Alright, I decided to go with an MSI GTX 980 Gaming w\ 4GB DDR5 for the video card since it has a good amount or VRAM, CUDA cores, and is ranked as one of the best graphics cards available right now. I'm sure by the time I can afford to build the rig they'll be even more reasonable. Right now they're actually under $700 which imho is pretty damn reasonable already for the performance.
You mentioned that HDD RAIDs need larger sets to see fast speeds. Should I use SSDs instead? To me it doesn't matter either way. I would rather pay the higher price for SSDs if I'm going to get a big performance bump. You also mention RAID 6. Would you recommend that over RAID 10? Like I mentioned in my original post, I am very new to using raid and want to use the best array for my needs. I am going to be working with pretty large video files, especially once I start editing 4K video, and did read that HDDs work better for some odd reason than SSDs with large (non-random?) reads (and possibly writes).
Hypothetically what do you think about this drive setup?
- 4 x Intel 730's using RAID 10 (internal hot swapable) for my OS/Apps which would give me a good performance bump from using a striped array but also the redundancy I need in case a drive fails.
- 2 x 4TB HDDs using RAID 0 to store completed projects. I'll also be backing up to an external drive, blu-rays, or a cloud server.
- 1 x 256GB SSD to use as a scratch disk for any apps that need it, primarily for Premiere & After Effects
Can you think of any reason to add another drive in there somewhere I'm not thinking of, or change that setup at all? Thanks for your input btw.