NEW PC - Hard Drive Arrangement Help!

[DaveMcKeen]

I've read the stickies!

Hi, I'm a photographer and my bottleneck is Photoshop actions consisting of loading an image file from the hard drive, processing it in RAM, saving it back to the hard drive and repeating all that hundreds of times at the end of a photo shoot. Budget is around $2K.

My main concern from the forum is before I go out and buy all this hardware, does the hard drive layout I propose below make sense? Please take a look and let me know what you know from your experience. Thanks.

(BTW, I know about RAID 0, single disk failure bad)

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Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra Socket 939

Athlon 64 x2 4200+

Crucial TWINX2048-3200C2 2GB Dualn Channel Kit DDR400 XMS3200 184-pin DDR DIMM

Cooler Master RC-531-SSN1 Centurion 531 (Silver) Mid Tower

Antek SP500 500W PSU

HDD Drive 0
Western Digital WD74GDRTL 74 GB Raptor 8MB 10,000RPM SATA I (150)
O/S
Photoshop temp files

HDD Drive 1 (RAID 0 configuration)
2 ea. Seagate ST3500641AS 500GB 8MB 7200RPM SATA II
Data (mostly digital image files)
Windows paging file

HDD Drive 2
Western Digital WD2500JD 250GB Caviar SATA I (already have)
Appplications
Web site files
Programs & Updates

Gigabyte GV-NX66256DP Nvidia GeForce 6600 256MB PCI Express x16 w/TV & DVI

Plextor Dual Layer PX-716A

MS Windows XP Professional SP2

FDD Mitsumi MTM43W 1.44MB 3.5in Floppy

1394 Adapter IOGEAR GIC1394 3 port PCI card 400MBPS

Mouse - already have

Keytronic KT800PS2US 104-key PS2 keyboard

Monitor Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF - already have

[doctorgonzo]

As long as you back up the the RAID array regularly, that makes sense. You may want to put the Photoshop scratch directory on the RAID array too.

[DaveMcKeen]

Hi Doc,

Thanks for that. Do you think that in my configuration I can put HDD Drive 0 on SATA1, HDD Drive 1 (RAID 0) on SATA2 & SATA3, and HDD Drive 2 on SATA4? Or should I put the drive with the O/S on an EIDE cable? I'd like to go all-SATA if is makes sense.

[doctorgonzo]

I'm not familiar with that board or its SATA controller so you will probably have to take a look at the manual to see how you set up RAID and single drives.

[kilgoretrout]

posted in error. sorry.

[popgoesthweasel]

No reason to have a Raid 0 array other than "you can". Personally I would go with a couple 16MB cache drives and be done with it, instead of the Raid 0 and Raptor.

[doctorgonzo]

Originally Posted by popgoesthweasel No reason to have a Raid 0 array other than "you can". Personally I would go with a couple 16MB cache drives and be done with it, instead of the Raid 0 and Raptor.

In this situation the performance benefit may make sense, since the purpose of this computer is for doing heavy graphics work. RAID 0 isn't completely useless; it is useful in very specific situations, such as this one.