Photography & Music Recommendations

[Luddite]

Hi there. I am making a jump from Macs to PCs. I haven't touched a PC for a long time and I'm seriously out of the loop. I've done a few hours of reading online to try to brush up, but I'm still pretty confused.

I'm in the professional photography industry and I also do some music recording as a hobby. I figure I want a machine with these qualities:

• Can accept at least four internal HDDs and preferably more. Do I need a special case?
• RAID setup for the internal drives. If I RAID SSDs, do I need a certain kind of card?
• A fair amount of RAM. Is there any real benefit to maxing it out?

I think that's all of the main requirements. Mainly, I want something fast. I don't have a specific budget in mind, but I don't want to throw money at anything without good reason.

Things I already have that can probably just transfer over:

• Lots of HDDs, including 2TB drives and SSDs.
• Graphics pen and tablet.
• Speakers and interface (does this mean I don't need a sound card?).
• NEC monitor.
• Mouse and Apple keyboard.

THIS is the closest store to me, though I live in the sticks and a trip in here is a whole day's commitment. I tried calling them and wasn't able to get any advice, so I'm hoping to collect some ideas here and go in with a bit of knowledge myself.

I have not much idea about processors and motherboards, though I was thinking about the AMD Phenom™ II X6 1100T Black Edition processor (I read bad things about the current Intels) and an Asus Crosshair IV Extreme motherboard.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[glc]

Can you wait till April? That's when the revised Sandy Bridge boards will be available. Those will change your mind about Intel.

You can mail order components from ncix.com or newegg.ca, you don't have to make a trip to a store.

We generally don't recommend RAID except for massive amounts of storage, and even then we recommend a high end controller card and RAID 5. If you want to use SSD's, I'd recommend separate drives for the OS and the apps. If you use Photoshop, you should use a dedicated scratch drive, and this should NOT be a SSD.

[Luddite]

Thanks for the reply!

Just one quick question: why should the scratch disk not be an SSD? Is that to avoid shortening its lifespan? Actually, I have a second question, too: you mention RAID 5 as a preference, but is RAID 1+0 a bad thing?

[glc]

In scratch drive service, a SSD will not last long. A WD Caviar Black is plenty fast for scratch drive service and having 500GB available for scratch is a big plus if you do high resolution work.

A four 2TB RAID 1+0 is 4TB. A four 2TB RAID 5 is 6TB and actually works better for both speed and data integrity.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Mind if I ask why you're switching?

Not trying to be a troll, but I find it weird: I'm in the photography and desktop publishing business too and am switching to Mac because of the shortcomings of Windows when it comes to professional grade work.