1 x 1TB or 2 x 500GB RE4s for OS/Applications??

[bumblebee01]

Hi everyone,

Could you please advise me on what HDD setup would be best to run my OS/applications from?

Currently have a single 250GB internal HDD installed, however want to use this as a dedicated Photoshop drive, so need another drive for the OS and programs.

Would it be better to have a single WD RE4 1TB, or could I use 2 x WD RE4 500GB drives in RAID 0 to boost OS and throughput performance?

This will be running in a Dell Precision T7400 with dual quad core 3.16GHz processors, 1GB DDR5 Sapphire video card on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. Long term storage is via a Synology DS710 2TB mirrored NAS setup.

Any advice appreciated.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Use the 1 TB drive. RAID 0 (which is not RAID, technically) puts your system and data at more risk than a single drive and will not noticeably improve performance in most situations. It does show impressive serial IO improvement, but real-world usage is dominated by seek time.

What do you mean by dedicated Photoshop drive? If you mean for your projects, keep in mind that a newer drive will likely be faster than an older one. If your Photoshop work were limited by read and write speeds, having your data on the slower drive would not make sense. Believe it or not, there are people who use SSDs for Photoshop scratch space, or project storage, to relieve the badly IO bound part of their work.

Oh, wait, I'm thinking of video editing. That was a long screed for nothing. So why don't I just delete it?

 

[bumblebee01]

Use the 1 TB drive. RAID 0 (which is not RAID, technically) puts your system and data at more risk than a single drive and will not noticeably improve performance in most situations. It does show impressive serial IO improvement, but real-world usage is dominated by seek time.

What do you mean by dedicated Photoshop drive? If you mean for your projects, keep in mind that a newer drive will likely be faster than an older one. If your Photoshop work were limited by read and write speeds, having your data on the slower drive would not make sense. Believe it or not, there are people who use SSDs for Photoshop scratch space, or project storage, to relieve the badly IO bound part of their work.

Oh, wait, I'm thinking of video editing. That was a long screed for nothing. So why don't I just delete it?

Haha, well many thanks for your words of wisdom. Unfortunately I don't do that much video editing but I'll keep it in mind.

I trawled the internet yesterday and managed to find a 2TB RE4 brand new for the same price as a 1TB RE4. Just have to wait until Monday to purchase and I will be extremely happy. Actually I need two, one for my wife's setup and one for mine. We work together and I wouldn't want to hear any murmurings of a slower system on the other side of the room!

I might be wrong (more than likely given my limited knowledge on computers) but if the scratch disk is on a local drive, surely if it is a half decent drive then the scratch should not slow down performance a great deal? Hopefully the processing power will get behind me and we should have a smooth user experience at faster speeds than I'm used to (currently on an old P4 Pentium single core, 60GB HDD and prehistoric video card - all trying to run Adobe CS5,AutoCAD etc often simultaneously!)

 

[WyomingKnott]

Yes, a more modern setup will be an improvement over something that old.

As to the rest, I was guessing that the drive will be the limiting factor. If it is, no amount of processing power would increase the overall performance; that's why it's called a limiting factor. But it will limit it to much better than you are getting now.

Memory is pretty important in these cases. How much memory are you going to have in the new rig? And are you getting two, one for your office-mate?