How would you configure my hard drives?

[Drizzy]

Ok I'm setting up 2 SATAII 80gb hdd in Raid 0. and I have a 160GB SATAII HDD and a 120GB IDE 133 HDD.

I planned to use my Raid config for my OS (30GB partition) as well as applications(~70GB partition) and finally RAW images (50GB partition) and the windows page file (~5-7GB).

I plan to use the 160GB SATAII HDD for my scratch disk as well as my data (my documents, movies, music, pictures, etc...)

Finally I want to use the IDE for nightly backups from my Raid0 and 160gb drive. Any things you would recommend I change?

Should I have my scratch disk on the RAID and the page file on the 160GB or does that matter?
I do a lot of photo editing and multi-tasking with illustrator, photoshop, indesign all open and running at the same time.... that is really where I want to improve on speed. Thanks for any recommendations.

 

[MegaVovaN]

Seems fine to me. You can have two page files one on SATA RAID and other on 160gb SATA.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Your configuration is well thought out, planned, and looks to be solid. Will the nightly backups of the RAID 0 array be done automatic or manually?

You mentioned storing the RAW files seperately--do you save your project & PSD files? If so, I would store them and back them up as well. Doesn't hurt having the important stuff in two places, and I never rely on optical media for backup...

:beer:

EDIT: Question... If you run out of room, how do you plan on implementing more storage?

 

[Drizzy]

automatically - probably every other day .. dont know if nightly will be needed. Yeah my project and PSD files will be backed up as well. Once I'm done working on something I'll save it to the SATAII 160gb for storage and have an extra copy on the IDE.

As for more storage - I'll throw another 2 drives onto my RAID setup and have 4 80gb drives.. or add another SATAII drive (non-raid) but if my backup gets full I plan to buy an external drive anyways so I'll just use that. I have a feeling my RAID is going to fill up first - so I think 4 drives in RAID 0 should be fun.

A few more general HDD questions - I've read that the inner part of the HDD is the slowest and the outter part or first partition is the fastest. Would it make sense to have a partition on the inner part of the drive that I leave blank? Example - say on an 80GB HDD I have a 30GB partition for OS and a 30GB partition for specific apps and then leave ~20GB in a 3rd partition that is never used? This would prevent the data from fragmenting as much and would make sure everything is on the fastest part of the HDD. Is this overkill for the benefit you'd gain? (I have read that you shouldnt have less than 15% of an SATA drive blank anyways or it can slow your system down substantially so maybe this would be another benefit to doing a blank partition on the inner part of the disk?)

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Drizzy
automatically - probably every other day .. dont know if nightly will be needed. Yeah my project and PSD files will be backed up as well. Once I'm done working on something I'll save it to the SATAII 160gb for storage and have an extra copy on the IDE.

As for more storage - I'll throw another 2 drives onto my RAID setup and have 4 80gb drives.. or add another SATAII drive (non-raid) but if my backup gets full I plan to buy an external drive anyways so I'll just use that. I have a feeling my RAID is going to fill up first - so I think 4 drives in RAID 0 should be fun.

A few more general HDD questions - I've read that the inner part of the HDD is the slowest and the outter part or first partition is the fastest. Would it make sense to have a partition on the inner part of the drive that I leave blank? Example - say on an 80GB HDD I have a 30GB partition for OS and a 30GB partition for specific apps and then leave ~20GB in a 3rd partition that is never used? This would prevent the data from fragmenting as much and would make sure everything is on the fastest part of the HDD. Is this overkill for the benefit you'd gain? (I have read that you shouldnt have less than 15% of an SATA drive blank anyways or it can slow your system down substantially so maybe this would be another benefit to doing a blank partition on the inner part of the disk?)

personally i would pick up acronis and use its scheduler to automatically image the raid array nightly. acronis is fast, i use v8 or 9 (can't remember) and when i image my 15k to my 10k scsi hdds on the same card (the 15k is the c drive and i use about 18GB or so of os/apps/game files it takes about 4-6mins going to the other scsi drive on the card). your bottleneck will be the drive it is going to but shoudn't take that long at all. plus i hear that acronis 10 is even faster.

also i just picked up the newest version of diskeeper and have it running all the time. you honestly can't tell it is there at all, they did an excellent job and it always keeps the hdds nice and defragmented, again let it run automatically.

 

[Drizzy]

Yeah I plan to get acronis 10 for the auto backups. Is there any problem with having your page file assigned to a different hard disk than the OS is on?

EDIT: Which (pagefile or scratch disk) should I put on the RAID 0 drive? Which would be more beneficial? How often does windows need to access the pagefile with 2GB of RAM?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Drizzy
Yeah I plan to get acronis 10 for the auto backups. Is there any problem with having your page file assigned to a different hard disk than the OS is on?

EDIT: Which (pagefile or scratch disk) should I put on the RAID 0 drive? Which would be more beneficial? How often does windows need to access the pagefile with 2GB of RAM?

actually windows always uses a pagefile, just to a lesser amount with more ram, but there are things always getting swapped in and out.

personally i run a pagefile on each hdd. i just let windows take care of the size. thise seemed to give the best performance vs having just 1 pagefile, albeit smaller and smaller as long as it is off the main drive (whole drive, not partition)