Advice needed on build for handling massive files

[TheBigCheese]

Hi guys

I might be getting some work through that will require scanning some 4x5 negatives at 4800dpi....this will produce an image size of 1.34GB, which then has to be massively edited.

I've tried scanning and editing one that size as a test and it absolutely crawls on my system...trying to apply unsharp mask etc. takes far too long.

My system is:

Asus P5B board with C2D 6600
2GB Corsair Twinx
3x Seagate 500GB .10 in RAID 5

So what I'm after is speed and the ability to handle massive files. I will post what I think I should be going for below but I wonder if I am missing something.

Is there any sort of hardware out there that is specifically designed for handling and moving massive files? (There probably isn't but it's worth a thought).

I am thinking towards...

Vista 64 with 8GB or 16GB RAM (if I can find a board to take it)...possibly DDR3 if the performance enhancements are worth the extra...seem to be a bit pointless at the moment.

The new C2D E6850 which seems to have very good benchmarks on THW. I was wondering about the QX6850 for it's sheer horsepower, but I'm not sure how much benefit I will get with it, even running Photoshop CS2 - it's a hellish expense to not get the results from.

I don't know what board I should be looking at for sheer speed and data handling.

HDDs I'm a bit stuck with...I have tried a Raptor drive before but it was just far too loud to work with all day...so probably more Seagate in RAID 5 (striped and mirrored).
I would be very interested in the new flash drives that Sandisk have announced at 64GB sizes for notebooks...if anything like that can be used in a PC it would probably help a lot.

Having just typed this I've just had a vision of the first reply..."Get a Mac G5"...well...the price point will probably around the same but I've never used a Mac before and I do like to do other things with the machine when I'm not working so would prefer to stay with the PC unless the Mac will offer a significant improvement over what a PC can do for the same money.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this rambling post!

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.


P.S. I will be needing two of these machines (one for my partner to edit on) so keeping prices down where possible is always in my mind.

P.P.S. I don't want to overclock anything, the machines do sometimes run warm if they are seriously number crunching and I don't want to be worrying about stability issues.

 

[TheBigCheese]

Thanks for the posts guys

Yes, the RAM is a big problem at the minute, it's not a fair comparison really as I wouldn't edit images that big with just 2GB but I don't have any other around at the moment.

That's really REALLY useful information on the RAID setup!!! I knew I was missing something but I wasn't sure what it was.

It's not the only RAID actually, I have in the machine...

3x 500GB Seagate in RAID 5 (SATA)
2x Maxtor 320GB in RAID 0 (games drive ) (SATA)
1x Western Digital 320GB drive on SATA

So if the onboard RAID controller is slowing things down should I be looking at something like this...?
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CC-022-AD

Doesn't seem to support RAID 5 though...10 is supported but that takes another disk...an advantage though is that it should be speedier as it's not managing parity...but has a lower capacity.

I've just surprised myself to find that OCUK are selling Samsung flash drives already! Talk about catering for the early adopters!

thefishdude, can you link to that benchmark chat so I can have a look please.

Budget....that's something I don't want to think about too deeply yet...we haven't secured this order yet...if we do we will have to get the machines to be able to deal with it so it's more a case of we'll pay whatever it takes through the business to get the job done efficiently.