I agree! - The typical fast M.2 drive or an Apple drive: This is plenty.
However! It's really, really, really surprisingly nice - surprisingly worthwhile! - to get more of those and stripe RAID the heck out of them.
rn I have a striped array of [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x4)] [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x2)] [Striped sub-array of 83⅓-GB portions of 6 Samsung 500GB SATA drives to use all the I/O bandwidth]. Did it mostly for "teh lulz" but it's actually kinda worth it +shrug+. Ultrasmooth somehow.
(Given that the backup strategy is hundred-percent-ly 100%.!!)
(Also: I like multiple monitors too. 2x32" 4K is pretty great. I've tried 4x24"/27" 1080P and it sort of didn't work for me. Mostly because there's kind of a minimum pixel tax per-display and it takes too much out of a 1080p surface. Hard to explain. It was hard to believe. But it's my experience.)
Yup! — It’s very interesting imo how different the best monitor setup for different people. I worked with a friend who is a lot like me in a lot of ways – and they just used a 13” laptop and nothing else and it was obviously the best setup for them.
—It’s tricky with big 4K displays. Subtle. I worked on a 43” 4K IPS display for a while and it didn’t work for me — the pixels were just big enough for the structure of them to have an effect on how things looked. Slightly weird color / light things at the edges.
The 55” 4K OLED doesn’t have this issue even though the pixels are bigger because of how it works fundamentally. No pixel mechanism to see there really.
(It might be possible to build a 43” 4K IPS panel that doesn’t have the issue, idk!, but it would be such a tiny niche product that I doubt it would happen anyway.)
I like multiple monitors too! I loved the two 32” 4K LG 32UD99-W monitors I used to have.
Those were perfect too. Only switched to the 55” OLED TV because I lost those monitors—One had to to back to the company that provided it for working at home… aaaaand I broke the other.
With big top-heavy monitors I have learned the lesson that all surfaces must be grippy towards each other under all circumstances. Also when and if the drawer-stand put under the monitor scooches 1mm out of the desktop area and off its grip-pads.
Actually the lesson is: Always just get adjustable gas-pump monitor arms for everything. Less clutter, more desk space, more flexibility, better ergonomics. It’s even more worth it than I suspected it would be. They cost less than I thought and make a bigger difference.
I have a nice little Ryzen 3900X machine. Reasonably lucky silicon - it runs at 4.2GHz at a slightly reduced voltage. 2 × 16GB DDR4-3200 CL14 sticks which are happy at 3400MHz CL14. I don’t recall the rank – it’s Crucial BallistiX. The sticks were too expensive for what they do! – I bought them as an experiment to see what the difference was if I got the fastest memory I could find without going to the scary steep part of the price-performance curve. There is a difference!, but not strictly worth it.
GPUs: I have Radeons – 5700 XT and 6800 XT. Those are overkill for development-only but very nice. The 6800 XT is smoother and snappier at driving a 4K desktop! I’m curious how the 6600 XT is. (I use AMD because I work on macOS; no Nvidia drivers.)
And I have a “throwaway” SSD RAID experiment right now: A 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus in the 4x M.2 slot, a 500GB Samsung 980 in the 2x M.2, and 500GB Samsung 860 Evo SATA drives in all six SATA ports.
Linux MD software RAID.
I made a sub-array that stripes across all the six SATA drives, on partitions that are one-sixth of 500GB. That sub-RAID is allllmost as fast as the NVME SSDs.
Then my nixOS root partition is on a big three-“drive” striped RAID made out of an NVME drive, the other NVME drive, plus the “poor mans sata nvme”. It goes pretty hard. Mostly did it to see what it’s like. It’s quite fast. There’s a sense of a lot of subperceptible bottlenecks all vanishing at once.
This is probably an UNRELIABLE setup! I have at least an eightfold failure rate compared to using a single drive! It’s an experiment! Haha! This-is-not-medical-advice, you know? The speed is noticeably good however.
BUT:
All in all I would just get an M2 mac these days! In the general case!
I did learn a ton building this and it’s very flexible, more flexible than a Mac. (However, flexible in ways that aren’t really that important.)
But yeah, if macs aren’t a preferred option, I want to state that my machine is not the machine I’d build now to match my suggestions on a working setup. I’d try for something maybe half the price with 98% of the performance.
Comments
Would multiple monitors also be a good solution, or is that too distracting for you?
How much and what brand of RAM do you use? What are the rank and CAS numbers?
What about GPU?
What RAID configuration are you using? How many SSDs and which models?
I have four monitors and it works for me.
Lowest possible CAS, highest possible clock speed.
Nvidia RTX series is necessary for dabbling with AI at acceptable speeds, which seems to be the future. 3090 or 4090 are best due to higher VRAM.
You don't need raid, just get fast nvram SSDs.
I agree! - The typical fast M.2 drive or an Apple drive: This is plenty. However! It's really, really, really surprisingly nice - surprisingly worthwhile! - to get more of those and stripe RAID the heck out of them.
rn I have a striped array of [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x4)] [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x2)] [Striped sub-array of 83⅓-GB portions of 6 Samsung 500GB SATA drives to use all the I/O bandwidth]. Did it mostly for "teh lulz" but it's actually kinda worth it +shrug+. Ultrasmooth somehow.
(Given that the backup strategy is hundred-percent-ly 100%.!!)
(Also: I like multiple monitors too. 2x32" 4K is pretty great. I've tried 4x24"/27" 1080P and it sort of didn't work for me. Mostly because there's kind of a minimum pixel tax per-display and it takes too much out of a 1080p surface. Hard to explain. It was hard to believe. But it's my experience.)
I went with 27" 1440p for the extra pixels. 4k is a little overkill IMHO, but 1080p is definitely not enough.
Yup! — It’s very interesting imo how different the best monitor setup for different people. I worked with a friend who is a lot like me in a lot of ways – and they just used a 13” laptop and nothing else and it was obviously the best setup for them.
—It’s tricky with big 4K displays. Subtle. I worked on a 43” 4K IPS display for a while and it didn’t work for me — the pixels were just big enough for the structure of them to have an effect on how things looked. Slightly weird color / light things at the edges.
The 55” 4K OLED doesn’t have this issue even though the pixels are bigger because of how it works fundamentally. No pixel mechanism to see there really.
(It might be possible to build a 43” 4K IPS panel that doesn’t have the issue, idk!, but it would be such a tiny niche product that I doubt it would happen anyway.)
I like multiple monitors too! I loved the two 32” 4K LG 32UD99-W monitors I used to have.
Those were perfect too. Only switched to the 55” OLED TV because I lost those monitors—One had to to back to the company that provided it for working at home… aaaaand I broke the other.
With big top-heavy monitors I have learned the lesson that all surfaces must be grippy towards each other under all circumstances. Also when and if the drawer-stand put under the monitor scooches 1mm out of the desktop area and off its grip-pads.
Actually the lesson is: Always just get adjustable gas-pump monitor arms for everything. Less clutter, more desk space, more flexibility, better ergonomics. It’s even more worth it than I suspected it would be. They cost less than I thought and make a bigger difference.
I have a nice little Ryzen 3900X machine. Reasonably lucky silicon - it runs at 4.2GHz at a slightly reduced voltage. 2 × 16GB DDR4-3200 CL14 sticks which are happy at 3400MHz CL14. I don’t recall the rank – it’s Crucial BallistiX. The sticks were too expensive for what they do! – I bought them as an experiment to see what the difference was if I got the fastest memory I could find without going to the scary steep part of the price-performance curve. There is a difference!, but not strictly worth it.
GPUs: I have Radeons – 5700 XT and 6800 XT. Those are overkill for development-only but very nice. The 6800 XT is smoother and snappier at driving a 4K desktop! I’m curious how the 6600 XT is. (I use AMD because I work on macOS; no Nvidia drivers.)
And I have a “throwaway” SSD RAID experiment right now: A 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus in the 4x M.2 slot, a 500GB Samsung 980 in the 2x M.2, and 500GB Samsung 860 Evo SATA drives in all six SATA ports.
Linux MD software RAID.
I made a sub-array that stripes across all the six SATA drives, on partitions that are one-sixth of 500GB. That sub-RAID is allllmost as fast as the NVME SSDs.
Then my nixOS root partition is on a big three-“drive” striped RAID made out of an NVME drive, the other NVME drive, plus the “poor mans sata nvme”. It goes pretty hard. Mostly did it to see what it’s like. It’s quite fast. There’s a sense of a lot of subperceptible bottlenecks all vanishing at once.
This is probably an UNRELIABLE setup! I have at least an eightfold failure rate compared to using a single drive! It’s an experiment! Haha! This-is-not-medical-advice, you know? The speed is noticeably good however.
BUT:
All in all I would just get an M2 mac these days! In the general case!
I did learn a ton building this and it’s very flexible, more flexible than a Mac. (However, flexible in ways that aren’t really that important.)
But yeah, if macs aren’t a preferred option, I want to state that my machine is not the machine I’d build now to match my suggestions on a working setup. I’d try for something maybe half the price with 98% of the performance.