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.
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My biggest cou loads used to be VB macro churning within high end CATIA or UNIGRAPHICS env, imagine that. 2x4 multicore xeon pkus 96GB did help though. But horrible still
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My current workstation is a build from 2016 with a i7-6950X overclocked substantially (4.5GHz), 64GB DDR4 and a Samsung 960 Pro 2TB.
I wanted to replace it much earlier with Zen 2 Threadripper but I couldn't get the parts. Kept getting delayed until it made no sense anymore.
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The 10 core i7-6950X is competitive for full build compilation with a 24 core Xeon from the same generation and is substantially better for most incremental builds where it's heavily bottlenecked on a couple threads.
It was really good for a couple years but it's awful now.
When Zen 3 Threadripper comes out, I'll happily pay thousands of dollars to get a 64+ core CPU, nice motherboard and 256GB+ memory to go with it.
Could not wait any longer though, and I'll happily turn this into a replacement for my badly aging gaming PC so it won't be wasted.
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Also, for the time being, I'm going to switch to dual booting on this machine while still also using my older workstation. So, I can either have 2 workstations doing builds or I can be doing gaming on this while also switching over regularly to test new builds on the other, etc.
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