Best hard drive setup for photoshop? two partions or one raid0?

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Posted By
brent_lightner
Nov 30, 2006
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369
Replies
5
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Closed
I’m in the process of building a new PC primarily for photoshop/indesign use. It’s a core 2 duo with 2 gigs of high end ram that I’m going to overclock the hell out of. But my questions is about the hard drives. I’ve got two small (36gb) 10K-rpm drives and two larger (500gb) 7200-rpm drives to work with (all of them are SATA3.0). I’m going to set up the 500’s in raid0 for data storage (yes, I’ll be working with an external backup as well, so no worries on the issue of data loss). But for my two fast drives, I can’t decide between the following configurations:

1. one for windows/apps; one only for scratch
2. put them together in raid0 and partition into 3 drives (one for windows, one for apps, one for scratch).

The other related question here has to do with the windows swap file. Is there any merit in putting windows/apps on one drive, then partioning the second drive in half and making half of it for windows swap and half for scratch? And I suppose in the event someone recommends option 2 from above, then it would probably be wise to make 4 partitions on that raid: the three I mentioned, plus another for the windows swap file?

I’ve been looking all over the net for the ultimate drive setup for working with adobe products (photoshop in particular) and have yet to find a definitive answer given my setup. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
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chrisjbirchall
Nov 30, 2006
ram that I’m going to overclock the hell out of.

Go-faster stripes are fair enough for a games machine – but for a professional editing application, I’d err on the side of reliability.

You’ll see no real speed advantage using a raid array with PS.

Best have one drive for OS, Apps and your "work in progress" files. The second drive could be partitioned to have Scratch on the first partition and keep the second partition for back-up/archive.

This way you will avoid read/write conflicts between scratch and Windows paging file, and between scratch and File Save/Open operations.

Hope this helps.

Chris.
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Bob Levine
Nov 30, 2006
You’ll see no real speed advantage using a raid array with PS.

My very unscientific experience contradicts this. I have a machine with RAID0. I use a machine at a client’s office that’s identical in every respect except it doesn’t have RAID.

With small files, you’re right, but with files in excess of 400 megs there’s a noticable difference in saving and opening files.

Bob
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brent_lightner
Nov 30, 2006
Bob, my research tends to side more towards your experience. I’m leaning towards raid-ing the two fast drives together and setting up three partions on that RAID. I just wonder if I’m going to defeat the purpose of a dedicated scratch partition by having it share disk access with the OS/Apps partition. If I had a third drive here, the clear answer would be to put the OS/Apps on one drive, then raid the other two and make that the sole scratch disk. But this is overkill for my needs, so I don’t want to screw with another drive (quite frankly, this whole setup is probably overkill for my needs, but I figure as long as I was building a new box, might as well do it right.)

Anyway, thanks for the input.

-brent
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deebs
Nov 30, 2006
I wonder about a series of linked drives compared to a parallel arrangement of drives particularly when the OS caters for parallel drives so easily.

Remember that it is easy to backup/ghost (?)/copy a single drive of user data.

How so with convoluted RAIDs?

But that is less hardware centric and more data centric yes?
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chrisjbirchall
Nov 30, 2006
Bob and Brent:

You are right of course, inasmuch as a raid 0 setup will be faster than a single drive.

What I meant to say, however, was: "You’ll see no real speed advantage using a partitioned raid array, compared to using one of the drives as a dedicated scratch"

In my experience, partitioning a drive – whether it be a single drive or an array – will always result in read/write confilct whilst the scratch and VM are on the same physical entity.

And yes – working on small files the difference would in any case be too small to notice.

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