones, can easily write @ 80 MB/second. Even if you consider reading from the same drive at the same time it can easily cope with this. Also, Windows handles the caching of reading and writing and therefore optimizes hard drive access.

Hard drive speed will become an issue if you have to feed the encoder raw video where the size is in the terabyte region. In these cases, a separate, fast raid0 for the source certainly makes sense.

[Robmoo]

Why? So I don't have to take the wife's/daughter's PC out of service for as long when I transcode videos and because it can be done. Whether or not it is a good use of $1300 I'm still debating. That's a good piece of over time work.

Looks like the 3930K is about 1.5 times faster than the 2700k at 2nd pass encoding and probably 2x faster than my current rig.

The new series of LGA 1155 processors are all supposed to be quad core. I'm thinking the 3930k will run faster at encoding video, but Ivy Bridge will likely have as good or better gaming performance at a lower price.

I'm not impressed with the X79 chipset. It is too bad Intel has no competitors in the MB chipset market. Hopefully they'll bring us more SATA ports and better SSD support with the X77 chipset.

[Atak_Snajpera]

intel is an encoding beast
x264fhdbenchmark.republika.pl/Results.txt

[hello_hello]

There is a lot of BS floating around about the importance of hard drive speed for encoding tasks. Let me give you a little example:

I hope that wasn't directed at my post, given I specifically said a single hard drive wouldn't be a bottleneck when encoding?
The problem is, a single hard drive can feel dead slow when performing other tasks, especially when it comes to moving large video files around, or when demuxing audio streams, re-authoring DVDs, the sort of work that necessitates a single drive doing a lot of reading and writing at the same time. For that sort of work even two single drives would be about three times as fast if you used one to read and the other to write.

It's less a big deal if moving or copying large files is something you only do occasionally, but if you're like me and often rip or burn two or three DVDs at a time, or you're extracting audio and video streams from large files on a regular basis, then a single drive becomes seriously painful. The actual encoding part is the least of it.
Personally I think... especially if you're going to build a fairly high performance PC... running only a single hard drive is somewhat silly.

[Groucho2004]

I hope that wasn't directed at my post, given I specifically said a single hard drive wouldn't be a bottleneck when encoding?
Not specifically, no. :D

I was referring to encoding in particular because I have seen posts where people think (or were told) that they need at least 2 drives and raid0 and whatnot for just this task.

When it comes to (de-)multiplexing and reading raw files, the focus is of course more on HD speed than CPU power.

And yes, when one does video work there should be at least 2 fast drives in the box.

[Robmoo]

I prefer to do a Raid only for my gaming rig because if you have a problem with that MB and your data is on a Raid0 you are in for some trouble for anything that has not been recently backed up. I had trouble with the Samsung F3 in my transcoding rig recently. Loading Windows it got stuck in seek mode. I just took it out and popped it in my gaming rig, downloaded some data I kept telling my wife to back up, and ran a disk check on it. No problem. In fact the drive worked when I put it back in my transcoding rig. Needless to say I transfer any data from it to the home server just as soon as I'm done. So, when this drive fails I will lose little or nothing. The point is one can't do that with a Raid0. I suppose if I were more brand loyal in my MB's perhaps I could swap the Raid0 to another PC.

[hello_hello]

To my way of thinking if a drive dies then you're going to lose data if it's not been backed up, the only difference between a single drive and RAID is the latter increases the chances of a drive failing. I wouldn't imagine the chances of a MB failure causing you to loose access to a RAID volume would be all that high, and to be honest in your above example I can't see how moving the drive to another PC would have been any more likely to get it going again than switching it to another controller in the same PC, or simply moving it about, or running it while mounted on a different angle.... whatever it was that really got it going again.
Needless to say I transfer any data from the RAID volumes to an external drive just as soon as I'm done. So, when the RAID volume fails I will lose little or nothing. ;)

Each to their own, but the way I look at it whether you're using single drives or running RAID volumes, regularly backing up fixes everything. Well almost everything...

[Groucho2004]

the only difference between a single drive and RAID is the latter increases the chances of a drive failing.
This sentence only makes sense if I substitute "RAID" with "RAID0" and "drive" with "array".

[hello_hello]

Why? The more drives you run the more likely it is one of them will fail at any given point in time regardless of the RAID configuration. If however, substituting makes you more comfortable, by all means.... ;) It probably is a better way to say it.

[Asmodian]

Why? The more drives you run the more likely it is one of them will fail at any given point in time regardless of the RAID configuration.

If you run a 3 drive raid5 array you are very unlikley to lose any data. :)

I run a few raid5 arrays (5 disk arrays), I have had drives die but have never lost data.

You will need a nice controller to get good perfomance but they are not out of the question.

[Robmoo]

If you run a 3 drive raid5 array you are very unlikley to lose any data. :)

I run a few raid5 arrays (5 disk arrays), I have had drives die but have never lost data.

You will need a nice controller to get good perfomance but they are not out of the question.

When drives drop back down to their pre-Thailand flood price this will be a good option. I haven't tried a raid5.

[hello_hello]

If you run a 3 drive raid5 array you are very unlikley to lose any data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_5_write_hole

And of course RAID 5 is slower.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_5#RAID_5_performance

As I said, each to their own, but in a personal computer RAID 0 seems fine to me. Hard drives are pretty reliable these days. Generally they fail very quickly if they're going to fail, if not they keep running for years.
To me it generally just comes down to backing up regularly, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people don't regardless of the number of drives they run.

[Asmodian]

Yes now is not a good time to build a RAID5 system, need to wait for the Bangkok hard drive factories to get back up and running.

Backing up 10s of terabytes on something besides hard drives isn't practical for everyone.

Always keep your RAID5 array on a stable system with a UPS, a UPS is pretty cheap and does wonders for those rare but destructive events. With a good controller RAID5 is very fast, latency might be higher but you use a SSD for applications that care about latency.

For doing video work I suggest using single drives unless you are working with uncompressed HD material. You do not need the throughput from raid0 and lots of single drives are safer and you can read from and write to different drives, keeping wear and noise down. I used to run a raid0 array but as hard drives have gotten faster they are much less useful. I have lost more data due to raid0 arrays breaking than anything else. Hard drives are very reliable.. until they aren't. It is hard to recover data off of any raid array once it has broken so it is better to use a fault tolerant array.
Just my 2 cents. :)

Since you are planning on using a SSD (I assume for OS and programs) the speed for other tasks should be great.

[Groucho2004]

Why? The more drives you run the more likely it is one of them will fail at any given point in time regardless of the RAID configuration. If however, substituting makes you more comfortable, by all means.... ;) It probably is a better way to say it.

You are correct that statistically adding more disks to a Raid array increases the chances of one of the disks failing.

However, you wrote "the only difference between a single drive and RAID is the latter increases the chances of a drive failing."
There are more differences and it ignores the advantage of the redundancy of a Raid1, for example.

All semantics, I know, but anyone reading this with little technical knowledge might get the idea that Raid in general is not safe.

[hello_hello]

Okay, I give up. I should have said RAID-0. :)
If I had a do-over....
"the only difference between a single drive and RAID-0 is the more drives you run as a RAID-0 volume, the greater the chances one of the drives will fail at any given point in time, which means the chances of a RAID-0 volume failing increases according to the number of drives used"

It's more of a mouthful, but having said that, I've got 5 dual drive RAID-0 volumes running between three PCs here. One of them failed almost immediately and the drives were returned under warranty, those Seagate drives were replaced with WD drives (the Seagate drives were a problem model I wouldn't trust for anything but short term storage) and the youngest of the 5 RAID-0 volumes has been running for at least four years without any problem. It's not unusual for at least one of the PCs to be running for weeks at a time.
I guess that's why, based on my experience so far, RAID-0 seems more than fine for the average user if they regularly back up their data.

[Robmoo]

Actually I'm runnning 4 drives in a Raid0 (4 256gb SSDs ;-) on this my gaming PC. The only thing I have on this computer I don't want to lose is me game saves which I back up to a 1tb Spinpoint F3, which I've been reading is no more the fastest available HD. I saw a Hitachi 1TB with faster benchmarks. Next year I hope to pick up a pair of OCZ Vertex 3 480GB and do a Raid0 with them. I like the performance of Raid0, but I prefer more reliability in everything but my gaming PC. I've had a couple of Raid0 failures. A lousy Aprevia PSU died and took out a drive on my Raid0 and my backup HD. I lost Christmas pictures out of that failure. I had an ASUS MB that died. I couldn't get the exact same model and the Raid wouldn't cooperate with the controller in the new MB so the data on that one was a loss. Luckily I just lost my favorites and some emails. So, no big deal.

[Blue_MiSfit]

I can't even begin to tell you how awesome SSDs are. I got an older SandForce powered 128gb Patriot Inferno last year and the improvement in general performance was nothing short of astonishing.

That said, for encoding your system component choices look excellent. I'd maybe wait until hard drive prices become a bit less crazy so you can get a 2TB unit. You can always move bulk storage to a RAID 6 NAS.

[mandarinka]

Do you really encode so often that you would need such a fast (expensive) cpu for computer that isn't used for suer-interactive tasks?
If you are just going to start (or even, batch) encoding and return once it is done, is it really needed to be done asap? Imho, for such scenarios, it doesn't really matter if the stuff is finifhed in 2 or in 3 hours, especially if you run it overnight :)

Also, since it is going to be a slave computer (unless you are going to use it as a primary desktop too), you can buy cheap RAM (not sure you even need 8gb btw, much less 16gb) and cheap mobo.

And lastly, if you don't want to bug people using the other comptuer, often that can be done as simply as by setting the priority of x264 to low... voilla, the computer can be used as needed (provided it isn't low on ram) and nobody will really notice.