My two cents:
Raid O should boot faster and should be slightly faster in disk intensive processes.
Should but not necessarily for any practical use in the real world. Gamers do not live in the real world.
With Photoshop the CPU, RAM, at least one scratch disk and appropriate configuration of memory and scratch disk is more important than RAID 0. As you are aware, but Dell was incorrect, never depend on data files being safely stored in a Raid 0 array.
However if you plan to install one or two more drives, beyond the RAID, in your ubermachine then why not? You will need these for scratch drives as you cannot use networked drives for these purposes.
Also, upgrade to CS3.
Ignore the Dell Rep.
OS and programs on Boot drive or split if you like, page file on each drive. Sata Raid 0 for data files if they are large. Files under 40 megabites on raid 0 are no faster than unstriped drive.
I installed OS and programs on raid 0 for a friend that insisted it was faster. Once he got tired of reloading everything he set it up as I listed above and lived happily ever after.
Thanks, Laverne. I have one more concern, if you would be so kind. One of the major reasons I was thinking of a separate application (D:) drive was to provide another disk for the Photoshop scratch file. But then I read that the scratch disk should, optimally, be something other than the drive containing Photoshop. True or false? Also, for optimal performance should the Windows Pagefile be on the C: the D: or the RAID volume?
Thank you, again.
Paul
If your files are fairly large and you use more than a couple of layers the scratch disk should be independant of everything else. If your image file is 100 megabtes or larger a raid 0 array scratch drive will speed things up. If your files are not very large you can use a single drive as a scratch drive. I usually make a 20 gig partiton for scratch and a second partition for inactive data on the rest of the disk.
I usually put a windows page file on at least 2 disks and let windows use either drive. I hope you have 4Gb of fast ram installed.
If you have fast drives with a sizeable cache, and especially if you have a lot of RAM and thus won’t be paging much, there shouldn’t be any significantly noticeable performance hit from using the same physical drive for paging and scratch. I use my C drive, a 10K SATA Raptor with a 16MB cache, for both without any negative effect on performance; there is rarely much paging going on with 4GB of RAM. With a slower drive and a smaller cache, simultaneous disk activity for paging and cache presents a significant performance hit, and limited RAM means this performance hit will be frequent.
Thank you to both Michael and Laverne. I have my own drum scanner and do a lot of lage prints for clients, so my average scan is a 250-450MB aRGB 16-bit file. I just looked at my system documentation again and found I’m wrong about the on-board controllers. It’s the SAS bus (4 connectores on the main board) which can be set up as RAID 0/1. SATA (3 connectors on the main board) bus requires a Perc4 or Perc5 card for RAID operation. Given this new information and from what I’ve heard so far, it seems that I should use 2 SAS connectors to create a SAS RAID volume for the boot drive and applications and then create a partition on that volume for exclusive use as a Photoshop swap disk. The other 2 SAS controllers should be used to create a RAID 0 SAS volume for my image files. Is that a correct summation of the suggestions?
Finally, the computer will arrive with 2GB (two @ 1GB) of DDR2 fully buffered, ECC, registered 533MHz RAM, but the system will also support 677MHz memory (and I have a power supply which will allow this option). My manual says that the system supports quad-channel operation with 4 identical RAM modules installed. So my options are to get 2 more PC2-4200 modules, or to pull the existing memory and replace with 677MHz. Dell says I’ll see only "a few percent; less than 5" boost in overall Photoshop performance from the upgrade from 533 to 677 speed memory. Thoughts?
Once again, many thanks.
Paul
