rspmd23 Loc: NYC , now in Westlake, Florida

What would you choose as the perfect computer/monitor/storage system (either desk top or lap top) for use with a D810. Main function is storing, organizing photos and light post-processing.

photon56 Loc: North America

Mac mini, 4k monitor and a couple of 2TB external drives for redundancy.

rspmd23 Loc: NYC , now in Westlake, Florida

Interesting, thanks !

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

27" iMac 3.5 ghz 5k Retina w/ a 2nd 27" 5K retina monitor. 512gb ssd with a 2 tb secondary internal drive. 32gb ram, AMD radeon r9 m290x video card w/ 4 gb video memory. 3 2 tb external drives, one stored off site, & a Cal Digit T4 Thunderbolt 2 RAID,JBOD external Raid drive.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

Mac Pro loaded to the max with memory and ssd. Then the balance of what jethro779 stated.

skiman Loc: Ventura, CA

A system with:
Intel I7 5960X processor
Geil 32GB DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3000 Memory
Nvidia GTX TITAN Z 12GB 768-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express Video Card
OCZ RevoDrive 350 Series 960GB Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K Monitor

Nothing Apple makes will even come close but it will run you about $7000.

rspmd23 Loc: NYC , now in Westlake, Florida

interesting array of chooices. Thanks !!

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

SkiMan... my hero... you stood up against the Mac-O-Cronies and made limp noodles of them.... out the window with them I say. You did it with Ampple ability.

I just built (3 mo ago) for about $800 an AMD 8 core, low end gaming Graphics Card 2 gig GDDR5, 16 gig of fast game memory, and a quality MoBo. Plenty fast enough and memory enough for Graphics processing... regardless of the camera (NASA work excluded).

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

SkiMan... my hero... you stood up against the Mac-O-Cronies and made limp noodles of them.... out the window with them I say. You did it with Ampple ability.

I just built (3 mo ago) for about $800 an AMD 8 core, low end gaming Graphics Card 2 gig GDDR5, 16 gig of fast game memory, and a quality MoBo. Plenty fast enough and memory enough for Graphics processing... regardless of the camera (NASA work excluded).

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

For a "perfect" system, I would suggest a PC with a wide gamut display. You can get one with 32 gb ram, 4-6 TB of storage, a 2 gb 30 bit display card and a 24" wide gamut display all for under $2000. At the moment, Apple only supports standard gamut display. Your camera is better than that, so why not get a computer to match?

sb Loc: Florida's East Coast

If you are not going to be gaming and video editing, you do not need huge RAM and an i7 processor.

The newer i5 4-core processor is perfectly fast and fine for photo editing.

See this recent article comparing the two processors:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404674,00.asp

Using an i5 will save you $240 or so over the i7.

You probably do not need a separate video card with the i5 as well, so that saves you another $150.

SSD drives are still expensive: you do not need to have SSD space upon which to store your data (photo files). I would put in a 120GB or 240GB SSD drive on which to load the operating system (I still like Windows 7, which is still available) and your programs.

I would then put in two 1TB HDD (regular hard drives) running in a RAID 1 format. This means that they behave as a single 1 TB drive. Each drive mirrors the other - this makes data access faster and also serves as an internal back-up for when/if one drive fails. In one of the front panel 3.5" drive bays you would want to put a card reader. I like to consider a BlueRay read-write drive for off-site storage. A BlueRay disc holds 25GB of data.

RAM: you do NOT need 32GB of RAM! Think about it: your photo editing program requires a few hundred MB of memory, a RAW file requires up to 50MB - why would you need so much RAM? The computer also uses what is called "virtual memory" - if you did not have enough RAM it moves parts of the program it is working on back and forth between the RAM and the hard drive - with SSD this would happen very fast. 8GB RAM is probably plenty, especially when you are running an SSD drive. You can always add more if you think you need it in the future.

This is a good bare-bones kit to start from:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9584391&CatId=11845

From $550, add two hard drives for $80 each, a card reader for $20, and a DVD-RW drive for $30, keyboard and mouse for $20, Windows 7 Home Premium for $120, and you have a really nice system for under $1,000!

And then whatever amount you pay your techie friend to put it all together for you! Probably $100 or so.

scsdesphotography Loc: Southeastern Michigan

I agree with the various PC configurations given here. While I am using an I7, an I5 will work just fine for photographic work. 16 Gb of RAM will let you process multiple images fairly quickly. One thing that has changed recently is that Lightroom CC has been rewritten to make better use of the video card GPU, so a card in the $150 range and above will pay off.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

I am not sure what your credentials are, but there does seem to be a bit of confusion in your post.

The operative word in the title of this thread is "Perfect" which implies no compromises or tradeoffs. You described an entry-level gaming system, or a low budget photo editing workstation.

There is no budget stated, so a good intermediate-level system for editing and storing large D810 files is what he is asking for. This means a machine with lots of large hard drives, possibly a SSD for boot, or at least using an SSD to cache a spindle drive using Intel's software RAID, common to many "built" systems. With an SSD-cached system drive your computer will boot in 20 secs after POST, and most programs will open in less than 2 secs.

Gaming requires lots of video ram, overclocked multi-core processor with hyperthreading, fast hard drives. No need for huge amounts of system ram. Rendering to compressed files will require large, fast hard drives. Photoshop requires modest vram, and preferably a wide-gamut card with around 2 gb ram. No need for more, unless you are driving multiple 5K displays.

On Amazon, an i7 4790K costs $330, and an i5-4690K is $235 - $95 difference, not $250 as you stated. And the i5 does not offer hyperthreading, which makes a difference with both PS and LR. Definitely worth the extra few dollars to get a faster hyperthreaded cpu. In case you are wondering, the K after the CPU number designates that it is unlocked and overclockable.

The 32gb ram won't make a difference with Lightroom which would be very happy with 8 gb, but a larger ram space will keep you from getting out of memory errors in Photoshop, which can happen with even 16 mb ram. If you do apply filters, do any layering with 16 bit files, etc etc etc - it is not hard to get to a .5 to 1 gb file size in no time. The temporary files that are generated during editing will easily exceed a shared 8 gb system ram space. The extra room with 32 gb means your processing can take place in faster RAM on the CPU I/O bus, and not use the scratch disk.

Separate video card is a must for the "perfect" system. Otherwise you are using system ram. Also, the Intel GPU is limited to 8 bit display. A separate lower end NVidia Quadro K620 card with 2 gb vram will give you 10 bit display pipeline, and still cost under $200. Using the Intel graphics will be a frustrating experience with larger files.

With 2 drives, RAID 1 is no faster than a single drive, and usually slower, though reading operations are as fast as the fastest drive. Your capacity is as large as the smallest drive in the array.

RAID 0 is faster on both read and write operations and you add the capacity of the drives in the array, because the data is striped across two drives and the throughput is spanned across a data bus that is 2x as fast. The downside with RAID 0 is that there is no parity drive, and a single drive failure will make the data for all intents and purposes unrecoverable.

Either way, I would not recommend anything less than RAID 5, 6, 1+0 - with the more parity drives the better. You get good performance and fault tolerance with parity drives, and RAID 6 offers striping and 2 parity with 4 hard drives.

Since you suggested a pair of hard drives, why would you suggest $80 drives - which are more than likely not RAID certified? I am assuming you are looking at 1 TB WD Black which sells for $80 at Tiger, but $70 everywhere else. It is a great drive, I actually use one in my desktop as a system drive, but it is not recommended for RAID. Why? because hard drives get "soft" errors, which a regular drive can take up to 2 mins to repair and reallocate the problem sectors. In a RAID array, this will usually cause the drive to be dropped from the array. A "RAID Ready" drive will recover from an soft error quicker, typically in less than 15 secs, to comply with the RAID controller's error recovery time specification. At the very least WD Red drives which cost $90 but are pretty slow and only have 16 mb cache and only have a 3 yr warranty, would be a minimum recommendation for RAID. WD has their Red Pro (64mb cache, 5 yr warranty), RE and RE+ with 64 or 128mb cache.

You only spec a 120 gb SSD, no scratch disk, relying on the 120 gb system drive for scratch disk, program storage and OS, and only 8 gb of system ram shared with graphics, etc - sounds like a system I built about 5 years ago. It was fine with my D300 12mp camera, but I would hate to try and do even a tiny content aware replace on an image without getting an out of memory error - which is the reason I upgraded my system entirely.

Lastly, you have no idea how quickly a 1 TB volume will fill up with D810 files.

Nah, this system you are suggesting is far from "perfect" especially for a D810.

bull drink water Loc: pontiac mi.

the same one you would use with a sony a-100.

scsdesphotography Loc: Southeastern Michigan

Gene, I agree with you about storage, I have 6 Tb in a RAID 10 config. Photoshop does like more memory and now Lightroom likes heftier graphics cards. With my current setup the only thing that takes more than a second or two is saving 300 RAW files in the Tiff format.