OK:
First off, the dual xeons have been REALLY fast, since when most people where using 30 mb/sec 5400 rpm drives, I was using 2 X 15's in raid 0 for a boot drive.
Dual Xeons have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with your storage setup.
Given an X25E I could put together an Intel Atom-based system in a PC that's slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes that would smoke your dual Xeons + X15s.
You're conflating CPU performance with storage subsystem performance and the two things have had essentially zero to do with each other since the day Intel de-coupled CPU frequency from motherboard frequency back in the days of the 486DX2.
SSD's represent the first time, in a LONG time, like 12 years, that actual desktop top systems can surpass that setup.
Yes, and you're worried about the cost of a single X25 or OCZ Vertex. Look at how much those X15s cost you in inflation-adjusted dollars, Greg (hint: 2.59% annual inflation over the last 12 years).
That said, my Shaq version continues to run quickly for what it's used for, and, bumping it up to a RAid 0 of X 25's, if the price ever comes into my arena, will continue to make this setup work for what it's used for.
Greg, you don't need RAID0. All RAID0 is doing is increasing the chance that you will lose data. You are not hitting those peak sustained transfer rates often enough to justify the added complexity of that configuration, and you are risking your data by leaving it in a RAID0 array.
Sustained Transfer Rates just are not important for the vast, overwhelming majority of desktop computing tasks. There is a point where we have enough sustained data transfer, and we have essentially reached that point on commodity 7200rpm desktop drives, let along X15s or SSDs. Honest. You can drop it as a criteria at this point.
(3 x ATI dual cards???? Sam, are you like totally off your meds????????)
Not at all. However, you'd end up with a better overall machine than whatever Xeon + SCSI configuration you're rolling over in your mind right now.
That system was suggest to P5 as a dedicated folding machine, though.
Why do lower cards, like 4870 and the 9600 and 9800 rate so high on HTPC machines, for playing DVDS?
Newer "low end" cards have more features for newer kinds of video processing and acceleration of new kinds of video decoding. The 4870 is NOT a low-end card, and the 9800 is essentially the same hardware as the top of the line (of its day) Geforce 8800.
Back in the day we talked about Graphics Accelerator cards, as in, the graphics card wasn't just about 3D performance and texture memory, but the ability to do more useful things like draw 2D GUI primatives (Tseng ET4000), accelerate MPEG1 (S3 Trio64), accelerate MPEG2 (ATI Rage 128) and these days we have cards that do h.264 video, which is useful for Flash movies and for HD content.
There's a big grouping of video cards I won't touch because I don't like the cooling solutions on them. Pretty much everything between things that can be passively cooled and things that need an extra slot for the heat sink is off my personal buy list.
