Paul wrote:
>Basically the new 4000 dpi m/f scanners will output such large files that
>handling them demands a new ball game in desktop systems: files of 500
to
>700 Mb will be common at 4000 dpi, (in 16bit), and no doubt 6000 dpi will
>come along soon for 35mm. If you do 5x4" - god help you.
Bear in mind if that's the file size you'll have one file per CDR as well.
Don't forget a CDRW drive in the computer spec. :)
> ok: from what I understand the max RAM controllable on a
> windows board is set by the chipset
Yup. You'd need to research motherboards carefully to find
one which has plenty of slots and is BIOS capable of addressing
as much RAM as possible. You'd be looking at a server type of
motherboard.
> It seems a new style Athlon SDRAM board with 4 slots is
> the way to go for best bang per buck at present.
What bus speed does the Athlon use to the RAM? You may get
significant performance differences depending on whether
the bus speed is 100MHz or 133Mhz.
> so, you could get two good IBM 75 Gb drives, which makes
> 150 Gb of stripped UDMA memory for about $600 ($300 x2).
IMO UDMA RAID is the way to go. It's probably worth getting
a PCI RAID card - I believe you can even fit more than one
in the computer. Consider the possibility of having two
RAID arrays (but check that the RAID BIOS supports it) so
the OS and data are on different physical devices. As a
cheaper option you could have the OS on a normal non-RAID
hard drive, but that would mean your swap space was slow.
Make a careful count of how many PCI slots the motherboard
has and how many you need - for RAID, SCSI, firewire,
soundcard, etc.
I bought a motherboard with onboard SCSI and kind of regret
it in a way - it would be easier to upgrade to a new
motherboard and CPU if I had a PCI SCSI card. Just pull
the card, plug it into the new board and you're away.
It's also kind of sad that my motherboard supports U2W
SCSI and I've only ever used SCSI II!
Where are the huge files going to end up? Have you checked
what size files can be handled by the people you're
scanning these for?
BTW I am beginning to believe that most people who want to
do a lot of film scanning should seriously consider UDMA
RAID. The delay that bugs me the most is waiting for files
to load and save.
Rob
(glad for once I only use 35mm :)
Rob Geraghty harper@wordweb.com
