How many drives do I really need?

[thatsright]

Hi All. For my new X58/i7-920 build I have been trying to figure out how many drives I will need. I have thought about buying a SSD, and don't think I will. What is driving me getting a new rig is Photoshop CS4 and Bridge. I will be installing Windows 7 64-bit w/ 6GB Ram. A few scamarios:

I will buy a 1TB WD Caviar Black drive for C for OS) and D for (Data) drive. BUT I need to have the Photoshop scratch disk on the fastest drive, which would be C. And I will have lots of slowdown issues if I also leave the Win 7 page file on this single physical hard drive. So I need to move the page file somewhere else. A few thoughts:

1. If I use the WD Caviar Black drive for the O/S and data storage, I will need another physical drive for the Win 7 page file. How about putting it on a 4 year old PATA Seagate drive?
2. If no to #1 then how many new drives should I buy? Should I buy a new HD just to put the page file on (along with other archived data).
3. I was thinking of going with RAID Mirroring, but I hear doing so on the X58 based mobo isn't really going to gain any performance. BUT I want to do this for a bit of data redundancy (though certainly not bullet proof).

What do you guys think?

 

[Red Squirrel]

For a workstation 1 is enough, just make sure you backup. I do like having two drives so I can do localized backups, and there's a slight performance increase (which I probably don't even notice anyway).

If you want speed for a scratch disk try to put two drives in raid 0. If you want redundancy then raid 5 is the cheapest bet, you need 3 drives. Or if you want to go hardcore, raid 10 with 4 drives.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Having everything one one drive isn't going ot cause slowdowns that bad. And the WD Black drives are fast enough to make that slowdown negligible. I think putting the Win 7 pagefile on a 4 year old, much slower drive is going to be slower than having it all on one disk.

What about getting a thumb drive and putting the page file on there? Might be something to research if you are trying to tweak your system.

Or since RAM is so cheap now, create a RAM disk and put your swap and/or page file on there.

What I would do in that instance is just get a 150gb VelociRaptor (they are relatively cheap now), and have the pagefile and/or scratch on there. The 10k rpm drive gives great random reads/writes. Else I'd stick everything on one drive.

 

[pjkenned]

You probably need 1 drive... unless you really want to network boot. If you want a bit more speed, plus some redundancy, Raid 5 w/ 3 disk minimum. A decent raid 5 controller with 4-5 drives will give you decent hard drive performance. Raid 5/6 performance benefits from more spindles being added

 

[sxr7171]

I respectfully disagree with everyone's thoughts. HDDs are the very bane of modern computing. They are so far behind our tech in CPUs, GPUs, interfaces, memory - everything.

Why would you buy a 1TB drive just to house the OS? A windows install is only about 12GB.

I would get 2 40GB Kingston SSDs ($115) and 1 WDC Caviar Black for data.

One 40GB SSD would be for your OS, trust me you will not fill it if you make sure your data is on the 1TB. Then since you want a blazing fast scratch disk use the other 40GB SSD for your scratch disk and/or pagefile. Don't worry about SSD lifespan. No matter how you abuse it, it will last you 5 years. $115 for 5 years is peanuts.

Alternatively get an 80GB Intel SSD put your OS and scratch disk on it.

I'm saying this because I very excitedly built up an i7 an O/C'd it to 4.1GHz and at the end of it all I can't get any useful program (sure benchmarks) to even get this CPU to 100%. Everything is limited by disk reads. If I run multiple instances of a transcoder I still can't get to 100

I tell you I am dying for the day when we see 1 or 2TB SSDs. Physical disk drives are keeping us down. They are only worth it for bulk storage due to SSD's high cost right now. We will enter a whole new era of workstation performance when we switch to SSDs. Begin the transition now, it doesn't seem cost is a major issue for you.