am looking to build a new system, and costing out SCCI vs IDE-substantial cost difference for SCCI as well as overheating and complexity-will SCCI drive speed up Poser? thanks for any thoughts.

unless you have an abysmally large amount of ram, chances are you will be using your swap file quite often when you are using poser. The speed of your swap file is almost directly related to both the speed of your drive and the amount of reads and writes being done to it at the time. If you got a 15000 rpm ultra320 scsi drive, then yes, it would very much improve performance over a standard ata100 drive. However, if you got a much slower scsi drive, you might not notice as much improvement. Some ideas with that, are it is better to get 2 smaller drives instead of one larger one if you are going to be using the swap file extensively, placing your swap file on the second drive, and also that scsi drives are more expensive and that an all scsi system has advantages , but is more expensive and your system will likely not take advantage of them, so it is most likely better to get a singular addon scsi card for your hard drives and keep ide for the rest of your devices.

May I offer a different opinion? Go to www.tccomputers.com, they have an Abit KR7A-RAID motherboard that has an onboard IDE RAID controller. It will do RAID-0, RAID-1, or RAID-0+1. RAID-0 splits the work load across 2 drives giving you a significant performance boost. RAID 1 will mirror the contents of 1 drive (or drive pair) for protection against physical hard drive failure. RAID-0+1 does both. Get yourself 2 IDE hard drives (or 4 if you want the mirror option), as much RAM and the fastest AMD Athlon XP you can afford. In my opinion, this will offer you much better overall performance then just a single SCSI drive. This is the configuration I use here and I'm very happy with the performance. Keep CD-ROM drives, ZIP drives, etc. on the standard IDE controllers. Of course, if you go with SCSI RAID then you'd blow away the IDE RAID, but that's another (more expensive) story... If you can afford that, go with Dual P4 Xeon processors & Windows XP Pro as well. Xeon's have a much larger internal cache, making "data crunching" applications significantly faster. Also, make sure that you get a video card that has good OpenGL speed benchmarks for when Poser 5 hits the market. Just my opinion. Brian

thanks for the input-will print off the comments and keep working on the system.

another thought-does 1GIG count as enough RAM-is it worth the money to go to 2 GIG, running XP Pro?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=754094

before you raid your drives read this thread, seems Poser may have a problem with it As for the ABIT board, check in the ABIT newsgroup first for any known problems. I had 2 Abit KA7's (agreed, a different model) capacitors go, I got 18 months out of the first one, 3 months out of the second one. Other than that it was a hell of a board Just find out all you can up front first

I have 512MB of RAM, and I can't remember the last time I heard my hard drive kick in to access a swap file. Maybe it was when I did a render that had just about everything and the kitchen sink involved in the scene? To make a long story short, I don't see the need for SCSI any more. You can spend the money on something else.

As has been kind of mentioned already, the key things for increased speed in Poser are: 1. Processor - a faster processor is the #1 thing to increase speed 2. Memory - the more memory the better. For graphic apps, 256 min, 512 is better. Depending on your operating system - try WinXP (if you are an IBM person). It has fantastic memory management (for a Microsoft product). Downlevel MS operating systems (WinMe, Win98...) have limitations to what they can do with memory above certain amounts. 3. Operating system (see above). 4. Hard drive - if you have met all the above criteria, you can honestly do without SCSI. Rendering is done in memory by the processor. You only really go to the harddrive when reading textures/files and saving images. It will not produce any real noticable speed increases.

I fully agree with ryamka - besides, today's IDE drives are incredibly fast. I have 892MB RAM and even complex scens go nowhere near the swap file. Even if they did, my huge and very quick Barracuda and IBM Deskstar IDE drves (all ATA100 and 7200RPM) would do the job just fine. For the same money you can get more than twice the capacity in IDE compared to SCSI and the drop in speed is negligible. In a rest I saw recently the differences were so small I was really surprised. I work with realtime DV video editing off my IDE's and never see a hiccup. Besides, 10000 RPM drives and faster make a lot of noise. My drives are so quiet I hardly hear them. Spend your extra money on a faster processor and more RAM. Poser has no support for multiple processors. Hopefully P5 will. P4 doesn't even utilise the 3d graphics chip on your graphics card! Another must for P5. :] FishNose

again, thanks for all the input!

My macintosh has its stock 20GB 7200rpm ATA/100 drive plus a 9.1GB 10,000rpm Ultra-160 SCSI drive (Seagate Cheetah). I don't notice a huge difference in performance... most of the time. There are clear exceptions though, and I feel they are significant. Specifically, it matters where I keep huge bitmaps (like 4000 x 4000 textures and Photoshop scratch files) and and also where I store thousands of small files that might need batch processing (like my website images and html pages). The SCSI drive clearly outperforms the ATA drive in extreme drive-based operations. Huge texture files open in photoshop and poser much faster from the SCSI drive, and doing batch operations on many small files (e.g. resizing website thumbnails) is also considerably quicker (due to the high-rpm and low seek time of the cheetah). This is not purely an ATA-vs-SCSI issue though, you can get very fast ATA drives that rival the midrange SCSI offerings. For the big picture, I agree with the advice above from ryamka: put your money into getting the best processor you can, then into RAM, and upgrade the drive if you have money to burn after that. The drive will help with speed, but it will help you the least of these 3 things. -Adam

The Ultra-160 drives should be the fastest way to go, though, it is questionable if they are worth the price difference on anything but a file server, though. However, when I was doing some Video capture a couple of years ago I was very impressed with the speed of SCSI (4?) drives compared to ATA-66 drives that were "supposed" to be almost as fast. It was day and night. I'm under the impression that a lot of PC people have ATA 66 drives running at 33, and ATA-100 drives running at 66 because they don't have the right cables (for the 100) or drivers installed, incidently. There is also a new ATA-133 spec that is starting to surface.

I bought the Ultra-160 drive to use with Pro Tools audio recording software, I wouldn't have gotten it for graphics tasks alone. As with video, multi-track audio needs solid disk performance. SCSI is also up to Ultra-320 now, right? What Fishnose says about 10,000 rpm drives is also true, they can be noisy, especially when starting up. I had to return the Quantum 10,000 drive I got first because it made an incredibly loud whine while running. It was obnoxiously high-pitched too, around 12kHz--as much a sensation as a sound.

Movida, Just a note... Poser runs fine on my Abit board with RAID hard drives (I have 2 30 GB in RAID-0). nu-be, it depends on the OS. With NT/2000/XP, generally the OS runs on 1 CPU and the applications on the second. I believe that with XP Server you can even specify what apps run on which CPU. Also, as I explained: RAID-0 is performance because the work load is split over 2 drives, effectively doubling the data rate. RAID-1 is for security. Once you are familiar with SCSI devices, the jumpers aren't that big of a deal. But they don't gain you enough of an advantage for the money you'd spend. As others have mentioned, IDE drives are much faster now then they used to be. 512 MB of RAM will work just fine, 1 GB only if you can afford it, and 2 GB is probably overkill. Brian

Hi, The only real difference these days between IDE and SCSI is price and sustained transfer speed. SCSI is more expensive, and will offer higher sustained data throughput. This is usefull, if you're ripping data, or spooling to CD etc. But has no real bearing on the "burst" speed, that makes up most drive access, whether it's accessing the pagefile or not. The only really good thing about SCSI is hardware bad block management. If a bit of the disk goes bad you can mark it and the internal controller will avoid it. No so with IDE, where if a bit of the disk goes bad you juat have to live with it, or buy a new one. If you buy a big disk though, make sure you cut it into "bite sized" chunks :) Around 20Gb, that way you'll still be able to back it up with conventional tape drives. Bigger than that and you start having to worry about buying a DLT drive, where the tapes will cost you $40 - $80 a pop (max 40Gb compressed) later jb