High Performance , High Quality
29 June, 2011 Having hovered on the fringes of 3D CAD long enough, I recently purchased a used Dell Precision T5400 workstation (Xeon quad core 3.16 Ghz, 4GB RAM, 1TB Hitachi, Quadro FX570 video card) to get the best performance I could using AutoCad Revit 2011 and Inventor Pro 2011- both very demanding 3D CAD programs. I upgraded the T5400 to 12GB RAM, and from Vista Business 64-bit to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and today I'm adding an NVidia geforce GTX 285 1GB that will configured to emulate a Quadro 5800 CAD oriented card- (and thereby saving about $3,000 on the card). Because I'm not very disciplined with backup and always worried about HD failure- though I've only had 2 failures in 18 years, I decided to set up- eventually -a RAID 1 that would have a pair of HD's that continually mirror each other. Having had good luck with Western Digital drives and read many HD reviews, I chose a Western Digital RE4, 500GB. Another contender was the single platter Samsung 500GB which is also very fast. Early on during research, I was planning to buy a pair of WD Caviar Black 1TB, but WD has arranged that only the Enterprise series can be configured for RAID- some sort of error correction is not present in their other series, so an RE4 it was. Instead of having to learn how to set up the RAID, for the time being, I decided to take the 1TB Hitachi out of the T5400, mount it in a USB HD enclosure (Sabrent eSATA to SATA aluminum) and for now this external drive would become the backup drive. The external drive will only run when backing up and I'm hoping that will extend it's life substantially. By the way, the Sabrent aluminum enclosure is brilliant- very nicely made and has a extremely quiet fan which keeps it very cool. The blue lights give it a serious, almost military hardware quality. The Precision T5400 has a wonderfully convenient HD carrier assembly that unclips and swings out and the drives are held in caddies that can be unclipped and draw vertically from the carrier. It's possible to change drives in less than 5 minutes. Having had a disaster while using Paragon Suite 10- during which the 1-year old WD 750BG disk from my XP machine (Dell Dimension 8400) became a door stop, I set the RE4 in the second drive caddy on SATA 1 and cloned the Hitachi (on SATA 0)to the RE4 using Easus ToDo 2.5 which is a free version, and excellent- you can be cloning in minutes. I recommend that anyone contemplating an HD upgrade spend an equal effort in carefully choosing utilities- the software I bought ruined a HD and created many hours of frustration, while the free product sailed through. When cloning the partitions from the Hitachi to the RE4, the transfer ran initially at 3.87GB/min and at the end, at 3.2GB/sec. In all it copied about 120GB in four partitions in about 29 minutes. I used the Easus to copy a backup of C: to another HD partition in a Dell Optiplex 740 (Athlon 64 dual core 2.4Ghz, Hitachi 500GB) and the transfer rate was about 2.4GB/min- still seeming quite fast. The 64MB cache of the RE4 is something that improves read/write rates, and that may be a lot of the difference- it really works. Checking at the end of the cloning session, the RE4 was running at 89F and the Hitachi in the enclosure at 110F. At the moment, the RE4 is at 82F- only 10 degrees above the room. I was surprised that with the RE4 my Windows Experience index for the T5400 disk remained the same at 5.9, as the startup, application speeds, and transfer times seemed very much improved. The RE4 is very quiet- and the T5400 has a heavy case and cover that probably assists this, and it seems to me to have less vibration than any drive I've had. Looking at it physically, it seems more substantially made, and I can see that the base of the platter spindle is large diameter. WD touts this extra rotational stability as a reason they can offer a 5- year warranty- and it must be effective. If you are using CAD, a good video card is essential in combination with fast read/write drive speeds. And, if you're on a budget as I am, consider high end gaming cards that use the same GPU as CAD-oriented cards. There are several NVidia geforce cards that can act as extremely expensive Quadros. Wikipedia has a fantastically useful table of quadro cards with notes on which geforce uses the same GPU. You can use a utility to simply rename the card as the CAD version and using the CAD drivers, save, save, save while having very high CAD performance. That's how the GTX285 can emulate a Quadro 5800 costing 10 times as much (note: the 285 is 1GB and the 5800 4GB). If you use Autodesk products, you can download optimized drivers for their recommended cards. Gaming cards concentrate on fast frame rates- abbreviating shading and rendering while CAD cards shade and render every frame fully. In these applications the combination of fast disk and fast video can transform the 3D CAD use. Newer software is increasingly taking advantage of multiple cores as well- if you have AutoCad 2007 or newer, type WHIPTHREAD in the command line, choose one of three configurations, and it will optimize core threading. A word about HD size: When contemplating my needs for HD space, I determined that all the files I've created since 1993- excluding many GB's of audio files on my recording computer (HP Elite quad core 3Ghz Q6600, 8GB RAM)- is only about 25GB and that includes 9,000 documents, 600 AutoCad drawings, and 11,000 images. When I set up the Hitachi drive- which was a 1TB, I created a 100GB partition for the OS and Programs, 100Gb for active files, 100GB for archive files, and the remaining 700GB for a backup copy of C:. Adding it up- 45GB in C:, 22 in D:, 18 in F: and 45 in G:, at this rate I could theoretically use something like a 160GB drive with room for 10 more years of work. Message- have a look at your real storage needs. Also, consider a reasonably compact partition for the OS/programs- because the tracking arms then have a shorter distance to travel, the access time is noticeably reduced and of course, partitions are virus resistant. With the RE4 "short-shifted" in this way, except for the huge 3D applications, starting applications like WordPerfect X4 and Corel Photopaint is more like "snapping" them on- they just appear instantly. I changed the video card in the Optiplex 740 from onboard shared 1GB ATI Radeon 6150LE to a Quadro FX 570 (256MB) and the Windows Index for gaming graphics went from 3.7 to 4.9 and the important for me graphics index from 3.0 to 4.6- a 60% percent improvement. By the way, over the years, Dell computers seem to have a consistently high synergy with NVidia cards. Overall, the Western Digital RE4 500GB, is a very satisfying product that seems a good step above in quality and performs better than any drive I've had. 3D CAD is very read/write intensive and the 64MB cache of the RE4 is surely helping- and can properly support the speeds of a high performance video card. The RE4 may be the beautiful swan song of mechanical HD's- and my last mechanical HD purchase. When 320GB SSD's are $100,... Summary: The extra cost for the RE4 is one of the best uses for $20 I can think of! Consider carefull, disk utility software, using compact OS/application partitions, and a video card that in combination can utilize the capabilities of the RE4. Amazon as usual did very well, and the RE4 was sent in a fitted box with formed plastic end holders. Cheers, PoultryLogistics Read more