HDD and RAID Optimization for Photoshop

I’m looking for recommendations for optimizing my machine’s performance, which appears to be disk bound. The CPU rarely sees double digit utilization. <br><br>Machine Specs: 3.2Ghz Quad Core (2.66GHz Extreme overclocked), 2GB RAM, Four 320GB SATA drives in a RAID5 configuration. Specifically, I’m using Seagate 7200.10 320GB SATA 3.0 drives, connected to an Asus P5B deluxe motherboard, which uses the P965 northbridge and Intel ICH8R southbridge built in RAID controller chipset. <br><br>The Intel Matrix Storage RAID controller allows upto 6 drives (I’m using 4 but I’m willing to buy one or two more if needed) and each drive can be a member of at most two arrays, specifically you can have any combination of arrays across the drives, with two different array types on any disk. <br><br>I’ve initially configured it as a single 900GB RAID 5 cluster 64KB cluster size, then within the Operating system I put three partitions, C: for the OS, D: for working files, and E: for finished files. <br><br>Sometimes I get decent/good read performance, e.g. loading ten 70MB TIFF files into Photoshop in about 7seconds i.e. 100MB/s. However, saving is terrible, each file takes about 10 seconds to save i.e. around 7MB/s. <br><br>I suspect the RAID 5 was a bad choice for performance, and think that perhaps the super large clusters was an even worse choice for writing performance, and believe that although to the OS it appears like three drives, being the same physical drives I’m getting lots of disk contention between photoshop accessing the scratch file, windows accessing the page file and temp files, and of course photoshop writing the actual data file. <br><br>I’d like some suggestions on a better solution for the HDD configuration. Notably, I chose these disks to build a silent machine (which has worked out well) so if I buy any more disks I’ll want to get the same ones, not 10K or other alternatives, so please frame the suggestions within the context of these drives, minimum of 4, maximum of 6 drives. <br><br>What I need from a space perspective is: <br><br>Finished File Drive – around 600GB <br>
Working File Drive – at least 100GB <br>
OS and Applications Drive – 50GB <br>
Somewhere to put the Photoshop scratch files that’s optimized <br> Somewhere to put the windows page file that’s optimized <br> Somewhere to direct the Bridge cache files <br>
Somewhere to direct Windows to store temp files. <br><br>Here’s my suggestion which I’d love feedback on: <br><br>Use 5 drives total (note after format they actually work out to be 300GB each) <br><br>Drives 1,2, and 3 are used in a RAID 0, 10GB slice from each drive for a 30GB RAID 0 partition for Photoshop Scratch, Bridge Cache, and Windows Temp Files. Set the cluster size to 4KB. Is there any reason to think I’d need more than 30GB just for Scratch, Bridge Cache, and Temp Files? <br><br>Drives 1,2, and 3 are used again for a second array, this time RAID 5, 290GB slices on each, making 580GB of space with 64KB cluster size, used for the finished files. <br><br>Drives 4 and 5 are used in a RAID 0, 20GB slices for a 40GB drive with cluster size of 4KB and used for the windows page file. <br><br>Drives 4 and 5 are then used again for a second array, this time RAID 1, 280GB total size for the OS, applications, and working files. <br><br>Any thoughts? <br><br>Thanks, <br>
Roland.