Dedicated drives vs raid 0 setup???

[rob25]

Another strange question :roll:

I will be using my pc for Photoshop cs4, Autopano pro (stitching), & hdri, large photo files.

I am considering adquiring 4 x segate 500gb 7200:12.(220 ? aprox. budget.)

Considering that for Photoshop cs4 use it is recomended to have os, scratch disk & Pictures files on a different HD:

Would it also be recomended that we put another disk for os swap file ???????

What would be better or speed things up more?
- Use 4 HDs each for a spedific task, 1.os, 2.os swap, 3. files, 4.scratch?
or
some kind of raid 0 combination?

If so why?

If I was maxed with 8 gb ram how much do the swap file or scratch disk come into play?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: rob25
Another strange question :roll:

I will be using my pc for Photoshop cs4, Autopano pro (stitching), & hdri, large photo files.

Yes, we know... :laugh:
Didn't you like the answers you got in your other threads?

 

[rob25]

Different questions about the same subject !

:frown: , Could do with more spcific replies to the question, or maybe they are too technical ? :laugh:

 

[elconejito]

Originally posted by: rob25
Would it also be recomended that we put another disk for os swap file ???????

What would be better or speed things up more?
- Use 4 HDs each for a spedific task, 1.os, 2.os swap, 3. files, 4.scratch?
or
some kind of raid 0 combination?

3 drives should be all you need. 1. OS + OS Swap, 2. PS Scratch, 3. Storage

What you are trying to avoid is multiple programs/processes hitting the same hard drive at the same time.

For example, if you have everything on one disk, there is the potential that Windows is writing to the drive at the same time you are saving an image to disk at the same time that PS is using the scratch. That would be slow.

Matter of fact, if you can fit the file your working on into RAM, the scratch disk doesn't even come into play and you can get away with just two drives (I always try to be budget conscious).

I use fairly large, but not huge, files fairly often and it never hits the scratch disk. For me, scratch size in Photoshop might reach 1.5GB at most for a composited tabloid size image. As soon as you hit the hard drive, performance draaaaaagggggssss no matter how fast the drive is.

I'd only recommend RAID 0 if you're consistently hitting that scratch drive. Probably overkill for the OS drive and really not needed (nor recommended) for your data drive.

Don't forget your backup solution too.

 

[specialk90]

If you get 4 drives, run them in Raid 10. And if you have a recent Intel motherboard with Raid onboard, you can also create a 2nd Raid array such as Raid 0. I just installed Vista x64 so I could use Photoshop CS4 64bit with more ram and it took over a day to install everthing from Vista to CS4 updates with SP1 and all drivers in between. I wasn't sitting there watching so I could have cut down on the time but who has 12hrs just to sit and watch. This potential downtime if a drive fails without using Raid is often overlooked. Plus, you will have a very fun time calling Adobe and telling them that you didn't have a chance to deactivate your CS4 so could they give you an activation code.
For me, the new GPU-accelerated Bridge is one of the main reasons I upgraded. I have my raw images stored on a Raid 5 array using a hardware controller and 4-7200.11 drives. Looking thru my photos is blazing fast now. I also have 4-150GB Raptors in Raid 10 for OS/Apps/Storage and a Raid 0 for scracth disk & PPro/AE media cache.

Oh yeah....I just had a Raptor die a few weeks ago but I have not lost ANY data or had ANY downtime and I could technically lose another drive and not lose any data thanks to Raid 10. The drive was less than 2yrs old.

 

[rob25]

O.K. , this is more like it , specific answers, fantastichhhh !!!!!!!!!

Eh, El conejito, de donde coño vienes hermano, yo estoy aqui en La Costa el Sol, Saludos :beer:

Great answer conejito, I am triying to set up a new rig, so how do you find the 8 gb of ram u are using ?
I was considering that amount, do you think I should spend more on a mobo that supports up to 12-16 mb, & add more ram & not worry about a 3rd disk ????

How large is a large file ? I am considering that I will be stitching, hdr Average (6x3)= 21, 10mb raw files.

I will probably go for 3 segate 500 7200.12 disks, fast & cheap, Much more space than I need considering that I already have about 1 tb between my laptop & external drives.
The only thing I am worried about is that this seems alright for photoshop cs4 but when I watch the tasks monitor on stitching progams, autopano pro 64 bit, It seems slow but it does not appear to be using all the hardware resources like ps does, I think here is maybe where faster drives might help ????

What Gpu are u using ? I think with a 4830 I will have enough.

Thanks Tigger, but I would have to sell a hell of a lot of frosties to even consider your proposal. :laugh:

I am considering adquiring 4 x segate 500gb 7200:12.(220 ? aprox. budget.)

I know what you mean with the changing over of os , I just upgraded my portable from 32 bit vista home premium to 64x, (Link to post.) But once everthing is optimized up & working it is best to make a drive image of your os & apps drive, no need to reactivate anthing when you reinstall it.

Sorry to hear about the hd death, first time I have ever heard of one dying, I was beggining to wonder if backing up was so important.:Q

 

[elconejito]

Firstly, I'm running CS3 right now which is 32-bit so the max I can assign it is approx 3GB+. Even with that, I don't think I've ever had a single file use up all of that allotment. If I have several large files open I think I may have bumped up against it once or twice, but nothing serious. Since you'll be on CS4, you can handle much bigger files since you can assign Photoshop to use higher than 3GB+, I think it goes up to 75% of your available RAM. So if you have 8GB installed, you can probably assign around 6GB to Photoshop. I don't mind the cap however, since I'm also usually running other apps at the same time like Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc. and they need some RAM too.

That was a really long answer to say I find the 8GB to be just perfect.

To find out how much RAM you need, go get the biggest file you have and open it in photoshop. See what your scratch size is (use the little flyout in the lower left of the document window. scratch size, not document size) while you are using it. As long as the number on the left is is smaller than the number on the right you are using only RAM and are going as fast as you can go. Once that left number goes higher than the right, then and only then are you working off of the hard drive.

The performance difference between RAM and a hard drive is HUGE. No matter what kind of hard drive setup, no matter if it is a raptor or RAID 0 or anything else you can think of it will never compete with RAM. So the best answer is to get as much RAM as you need to fit the files.

If you can get away with 8GB, I think that is your best bet. 4x 2GB sticks is relatively inexpensive and really well supported. If you go to 12 or 16GB you will need some 4GB sticks and those get expensive. If you need more than 8GB I'd recommend investing in an i7 setup and get 6x 2GB for a total of 12GB.

For the hard drive, those sound fine (I haven't used Seagates in a while). Keep in mind though, that you'll start to see a performance hit once about 20-30% of the drive is used. So on a 500G drive you'll start to see some slowness around 150GB used. If you have less data than that, then no problems. Personally, I like the western digital 640GB drives from a price/performance standpoint.

I'm not sure about the autopano pro. Is that a standalone program or a photoshop plugin? There are some programs I use that I'm limited by my CPU or sometimes RAM or sometimes HDD, so it's possible that in that software you may be HDD limited. I can't say for sure.

I'm using a 9600GT, which is fine for me. I do occasionally game on this machine and it's plenty. I don't have CS4 yet, so I don't know how it might influence performance. From the links at Adobe's site it doesn't seem like you need a super fast GPU. It just has to support OpenGL, which probably 99% of recent GPUs are capable of. I thought Nvidia and Adobe are partners so there may be a benefit to using an Nvidia card. Don't know if it's much if any though.

100% agree with the image of your OS/apps. I do that on all my machines. Also make sure you've got a good backup solution too. In a worst case scenario if a drive fails reinstalling windows is a pain, but it's doable. Getting your data back without a backup is impossible.

De donde soy? Mis padres son Colombianos, pero yo naci en los estados unidos. Vivo cerca de Washington, el capital. Saludos!

 

[rob25]

Pues saludos, un dia me gustaria visitar Columbia con la familia, tengo una amiga columbiana aqui (Novia de un amigo.) y he visto fotos y demas y me encanta.

Originally posted by: elconejito
Keep in mind though, that you'll start to see a performance hit once about 20-30% of the drive is used

This is something I was pondering, If you do a first partition of 150 gb & use that for os & on the second use for general storage, will the performance of the first partition always be at the best.
I come to this conclusion if i understand correctly that the outer part of the disk is always faster so if you resrtict the os to a partition there it should not slow down in regards to the other data on the inner part of the disk seeing that it is sectioned off. Is this correct???
If not why?

Thanks for all the valuable info.

*** By the way, The use of ram in cs4 depends on if you have a 32 bit os or a 64 bit os, or a 32 or 64 bit version of photoshop installed.
& another interesting fact is that even if photoshop is only using 3,5 gb of ram & you have 8 ,the first place it will start to use scratch from is the rest of the avilable ram.
I am not sure if this applies to cs3 though.

 

[elconejito]

Originally posted by: rob25
This is something I was pondering, If you do a first partition of 150 gb & use that for os & on the second use for general storage, will the performance of the first partition always be at the best.
I come to this conclusion if i understand correctly that the outer part of the disk is always faster so if you resrtict the os to a partition there it should not slow down in regards to the other data on the inner part of the disk seeing that it is sectioned off. Is this correct???
If not why?

That's correct.

However (and this is just my opinion here, there's probably many that disagree) I don't see much point in it. Let's say you have a 500GB disk, and you set the first partition C at 150GB and the rest of the drive is D. That means anything you put on the D drive is already in a slower part of the disk. And if you only use 50GB of C then you have 100GB of perfectly usable and faster HDD space that is just sitting there unused.

If you only have one drive, it makes some sense in case you need to wipe your drive, restore an image, etc, your data drive is intact. But if something happens where the drive dies the whole thing is screwed anyway. Personally, I like separating OS/apps on one drive, data on another physical drive, not a partition.

But it's really a preference thing I don't think it's right or wrong one way or another. I've known people that use several partitions no matter what. I just happen to be a multi-harddrive guy. I prefer to keep buying progressively bigger and bigger drives to keep my usage to under 20%

Originally posted by: rob25
Thanks for all the valuable info.

*** By the way, The use of ram in cs4 depends on if you have a 32 bit os or a 64 bit os, or a 32 or 64 bit version of photoshop installed.
& another interesting fact is that even if photoshop is only using 3,5 gb of ram & you have 8 ,the first place it will start to use scratch from is the rest of the avilable ram.
I am not sure if this applies to cs3 though.

I thought I had heard that about CS3, but I haven't really had much chance to run into it.

Let us know which way you decide to go with the hard drives and how it ends up working for you.

 

[specialk90]

First off, Adobe and some other programs use a 'secret' place on a hard drive to store license info and this 'secret' place is not visible to the user. Restoring a backup image does not restore this info so you still have that problem. I know about this because I have tried with Norton and $800 Acronis Server and both times, Adobe told me to contact them. I researched why I couldn't restore from an image and learned of this 'secret' section on a hard drive.
2) No matter how many single drives you have and how everything is split across them, it will never be as fast as Raid 10. You said that you don't need the extra space, so 1TB usable space should be enough. When I first started using Adobe CS2, I tried splitting things across single drives and it was never fast enough. Then I learned about Raid 0 and tried that until a Gigabyte motherboard fried itself and causing corruption or damage to one of the 2 drives in Raid 0. I lost some data, but since it was only 7 days after I installed everything, it was very important data. Then I learned about Raid 10 and Intel's Matrix Raid and set up Raid 10 and Raid 0 using 4 drives. Now, I couldn't imagine going back to NO protection and slow speed.
3) No matter what you do, the hard drives will always be the bottleneck. I have done some HDR work with 3-5 24MP photos resulting in images 300MB and larger. With my current Raid set up, I only have to wait a few seconds for the HDR image to be created and also the same for saving. My friend/business partner uses InDesign and Photoshop everyday and every month, he has a 60+ page magazine to put together. This large file eats his resources up quickly. He is not tech savvy, so my explaining Raid to him was like talking to a wall; therefore, I had him use my 2nd PC for a week. It has 4-74GB Raptors in Raid 10 & 0 with CS4, Vista x64 & 6GB ram. He was blown away at the responsiveness and speed so he asked me to make his pc faster. Luckily, his Dell came with Raid 1 and Intel's Matrix Raid; so, I reconfigured his 2 drives to Raid 1 for OS/Apps/Storage and a Raid 0 for scratch disk. But this wasn't enough speed so now he got 2 more drives so I could change it to a 4 drive Raid 10 & 0.
4) If you use Bridge, then you will notice a HUGE improvement using Raid 10 to look thru images. I have a 320GB Sata drive that I put in my PC to backup my photos, and I HATE having to look thru the images on that drive in Bridge because it is so slow compared to my Raid setup. Also, with the new GPU accelerated feature in Bridge CS4 & Photoshop, I can look thru my Raw 24MP photos instantly.
5) Think of it this way: imagine your car running at 7200rpm 24/7 without any maintenance. Hard drives are extremely sensitive pieces of hardware. A 2 inch drop onto carpet broke the brother of my 320GB drive and it was inside an external drive case and it was not powered on.

 

[rob25]

:Q WOW !!!
Thats what I am talking about Blain.

Thanks guys for your time & input, you are realy helpping me out here to clarify some concepts. :thumbsup:

First of all colega Conejito:

An interesting link from adobe press,
What?s it Going to Take to Run Photoshop CS4?
...here it explins ram usage etc.

The reason I would partition is because the lager hds seem to perform better than the smaller drives for a couple of more $, so if I partition that 150 and ensure that it is fast, Ican use the rest for other unimportant data like movies, music, etc. I always have my photos & important data backed up on an external drives as well.
So thanks again for your input & I hope the article enlightens you for when you are ready to jump into 64 x & cs4. Vaya con dios amigo.

Frosties :

Thank you too man, I have been considering the option of raid 0/1, is that what you refer to as raid 10 ? 2x500gb + 1x1tb mirror for eg.?

Is it fairly simple to set up ?

sooner or later I will be going that way.

By the way, I have used acronis & other programs to back up my system & I have never had problems with activations, although now that I think about it I never did one with PS.:roll:
Did you try to do a sector by sector image, I dont think there could be a secret place on the drive if you did it that way.

 

[elconejito]

the 2x500GB will only get you RAID 1. RAID 10 (is that the same as 0/1?) will need four disks. I think specialk90 means you would use the 4 disks in RAID 10 to get you 1 drive.

I think performance wise, can't be beat. But cost is a factor too.

Are you sure you will even be hitting the hard drive if you have enough RAM? (except opening and saving maybe)

===========
On the disk image issue, I've only had to do it once and I did not have to re-activate my adobe (or any others for that matter) products. I did a full disk image, not just a partition or anything like that using Acronis TrueImage. Maybe it matters if you do the full drive or just a partition? Or was it a backup (i.e. just copy everything) rather than a real bit-for-bit image?

 

[specialk90]

/\ I think you might be onto something with the 'partition' disk image vs 'entire' disk image. I just checked in Acronis and it has a check mark next to "Disk" and also "Partition x". As for Norton Ghost, that was a fresh install of windows + CS2 and a full disk image; however, that program was junk - all Norton is junk. This is really awesome news that I can restore without it being a PITA. I will definitely try it when I reconfigure my 2 PCs and reinstall XP Pro or just deal with Vista x64 on both PCs.

Raid 10 is very different from Raid 0+1. Raid 10 combines 2 Raid 1 mirrors by 'striping' data across them. Raid 0+1 combines 2 Raid 0 sets and mirrors them. Raid 10 is far more common because it is superior for a few reasons; one of which is being able to increase read speeds/access a little just like Raid 1. However, the Raid controller must have this capability(Intel's ICH7/8/9/10R all do). Funny thing is Mac uses the inferior 0+1 but I bet they will say "it just works".

For the 150GB of 500GB - that is kinda called short stroking. However, for short stroking to work, only the first xGB can be used -- the rest of the drive must remain free of partitions/data so the drive's head will be restricted to the space being used. For a 250GB with 34GB used, IOP(# of transactions/s) increased 65% and 12GB increased performance 90%. For your laptop w/ 2 drives, you can create a Raid 1 array and also a Raid 0 array to maximize performance. My current XP Raid 10 array is solely for the 'C' drive and is 60GB so it uses the first 30GB of each 150GB Raptor which is 20% and the Raid 0 array is the 'D' drive using the rest of the space. According to some benchmark tests, my Random Access only decreased to 6.8ms from 8.0 for a single drive. If I didn't use any more of the drives, it should be a little lower. For your future desktop, I don't see why a 4-500GB Raid 10 + 0 setup wouldn't provide the necessary speed & performance you are seeking. For a little more money, you could upgrade to the Seagate ES.2 enterprise-class drives which get you more reliable hardware plus about 15-20& higher IOP compared to their 7200.11 desktop siblings. The ES.2's IOP performance is very close to the Velociraptor in server benchmarks and yet its only 7200rpm.

 

[rob25]

I had a few problems with windows & acronis once, I made a backup image, then latter on I added my second drive.When I went to restore my c: partiton one day, acronis asked where etc , on C: bla.bla bla. Then I booted up & when I got passed my pasword to get into windows it sort of got stuck in limbo. I opened the task manager & ran explorer : I got to the desktop & windows kept giving me messages that I did not have administrator privilidges.I also realized that it was installing my os on D: instead of C: After about 3 days of googling & trying fixes which just lead to other problems, I discovered by trial & error that it would only load the partition correctly if there was one hd instaled. I think it probably had something to do with the mbr or something like that ?

So just take that into consideration, I dont know how well it will work with raid or if you change to a different hardware config.

& I repeat, if you do a sector by sector aproach of the entire hard disk I cannot see how you would have any problems with activations.

I also found this link to an NTI Drive Backup 4 portable

You can make bootable dvd or drive backups.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: specialk90
2) No matter how many single drives you have and how everything is split across them, it will never be as fast as Raid 10.

For the same number of disks, raid 0 and raid 10 will have identical in read speads but raid 0 will be nearly 2x faster in write speeds.

The tradeoff with raid 10 is your write bandwidth is 1/2 that of raid 0 but you get data redundancy in exchange.

 

[rob25]

My head is about to explode now, looking up different raid systems.

So the difference between raid 10 & reid 0,1 is that:
- with raid 10 you mirror 1 drive with another then you set up the same in parallel as a 0 setup.
- with raid 0,1 you first stripe 1 drive & then you mirror each drive.


could you not stripe 2 500 drives in raid 0 then mirror that in a 1 tb drive? I suppose the write time to the 1 tb would be slower?

 

[elconejito]

I think this is how it goes, correct me if I'm wrong here (this is all fascinating, btw...)
=======
RAID 10:
Drive 1
Drive 2
Drive 3
Drive 4

Drive 1 & 2 are mirrored (RAID 1)
Drive 3 & 4 are mirrored (RAID 1)

Mirror 1&2 and Mirror 3&4 are then striped (RAID 0)

Advantage of RAID 0 performance (or close to), RAID 1 mitigates the risk of catastrophe in RAID 0 setups. (i.e. both drives in one mirror would have to fail at once for the RAID 0 to fail).

Assuming 4x500GB drives, this would give 1TB usable disk space?

=======
RAID 0,1:
Drive 1
Drive 2
Drive 3
Drive 4

Drive 1 & 2 are striped (RAID 0)
Drive 3 & 4 are striped (RAID 0)

Stripe 1&2 and Stripe 3&4 are then Mirrored (RAID 1)

This seems like a fail all the way 'round? If *any* of the drives fail the whole RAID setup dies, right? [EDIT: I look at it a little longer, and maybe it doesn't fail? What is the advantage or disadvantage to doing it this way? Or maybe I'm missing something here...]

Assuming 4x500GB drives, this would also give 1TB usable disk space?

=======
@rob25 - Assuming you could do that, what would be the advantage?

=======
I guess the question is...
Would having *ONE* super fast RAID 10 setup with OS, OS Swap, Applications, PS Swap and Storage all on the same drive be better than having *MULTIPLE* drives to avoid simultaneous usage of any one particular drive? I don't know the answer to that...

 

[rob25]

Originally posted by: elconejito
II guess the question is...
Would having *ONE* super fast RAID 10 setup with OS, OS Swap, Applications, PS Swap and Storage all on the same drive be better than having *MULTIPLE* drives to avoid simultaneous usage of any one particular drive? I don't know the answer to that...

I think that was the original question !!!!

From all the gathered information I think maybe the raid would be faster but les stable.

Why?

-Because ( Take the 4x segates for eg.):

If you assign 100% of the power of 1xdisk (Dedicated) to each seperate task, when that task/disk reaches 100% of its performance it will not go any faster regardles of what the other 3 disks are doing, so OS, for eg. can only read/write as fast as 1x disk.

-If we give 100% of the power of all the disksx4 (raid 0) to share indiscriminately ,1 task (say OS. for eg.)can be using up to 4x100% of the power of 4 disks if we were not using scratch or saving files.

-So in the case of raid 10 I suppose we 2x write speed (writing the same amount of info to 2 disks at once + repeating that info on another 2.) & 4x the read speed aprox of the whole overal processes.(We have four disks to retrieve the information from.)

So I think the real answer to this question would be another more specific question:

In what context would dedicated drives be better than raid or faster, if all drives were running over 80% of their capacity?
Someone very tachnical who knows how the software/hardware relation works might be able to answer that, or maybe someone could do some tests & comparisons.
I thimk that the raid solution would be a lot more sternuous on the cpu because it would have to decide how to share the resources between Os, scratch,swap & files, & the heads of the drives would be going crazy, wheras with dedicated there would be no conflict.

Stability wise- I guess that if you hand each one a differnt task the processes wont be fighting between each other when things get hairy, thats why I suppose that RAID has a higher failure rate too apart from the fact that 4 drives have 4x the probability of failure.

Thats the conclusion I have come to.

***Corrected 16/April/2009, sorry my head was a bit overloaded

 

[specialk90]

"-Because if you assign 1/4 of the power to each task it is the fastest it will go, so when that task reaches 100% of its capacity it will not go any faster regardles of what the other 75% are doing.
-If we give 100% to all the tasks to share indiscriminately when 1 task requires 50% & the others are not using it can use it. "

I'm not quite following your logic here...could you explain better?

One MAJOR important aspect not mentioned is the fact that you can ALSO create a Raid 0 array for non-important data. Right off the bat, that would include scratch disk and page file, and the OS/Apps if you don't mind the chance of having to restore/resintall. Therefore, the Raid 10 would be used solely for pictures. Lets say that you put just the pictures on Raid 10 and using 4-500GB drives; A Raid 0 array of 100GB should be more than enough which will leave you with 475GB for Raid 10. Creating the Raid 0 first will put it on the first 25GB of each drive giving you max performance for the OS/Apps, page file/os swap and scratch disk.

Raid 10 vs 0+1: not trying to be rude but this is a useless debate because 90+% Raid controllers use 10, which is superior. I think someone pointed out that 10 has better read speeds, which is correct. It has something to do with the underlying Raid 1 mirrors and the fact that good controllers are able to maximize Raid 1 read performance.

So no one is confused on how simple and easy creating a Raid 10 + Raid 0 array is, this is how its done: (I'm fully explaining everything because I want to help a fellow photog, especially when photographers are one of the worst hit groups in this recession). This is after the pc is put together.
1) When PC boots up, hit 'Delete' or whatever gets into BIOS.
2) Go to the section that has you select "AHCI", Raid" and IDE(I think) and select Raid. This is usually on the 1st BIOS page. Then save & exit.
3) After POST screen, another screen should pop up and says hold "Cntrl" + "I"(letter eye) to enter Intel Matrix Raid configuration- do that.
4) Once in, it will ask to "1-Create Raid", "2-Delete Raid", "3-Reset Raid 2 Non-Raid" and 4-Exit. Select #1.
5) It will ask to add the drives you want to use so add all 4 drives.
6a) Then it will ask what Raid you want. If you want OS/Apps/ page file & scratch disk on Raid 0, then select Raid 0
6b) If you want OS/Apps & photos on Raid 10, then select "Raid 10" (The 1st Raid array created needs to host the OS)
7) Now select "Stripe Size". If OS ->Raid 0, select 16KB; if OS ->Raid 10 select 32KB.
8) Select how much space you want allocated to that array.
9) Select create and stay there to create your next Raid array
(The "Stripe Size" and Space allocation order might be reversed)

A) If OS + Apps + page file + scratch disk are on Raid 0, "Stripe Size" for Raid 0=16KB and Raid 10=32KB; Raid 0 created 1st
B) If OS + Photos are on Raid 10, Stripe Size=32KB & Raid 0=64KB. Raid 10 created 1st.

One more idea for 4-500GB drives:
- 2 drives with a Raid 0 for OS/Apps, page file & scratch disk and a Raid 1 for storage
- 2 drives in Raid 1 for photos. This will give you some more storage space but slightly hurt overall performance. Or create a Raid 0 on the 2 drives but only use the first 50GB of each drive(100GB total) and leave the rest empty. Ooooohhhh. This sounds VERY tempting to try out myself since short stroking works so well.

 

[rob25]

specialk90

I'm not quite following your logic here...could you explain better?

Sorry, I edited that again, I hope I made it clearer...


Im realy lost with this Raid 10, are you saying that you can take 4 disks , select 100 gb in Raid 0, then raid 10 on the rest???

Another question, are you using a hardware controler for this raid 10, from what i have read it is not recomendable to do raid 10 just by software.

 

[rob25]

To find out how much RAM you need, go get the biggest file you have and open it in photoshop. See what your scratch size is (use the little flyout in the lower left of the document window. scratch size, not document size) while you are using it. As long as the number on the left is is smaller than the number on the right you are using only RAM and are going as fast as you can go. Once that left number goes higher than the right, then and only then are you working off of the hard drive.

Wow, just cheking this out, where did you get that info. from?
That is realy valuable info to me, I had no idea how to figure that out, thanks. :thumbsup:

100% agree with the image of your OS/apps. I do that on all my machines. Also make sure you've got a good backup solution too. In a worst case scenario if a drive fails reinstalling windows is a pain, but it's doable. Getting your data back without a backup is impossible.

You dont even need to instal windows if you create an acronis true image bootable cd, just recover from there & have imagebackup on an external drive.

 

[elconejito]

The scratch size thing I've known about for ages. I usually mention it because about 90% of people I know that work with photoshop (graphic artists, photographers, etc) say "wow, i didn't know that!" You'd be surprised (or maybe not) how big a 10mb file expands to when it's "opened" in Photoshop. So as long as the scratch size stays less than your RAM the whole drive issue may be moot. In my case it all stays in RAM, so the hard drives aren't that big of an issue. You can also check "Efficiency", if it's 100% it's all in RAM, anything less and you're using the hard drive. I like the scratch size better though...

Definitely look and see what your RAM usage is. That way you can just buy what you need.

Originally posted by: specialk90
Raid 10 vs 0+1: not trying to be rude but this is a useless debate because 90+% Raid controllers use 10, which is superior. I think someone pointed out that 10 has better read speeds, which is correct. It has something to do with the underlying Raid 1 mirrors and the fact that good controllers are able to maximize Raid 1 read performance.

lol, is that for me? It's a serious question. I'm positive it has some influence which comes first the stripe or the mirror, I was just looking for an idea of why or how much. I've frequently seen RAID 10, RAID 0,1 not so much and there must be a reason why.

Originally posted by: specialk90
So no one is confused on how simple and easy creating a Raid 10 + Raid 0 array is, this is how its done:

Where does the intel storage matrix manager (or whatever it's called) come into play? Or is this "instead of"?

Originally posted by: specialk90
One more idea for 4-500GB drives:
- 2 drives with a Raid 0 for OS/Apps, page file & scratch disk and a Raid 1 for storage
- 2 drives in Raid 1 for photos.

Definitely a good option. You could make an image of the RAID 0 drive and store it on the RAID 1 for a quick rebuild in case of disaster.

So many options..

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: elconejito

Originally posted by: specialk90
Raid 10 vs 0+1: not trying to be rude but this is a useless debate because 90+% Raid controllers use 10, which is superior. I think someone pointed out that 10 has better read speeds, which is correct. It has something to do with the underlying Raid 1 mirrors and the fact that good controllers are able to maximize Raid 1 read performance.

lol, is that for me? It's a serious question. I'm positive it has some influence which comes first the stripe or the mirror, I was just looking for an idea of why or how much. I've frequently seen RAID 10, RAID 0,1 not so much and there must be a reason why.

http://www.storagereview.com/g...evels/multLevel01.html

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd...d/levels/multXY-c.html

 

[rob25]

Cant delete this

Stripped = joining two disks to act as one hence x2 the power & capacity.
mirrored= joining two disks in order to duplicate/backup transfers.

four disks, a50,b50,c50,d50.

raid 0+1

a50 & b50 are striped to become x100 .
c50 & d50 are striped to become y100 .

x100 mirrors (backs up) y100.

raid 1+0

a50 mirrors b50 to become x50
c50 mirrors d50 to become y50

x50 & y50 are striped to become xy100

 

[rob25]

Great I.D.C., those links help to clarify everything, 1+0 & 0+1 I think is the easiest for layman terms.


The advantage a 1+0 would have is that when one disk fails you still run on 3: & you only have to recover the down disk.

with 0+1 when one disk goes down it takes its partner with it & you only run on 2 disks & have to recover the other 2.
So specialk is right, because in 1+0 you could have a second failure unless it was the mirror of the first failure, I think:frown:[/quote]