Parts for temporary new workstation which gets to become a gaming PC once Zen 3 Threadripper is available:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
Noctua NH-D15
ASUS Prime X570-Pro
4x 32GB G.SKILL 16-22-22-42 DDR4 3600
Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB
Fractal Design Meshify 2
Reusing an existing GPU and PSU.
Conversation
It gets to inherit a reference design GeForce 1080 Ti and 80 Plus Titanium PSU (EVGA SuperNova T2 850W). GPU can be replaced later when it gets to stop being a workstation.
Nice that I was finally able to get new CPU and other parts at proper retail prices. Chip shortage sucks.
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Why not spread your storage over multiple SSDs, partly raid 0, partly mirror?
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I've never had an SSD fail, let alone a high end one with high durability NAND and higher quality parts. It would be a major inconvenience but not a major problem beyond wasted time.
RAID only makes things worse with a high-end NVMe SSD. Already insane overkill performance too.
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I prefer having fewer things that can go wrong and from my perspective, redundancy via RAID only adds more that can go wrong. If the SSD is going to fail, I need a new SSD anyway, and I'd rather just deal with that. I don't want to deal with another layer of latency/complexity.
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Look at the specs for samsung.com/semiconductor/.
5GB/s sequential write, 7GB/s sequential read, 1,000,000 QD32 IOPS, 60,000 QD1 IOPS.
It's immensely overkill for my needs. I need the Pro line because huge amounts of data is written but the performance is really not a factor.
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It's substantially faster than the Samsung 960 Pro 2TB in my old workstation but that won't make any difference.
Having 128GB of memory means there's a massive amount of cached data and plenty of space to buffer writes.
Latency is something that does matter a lot though.
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RAID hurts latency and IOPS. It's not really suited to the age of high-end NVMe drives. It's also really hard to actually be I/O bound with this kind of drive.
Latency is what really ends up bottlenecking performance for I/O for anything that I'm likely to do, not the rest.
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Good to know, Im resurrecting a development WS myself next week based on 2010-ish HP CAD CAM stations still laying around. If that doesn't perform I need to save up for what you did here.
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Basically, if you have mostly CPU-bound tasks, it's very wasteful to make far more threads for them than you have cores. You really don't want to be context switching. Data is ideally almost always cached and there's generally enough write buffer that write latency is irrelevant.
The main thing that really matters to avoid I/O slowing everything down is having the lowest possible latency.
The capabilities of these high end NVMe drives is ridiculous and unless it's some massive database server doing massively parallel workloads, it just doesn't matter.
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If something isn't cached, it doesn't really faster if the read speed is 7GB/s or 2GB/s. It will hardly make a difference for most workloads. Similarly, drastically more IOPS than you need for most workloads. The limiting factor is latency to send and receive responses from it.
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Yeah, so for any of that kind of stuff, even the Samsung EVO line would pretty much erase I/O as a performance factor. The reason to get the Pro line is not the substantial increase in performance that's simply even more overkill but the massively better write durability, etc.
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