Digital BW, The Print

Hi Michael,
The benefits of using a RAID setup are that data is distributed across the drives under the RAID controller. So this isn't so much about gaining the extra disk space as it is about providing a failsafe backup. As I understand it, RAID technology has migrated from server systems where it was very important for file or system servers to maintain data integrity in the event of a failure. If you install a minimum of two hard disks, then the RAID controller will ensure that data is written to both disks.
Since a lot of motherboards now come with raid controllers built in, and the drivers for them come with the install disk, it means that with a little simple configuration, your machine will keep two copies of everything. I believe it's the case (since my current machine doesn't have one, my last machine did) that in the event of data loss or disk failure, you can then boot to the second disk where all of your data will still be stored. Of course, you'd then have to replace the faulty disk. So you don't have to keep consciously making backup copies of your files. Depending on your machine (PC?) the hardware shouldn't cost a fortune. I recently bought a very good motherboard that cost me £56 - and it flies. The trick seems to be to avoid the bells and whistles and look at core performance.

It's my personal opinion that the key to large file management is plenty of RAM. I don't know very much about the Adobe scratch disk except that it is a means for the program to use disk space as virtual memory. If you have plenty of RAM installed on the machine (plus the fact that you can configure Photoshop via the preferences menu to allocate system memory use) then the scratch disk shouldn't really be an issue. I've got a single 120Gb hard disk in this machine and recently managed to produde a 2Gb file from a scan! With just 2Gb of system memory, I didn't have a problem opening and editing the file. True it wasn't lightning fast but it was certainly workable.

Regards

Alan

-- 
  Alan Ansell
  aansell@...

----- Original message -----
From: "Michael-K" <michael3442@...>
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 09:59:20 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Digital BW] Re: OT: Computer Hard Drive & Backup Management

Thanks, Alan. Regarding the Raid setup, are the "real world" benefits of this route really worth the time/trouble to set it all up? Can you provide a nutshell summary of what these benefits are? Thanks.
-Michael K
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