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Which RAID for Photoshop?

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mcennis4

Registered
Joined
Nov 28, 2001
I've never set up RAID and was wondering which one to go with. Normally, my OS is the only thing on the C: drive so all my files are safe on other partitions and drives. I'm guessing I don't need to mirror correct? If one drive goes down can you install the other to another PC or does RAID prevent this? I'm looking for speed for large file editing.
 
I'd go with Raid0 or Raid5.

It would help somewhat with loading times (especially with Huge image files) but what really seems to help photoshop is Lots of RAM - It's a memory hog :)
 
If speed is your goal, HD will make very little difference, Ram is your solution, 2gb+ If you want faster loads a RAID1 with 2 Raptors would be the fastest safest and least expencive way to do it.
 
I vote RAID 5, then RAID 1, then 0.

RAID 5 is expensive because you need At least 3 drives. So Go RAID 1.

(Yes I know this is like my first post in 3 months)
 
Thanks for the replies. I finally found a few sites that posted some benchmarks and if there is enough ram it won't use the scratch disk. Since it is for Photoshop, I bought 4gb of PQI turbo DDR2 667 that was recommended vs. going with 2gb of muskin/corsair so I'm guessing I should have enough. However, I'm having a hard time setting it up in the bios to boot at 667 and of course, I didn't see any problem threads until after I had ordered it. Hopefully I'll find a fix today.
 
infinitevalence said:
If speed is your goal, HD will make very little difference, Ram is your solution, 2gb+ If you want faster loads a RAID1 with 2 Raptors would be the fastest safest and least expencive way to do it.

I disagree, quite the opposite. When I went to RAID it was the BIGGEST performance boost that Ive gotten.

When you have two hdd's working as one everything is going to speed up, some things better than others.

Transferring files, no brainer, much faster. Accessing programs, the same.

Of course the more ram the better but as far as worth while performance, I definately recommend going RAID (0), just remember redudancy doesnt exist.
 
Wouldn't you lose all data with a crash?

Googled...
"Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost."
 
mcennis4 said:
Wouldn't you lose all data with a crash?

Googled...
"Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost."

edwardaune said:
just remember redudancy doesnt exist.

True, thats why I mentioned that, RAID 5, same as RIAD 0 w/redundancy. RAID 0 if you only have two drives, just back up often.

You should do that anyways. There is no prefect system.
 
I would use a raid 0 array for the scratch disk. Photoshop does not like to use the same physical drive where the pagefile is and you should have one no matter how much ram you have. Anyway, partition a drive install windows on C. Use the raid array for scratch and it will be smokin fast.
 
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