New NOS1 dedicated PC. Less terrifying thanks to you. All help still welcome!

[rakeshpoorun]

RE: Hard drive configuration in "XXHIghend PC"

Since I last posted here about my proposed build, I have tried to take what would have been an ideal short-cut and order the XXHighend PC from Peter directly built per the specifications he posted on this site.

It is most unlikely that this will now happen but irrespective of this, there are a few issues that I need to consider regarding my build based in all likelihood on the Supermicro X10dac, which is at this moment my favourite solution going forward although no one here or elsewhere has commented on the wisdom or otherwise of this choice.

My post here is a specific call for help and advice regarding the hard drive configuration of an XXHighend PC source. I have ordered the Intel 750 400GB PCI-e SSD (I will call this SSD1; had to order this in the US as it is difficult to find in Europe at the moment) and have also bought some 300GB 10000rpm Velociraptors hard drives on ebay.

Running XXHighend in Ramdisk, I am planning to use the Intel 750 SSD for Windows OS and XXHighend. I am also thinking of using another cheaper SSD like the Samsung SM951 (AICH) (I will call this SSD2) 256GB for Galleries. Is this the way to go about this? Can anyone comment?

Another issue regards the Playback location. My understanding is that this should ideally be in Ramdisk as well. But should this be stored on SSD1 or SSD2 or ideally on a separate SSD (such as another Samsung SM951)?

Obviously I do realise that these issues must have been considered in other threads and I have tried to go through these but I have found them less than conclusive. So any help or advice or just a note of your own experience would be appreciated.

I have some further questions regarding the hard drives where I will be storing my music and maybe some music dvds/blurays but that will be a question for another post.

Many thanks
Rakesh

P.S. I am in the UK (Berkshire)/France (Alsace/Germany border) so if any kind soul with experience building an XXHighend PC would be willing to let me listen to their rig or offer some advice/help with my build, please feel free to get in touch.

[PeterSt]

Rakesh,

Maybe you are going to rephrase a couple of options if I tell you that the phenomenon RAMDisk is about an emulated hdd in internal memory. I mean, it looks like you think that an SSD equals RAMDisk.
Am I wrong in thinking this ?

Peter

[rakeshpoorun]

Rakesh,

Maybe you are going to rephrase a couple of options if I tell you that the phenomenon RAMDisk is about an emulated hdd in internal memory. I mean, it looks like you think that an SSD equals RAMDisk.
Am I wrong in thinking this ?

Peter

Hi Peter,

I am in a cafe and using my smartphone to type so please excuse the brevity of my response.

I understand that Ramdisk is actually a virtual disk that takes advantage of the very high speed access the CPU has to the volatile memory contained in Ram. I read what you wrote about the requirements for Ram for storing high resolution/ upsampled music and accordingly went for 64MB of ram. From my understanding of the requirements of XXHIghend and the audio files transferred to memory, this should be amply sufficient.

I am also fairly sure that the volatility of ram memory means that one inevitably must have the XXHighend software on hard disk, and this is why I have gone for the Intel 750 PCI-e for Windows OS and XXHighend, as this is nvme and therefore capable of being used as a bootable drive with the X10dac motherboard according to Supermicro and their distributor here in the UK.

I understand that Galleries can be considered as the metadata pertaining to what we want to play, somewhat like a synopsis and table of contents but not the audio file itself. This should be apparently/preferably on a separate drive and I am thinking of a separate Samsung SM951 AICH SSD which at 256GB should be able to deal with my expanding flac music/potentially ripped DVD/bluray collection over many years to come.

So I do not think I am incorrect in my understanding of what Ramdisk is - in the XXhighend PC, it is partitioned to accommodate both XXHighend itself and the Playback drive.

But I was confused and almost certainly incorrect about a different aspect of how your music pc operates. I thought that the music files and the Playback drive were different things. Now I think that in fact the Playback drive is simply where the music files reside during playback. On this basis there is no need for a separate SSD for the playback drive? The playback drive source the music files from wherever the music collection is stored be it a SATA drive or as will likely be the case in my PC a combination of 10k Velociraptor drives and 15k sas hard drives which can have a transfer speed of 12Gbps when used with the LSI raid card incorporated in the Supermicro motherboard.

Is the above about right?

Thanks
Rakesh

[PeterSt]

On the basis there is no need for a separate SSD for the playback drive?

At least that was the reason for my previous post.

But it is now not clear yet whether you have the right idea in mind. Playback drive is like this :

Permantent Storage -> Copy activity -> Playback Drive -> Playback from there.

Playback Drive can be anything (including not applicable and then the normal source is used) and can also be a RAMDisk. General consensus is that the latter is the best.

and accordingly went for 64MB of ram

64GB I suppose ? but really overdone.
8GB Of RAM for the Playback Drive as RAMDisk is sufficient for everything and all (thinking Hires albums and not 10 of them in one playlist).

SSD I would use for Galleries indeed and now for their reading speed.

Something else :
Best thing (SQ) is to have as few as possible in the audio PC, not as much as possible ...
This is how you may end up with two PC's in the end. One that plays the music and one that holds all the music, including Galleries. All what's left is the OS Disk, which in the end can also be something different, but never mind.
Not necessary at alll to think like that from the start, but think that it will happen in the end (stage).

Regards,
Peter

[rakeshpoorun]

On the basis there is no need for a separate SSD for the playback drive?

At least that was the reason for my previous post.

But it is now not clear yet whether you have the right idea in mind. Playback drive is like this :

Permantent Storage -> Copy activity -> Playback Drive -> Playback from there.

Playback Drive can be anything (including not applicable and then the normal source is used) and can also be a RAMDisk. General consensus is that the latter is the best.

and accordingly went for 64MB of ram

64GB I suppose ? but really overdone.
8GB Of RAM for the Playback Drive as RAMDisk is sufficient for everything and all (thinking Hires albums and not 10 of them in one playlist).

SSD I would use for Galleries indeed and now for their reading speed.

Something else :
Best thing (SQ) is to have as few as possible in the audio PC, not as much as possible ...
This is how you may end up with two PC's in the end. One that plays the music and one that holds all the music, including Galleries. All what's left is the OS Disk, which in the end can also be something different, but never mind.
Not necessary at alll to think like that from the start, but think that it will happen in the end (stage).

Regards,
Peter

Peter,

Thanks for the post above. It was certainly very helpful in helping me understand the nature of the Playback drive. So I do not need a third SSD, just two one for XXHIGHEND and Windows OS and the other for Galleries.

It is funny you mention two PCs one slaved to the other as this is what I was planning to do down the line when I upgrade to the NOS1a in due course next year.

The idea is to use my current build as a music server storage option. I would remove 32GB of ram, used the two remaining CPUs ( I did mention that I eventually ended buying 4 of these low powered INTEL LGA2011 v3 Xeons)... If that's feasible, I will have not have a single disk in that XXHighend Playback optimised pc, just two CPUs and the ram sticks. This is another reason why the X10dac has always appealed to me.  Is what I am proposing a possibility using the current configuration as a starting point?

Best rgds
Rakesh

P.S. Yes I did mean 64GB of ram. What you wrote was that 24GB or so were ideal for high resolution music because up sampling resulted in large music files stored in Playback drive. It's good that 32GB is sufficient as it means that I have most of what's needed for a second XXHIGHEND Optimised PC. As things stand all that I would require would be amother dual CPU motherboard probably the Supermicro X10dax (which enables some mild overclocking of Xeon CPUs and memory) and a case.

[PeterSt]

Rakesh,

Having a dual CPU in the music (file) server really seriously does not make any sense. Take a laptop for that ! (to emphasize what I mean).

And a ram stick ? that smells like a thumb drive or USB pen or what to call it. Can be the playback drive all right, but it is still not the RAMDisk. RAMDisk is just internal memory.
My English is not the best as you may notice, so maybe it's about that.

Regards,
Peter

[rakeshpoorun]

Rakesh,

Having a dual CPU in the music (file) server really seriously does not make any sense. Take a laptop for that ! (to emphasize what I mean).

And a ram stick ? that smells like a thumb drive or USB pen or what to call it. Can be the playback drive all right, but it is still not the RAMDisk. RAMDisk is just internal memory.
My English is not the best as you may notice, so maybe it's about that.

Regards,
Peter

With regard to the use of the term "Ram stick," it was a slip on my part, I meant of course memory modules. I simply meant I could use less memory in the file server and use the memory modules in the "Playback Optimised PC."

Peter, if I understand correctly the use of a dual CPU motherboard is overkill for this application (as a music server which it will not be to start with and maybe never). I am sure this is the case.  But there are other advantages to using the X10dac motherboard such as the presence of the LSI/Avago SAS3 controller which is described in the review on "servethehome.com website" as:

"Probably the biggest standout feature of the Supermicro X10DAC is the onboard LSI / Avago SAS 3008 controller. The SAS3008 is a cacheless HBA that can be used either in IT mode (HBA) or IR mode (RAID 0, 1, 10). The SAS 3008 is a very fast controller that features eight 12gbps SAS3 ports. As we have seen already with some of our SAS3 benchmarks such as the Toshiba PX02SMU080 800GB drive we benchmarked recently, it would not be hard to populate this controller with eight drives each capable of over 1GB/s transfer speeds. When this controller is combined with the ten SATA 3 ports, one has up to 18 storage ports available using onboard controllers."

In other words, the use of this motherboard gives me a slice of my cake and I can eat it as well. For the time being, I use it in my main XXHighend PC and later on I harness its storage potential to utilise it as the centrepiece of my music/file server.

Building an XXHighend dedicated/optimised PC at a later date should be relatively painless given that it will consist of just the two processors and the RAM. I may not even need a graphic card if it can be configured for headless operation so only the graphic card in the music server is used to hook up to a monitor.

Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with what I see to be the logic behind the approach outlined above. As things stand however, I am not sure what that might be other than the use of an additional CPU. OK sure this adds to the cost but for now it will be used as both music server/Playback PC and the Supermicro X10dac seems to be a good interim solution.

rgds
Rakesh

[juanpmar]

Having a dual CPU in the music (file) server really seriously does not make any sense. Take a laptop for that ! (to emphasize what I mean).

Are there some minimal specifications for a server laptop like amount of memory, CPU speed, USB ports or hdd size?

Regards
Juan

[PeterSt]

"Probably the biggest standout feature of the Supermicro X10DAC is the onboard LSI / Avago SAS 3008 controller. The SAS3008 is a cacheless HBA that can be used either in IT mode (HBA) or IR mode (RAID 0, 1, 10). The SAS 3008 is a very fast controller that features eight 12gbps SAS3 ports. As we have seen already with some of our SAS3 benchmarks such as the Toshiba PX02SMU080 800GB drive we benchmarked recently, it would not be hard to populate this controller with eight drives each capable of over 1GB/s transfer speeds. When this controller is combined with the ten SATA 3 ports, one has up to 18 storage ports available using onboard controllers."

[/i]

Nah ... There is no single way that you are going to utilize any of this. Not even for one (fast) port. So this is not overkill, it really is "rubbish". Think like having a large V12, drive that out of a cargo plane (up in the air) and think you will be down faster with that V12.
(thinking of it, you will be faster down because it weighs more than a line-4 motor)

So there are a 100 other things that determine the overall speed (of in this case file transfer) and you wont gain a thing on it. Too difficult to explain, so you'd have to trust me.

Also, by the time you can utilize that amount of disk ports and thinking of today's (or just tomorrow's) hdd's of 8TB, you wished you have invested in a factory of ripping machines for which wasn't $ left anyway because the millions of albums are too expensive. Next you must also have an 8 channel system at least, so you can listen to 4x stereo at the same time in order to listen to 1% of those albums for the rest of your life.

Have the cheapest for this but try to get some SATAIII ports because at some stage some speed can be handy (like when making a backup copy).
There is much (more) to it to make things fast but there is also much (more) to it to make things "slow" becaue irrelevant. Just don't even think about it ... that would be my idea.

Peter

[PeterSt]

Having a dual CPU in the music (file) server really seriously does not make any sense. Take a laptop for that ! (to emphasize what I mean).

Are there some minimal specifications for a server laptop like amount of memory, CPU speed, USB ports or hdd size?

Hi Juan,

The laptop was an example to show how irrelevant it all is. In the end I would never use a laptop because they often suffer from congestion (look at the ever burning disk light) and might be unresponsive for a (too) long time. Still it gives the (my) idea that it doesn't matter much.

"hdd size" is an odd one because you can only be talking about music disks here and they will never be internally in the laptop (a laptop still assumed).
And next the only one who is able to answer that (hdd) question, is you.

Regards,
Peter

[rakeshpoorun]

"Probably the biggest standout feature of the Supermicro X10DAC is the onboard LSI / Avago SAS 3008 controller. The SAS3008 is a cacheless HBA that can be used either in IT mode (HBA) or IR mode (RAID 0, 1, 10). The SAS 3008 is a very fast controller that features eight 12gbps SAS3 ports. As we have seen already with some of our SAS3 benchmarks such as the Toshiba PX02SMU080 800GB drive we benchmarked recently, it would not be hard to populate this controller with eight drives each capable of over 1GB/s transfer speeds. When this controller is combined with the ten SATA 3 ports, one has up to 18 storage ports available using onboard controllers."

[/i]

Nah ... There is no single way that you are going to utilize any of this. Not even for one (fast) port. So this is not overkill, it really is "rubbish". Think like having a large V12, drive that out of a cargo plane (up in the air) and think you will be down faster with that V12.
(thinking of it, you will be faster down because it weighs more than a line-4 motor)

So there are a 100 other things that determine the overall speed (of in this case file transfer) and you wont gain a thing on it. Too difficult to explain, so you'd have to trust me.

Also, by the time you can utilize that amount of disk ports and thinking of today's (or just tomorrow's) hdd's of 8TB, you wished you have invested in a factory of ripping machines for which wasn't $ left anyway because the millions of albums are too expensive. Next you must also have an 8 channel system at least, so you can listen to 4x stereo at the same time in order to listen to 1% of those albums for the rest of your life.

Have the cheapest for this but try to get some SATAIII ports because at some stage some speed can be handy (like when making a backup copy).
There is much (more) to it to make things fast but there is also much (more) to it to make things "slow" becaue irrelevant. Just don't even think about it ... that would be my idea.

Peter

Hi Peter,

Some strong words indeed. Maybe the use of "rubbish" goes some way to justify your points and validate your perspective...Add weight and substance to your arguments. I should try it one day. Maybe I will start winning some arguments with my little ones instead of trying to reason with them as to the reasons we do or do not do certain things. I imagine I will say, "You want this expensive train set. This is rubbish (in inverted commas). It is too fast for this track...It is like putting a V12 in a car and dropping it from altitude (oops it might in fact go faster but that's not relevant). I am right but it's too hard or time-consuming to explain. Bugger this. Just trust me."  I will report back.

Having said that, you are probably right. Let's see a CD is about 500MB but the same album in high-resolution is roughly 6GB. I imagine all in all 2 x 6TB discs should be quite sufficient for my entire music collection (about 2000 cds + 400 dvds + 100 blu-rays that I may want to store on there). I would probably want to use an additional disc for back-up. I imagine to make use of three SAS3 ports is not a bad idea here.

I imagine that people here have not hallucinated when they commented that the best results they obtained was by using a SATAIII hard disc as a source like the Western Digital Velociraptor. They are easy to find and cheap but relatively low capacity so let's say I have two of these and still back-up to the 6TB disc. I would be using 5 of the 18 ports and have the possibility of using this to store ripped blu-ray discs as well if I feel like it.

Why is it, I wonder, that most people I know who make a living selling audio products always use expensive car analogies to make a point? My second car was a BMW 540i V8 and sure I did not need that much power when I drove all the way from the UK to Italy in the summer, but it sure beat driving a 2cv Citroen for sheer pleasure! But car analogies don't really float my proverbial boat so I will move on...

So there are a 100 other things that determine the overall speed (of in this case file transfer) and you wont gain a thing on it. Too difficult to explain, so you'd have to trust me.
...

I do not follow your logic here.

I thought, and you seem to agree, that high file transfer speeds is a good thing.  So the ability of having 12Gbp/s file transfer seems to be a great idea unless you are saying that the motherboard and hard drive manufacturers are lying about these gains and that I won't actually enjoy these speeds? If this is the crux of your argument and you felt so strongly about it, then say so. If on the other hand, there is a price to pay elsewhere, maybe it would be enlightening to hear what the actual reasons are. I can only speculate that one looses out elsewhere because of the added complexity of the motherboard or because the file transfer protocols may impact on the way the motherboard accesses data on the hard drives? Or could it be that the raid card increases power consumption? Or does this subsystem have implications in terms of Windows OS which would not fit in well with the way the XXHighend software operates?

I am the first to admit that I was not too sure about the choice of this motherboard and this is why I posted here about it in the first place. In the hope that someone with more experience than I have would explain whether it is a good choice or not.

In conclusion, Peter, I am inclined to accept your advice at face value and may well decide to forego the X10dac and use the X10dax instead (it is a dual processor motherboard but does not have the  onboard SAS3  controller). But I must say it was a very odd way of putting across your point...

Best regards
Rakesh

[rakeshpoorun]

In conclusion, Peter, I am inclined to accept your advice at face value and may well decide to forego the X10dac and use the X10dax instead (it is a dual processor motherboard but does not have the  onboard SAS3  controller).

Peter,


I am trying to attach a picture to the specifications of the Supermicro X10DAX motherboard. I would welcome your opinion (and anyone's else who cares to contribute for that matter) as to whether it is any good for my purposes?

Maybe I should clarify what are my purposes even if it is not evident from the above? Well to have a single pc that will make use of XXHighend, use 2 processors and be fairly stable/reliable over time. Eventually maybe migrate all the hard discs including OS discs to another pc so this motherboard could be dedicated to just playing music files during playback and nothing else.

Best regards
Rakesh

[rakeshpoorun]

By the way,

for those who are interested in a really minimalist set-up for an XXHighend PC, you might want to consider this soon to be launched mini ITX LGA-2011-R motherboard by Asrock.


EPC612D4I

    Mini ITX 6.7" x 6.7"
    Socket LGA 2011 R3 Intel Xeon processor E5-1600/2600 v3 series
    Supports Quad channel DDR4 2133/1866 ECC DIMM, 4 x SO-DIMM slots
    Supports 4 SATA3 by C612
    Supports 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16
    Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN (RTL8211E)
    Supports Intel Dual GLAN ( Intel i210 + Intel i217 )



Full specs can be found here:

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPC612D4I#Specifications

[PeterSt]

Hi Rakesh,

I have not much lust to bring across an ICT course/education. If you ask for advice then I can give you that and if you can't accept the answer then it could be better to not ask the questions in the first place. There's just too much involved in explaining (all).

But I will now make it worse for you () :

My profession is (computer) performance specialist. Started with that explicitly, back in 1975. Still working on that on a daily basis. XXHighEnd is one of its products where the power of the PC is utilized for SQ (and CPU usage is 0.0000x% anyway). NOS1-USB is also one of its product with 24/768 input capability.
Important ? of course not.

More important could be the first ever "logistics software" (today named ERP software) running on a (Novell) PC network. This was in 1989 and two AT servers running at a speed of 40MHz served 120 XT 12 MHz clients concurrently, all with faster response than any mainframe available at the day (with the notice that Cray's really were used for something (science) else).
So in those poor AT servers them SAS ports could have been useful but still weren't needed anyway.

Hey, the danger with topics like this is that readers may start to think that we need super computers to run a simple audio player. So I am answering the questions because you ask them. I tend to answer in the direction of your liking (say "speed") because it is my (real) profession. But at some stage it goes too far because it can't be utilized by one single poor user (client in IT terms) which the audio thread is.

In comparison, today's normal work is about 1000s of such clients causing ~ 8000 sales orders with say 100000 sales order lines and all behind that to deliver those lines the next day early morning (think fresh food). One server is doing this and STILL no 12GB etc. ports are in there because of no benefit. However, smart caches and multi processors and smart threading etc. etc. sure is there. To AVOID the necessity of this stuff, just because at some stage (which is all stages) it does not exist yet. But the ERP software did.
XXHighEnd makes use of the same "technology" were possible, just because it is me. You won't know it, but try to browse the Library Area with 400K tracks in there, all with coverart, and *know* that there's not even a database involved.

You can well say that one of the big "hobby's" I have applied in there is using a giant amount of data (which in the end is more than any largest company will have stored), without a single piece of "database".
I think I know what I am doing (or advising for that matter).

Best regards,
Peter

[juanpmar]

Having a dual CPU in the music (file) server really seriously does not make any sense. Take a laptop for that ! (to emphasize what I mean).

Are there some minimal specifications for a server laptop like amount of memory, CPU speed, USB ports or hdd size?

Hi Juan,

The laptop was an example to show how irrelevant it all is. In the end I would never use a laptop because they often suffer from congestion (look at the ever burning disk light) and might be unresponsive for a (too) long time. Still it gives the (my) idea that it doesn't matter much.

Regards,
Peter

Hey Peter, sometimes is difficult to understand your yes/not at the same time,  probably the same applies to me and to many people here and it shows the complexity and multitude of possibilities of what we are treating here.
But...sometimes also the answer could be more specific or at least "some" more specific. E.g. I was waiting for something like: would be better if you don't use a laptop and use instead a Pc with at least 4Gb of memory and a i3 processor, etc. Or better even: take a look at what I am using now as Pc server.
Of course for me is difficult to deal with a foreign language with enough subtlety. So do not understand this as a reproach but as a humble proposal to avoid countless posts asking back the same thing.

Kind regards,
Juan