support.bibblelabs.com

[liotier]

I'm currently on a JPEG workflow using Digikam which I like a lot. But I'm going to transition to RAW, moving from a Canon 400D to a 50D - bigger files, a Bibble 5 purchase and most probably the need for faster hardware. Since mass storage I/O seems to be the bottleneck for image processing, I'm focusing on that subsystem.

In the throughput for money category, hard disks will still win by far in the medium term. But the orders of magnitude lower seek times of SSD make them very interesting for intense multitasking. As a gross approximation, SSD are superior for random IO with small files, hard disks provide more throughput for linear IO with big files. According to some rudimentary tests, the file size threshold seems to be somewhere in the handful of megabytes range.

So my question to whoever has had his hands on the current pre-release versions of Bibble 5 is : for RAID0 at constant price, should I stack 10kRPM disks or a bunch of 32 GB SSD ?

I'm currently using Linux - and I'm going to use Bibble there too, probably with XFS which seems the best filesystem for that sort of use.

I guess it is too early to ask for benchmarks... But I'm hungry for them !

[sgaure]

Actually, the few B5 benchmarks which have been made available says quite clearly that B5 is *not* I/O bound.

A modern SATA disk yields 40-80MB/s in sequential read. That's, say, 5 images per second. Even with B5 it seems you'll need more than 4 cores to process at that speed.

However, if you have too little memory you'll find yourself paging, and then a faster disk will help a lot; but more memory will help even more.

[liotier]

[cvermillion]

[liotier]

[bonk]

i wouldnt build a computer system for still imaging with a RAID0. never. ever.
its just unsafe and doesnt deliver the goods. (demo machines excluded)

taking your considerations a little further:

if you look at the numbers in the video, bibble does around 5 frames per second on that 16core.
those were 8 megapixel files, that gives us 2.5 megapixel per second per core.
a quadcore could therefore do roughly 10 megapixels per second.
thats around 10Mb read and totally worst case 60Mb write (TIFF 16bit).
and with TIFF 16bit we are talking about more than 200 Gb of output per hour.

taking full advantage of your computer you wont need a fast drive.
you will need a really BIG one.

[liotier]

RAID0 may be unsafe, but it is cheap throughput performance and I mitigate the risk by having nightly backups to another host. But I would not do it in a commercial setting, and on servers I prefer RAID1 - or RAID10 when needed.

Thanks for opening my eyes on the size issue - I was thinking about storing the output as JPEG, but a non-destructive format is better for the archival purpose although the numbers are quite frightening. The 50D's 15.05 mpixels (4752x3168) files are 20.2 MB - the TIFF would be 90 MB with a 5 MB JPEG on top for diffusion. All together that is 115 MB per frame... My storage needs are jumping by a factor of more than ten !

I was planning to have a small fast volume for current work and a large cheap one for archive, but a single fast 7500 RPM 1TB drive such as a Samsung Spinpoint F1 looks sufficient to provide the read/write streams required to keep the quad core well fed - and it is big enough as well !

So I'll probably go for a cheap SSD such as a 32GB OCZ as a root volume, with a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 as /home. And of course another 1TB hard drive to back it up on my file server...

[bonk]

[Moz]