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leftheaded
08-11-07, 03:21 PM
I'm going to do a lot of photo editing in Photoshop & Lightroom, video editing in Vegas, and audio editing in Sound Forge.

What's the best bang for the buck as far as config/setup for performance? My current thoughts are something like these (backup will be to a separate box and DVD):

2 x 150GB Raptors using ICH9R Matrix RAID 0 (OS/Apps on 50GB, 128k stripe) and RAID 0 (temp/swap/cache/? on 250GB, 64k stripe)
OR

2 x 250GB 7200.10 seagates (ST3250410AS, the single platter). Same idea with two RAID 0 in a matrix, but with different sizes. or maybe even RAID0 of 50GB and a RAID 1 of 220GB?

Keeping the noise down is important to me too. Seagate clearly gets the edge here.

The kicker is the bang for the buck. I'm really wondering if the Raptors are worth difference in price. Is it going to be night and day difference across the board? Or would Raptors only benefit application startup times? Saving < 10 seconds on app startup is not worth it to me, but I don't know if there are other benefits I'm not aware of. Any help would be very appreciated as I hope to finalize my purchases today.

I want the Raptors, but I'm having trouble justifying double the price because I'm not certain of what benefits I'll see other than "it seeks faster". That's not tangible to me (or my wife) lol

phantasm
08-11-07, 03:36 PM
Personally, i dont like my system drive being a part of an array. To me it feels like bad juju.

I'd place my swap and working directories on the array, the OS and Apps. on an individual Raptor would be fine.

Like this:

1x 78GB Raptor for OS and Raptors.
2x Seagate 7200.10 drives in whatever size you want running in RAID 0

leftheaded
08-11-07, 04:16 PM
that's pretty much the same thing that someone over at a photography forum advised. here's what he suggested,

Forget RAID-0. It doesn't really help that much.

What you want is as follows:
C: [ 74GB or 150GB Raptor ] operating system & applications
D: [ 2 each, 7200rpm SATA II drives of whatever size in RAID-1 ] data storage
K: [ 74GB or 150GB Raptor ] cache drive, i.e., windows page file & PS scratch files