Digital BW, The Print

Keep in mind that small drives generally speaking have relatively low
read/write speeds and the best speed is at the start (outside) of the disk.
Photoshop reads and writes big chunks so this is important to PS
performance. I use this chart for checking out disk performance. Max read
and write is the data point to look at.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html?modelx=33&model1=1015&model2=1016&chart=36

I find that hard disk performance is the limiting factor with Photoshop and
disk performance is always improving. So if you haven't upgraded your hard
disks in the last 2 years, you'll almost certainly get a 50%+ performance
improvement by doing so. Also pick your disks carefully as even in the same
family some have 25% better read/write performance than others.

I personally use WD 750 RE2 AAYS drives, 6 of them in a Raid 0 array for a
stonking 600Mb/sec performance. Makes it practical to manipulate 1gb images.
Raid 0 has no redundancy so I have to back up regularily. I've never had a
disk failure and these RE2 are high duty cycle server disks with 1.2 million
hour MTBF which I think means that even with 6 of them I can expect a
failure every 20 years in heavy use. I use them lightly for typically 2
years.

Mike

On 29/01/2008, Paul Grant <gphoto2@...> wrote:
>
>   Richard, I have a lot of drives but that's not so important..each RAID 0
> pair needs at least two drives. So for my current latest configuration I
> have a Raid 1 pair of 500gb hard drives as my system drive. This gives me
> 100% back up of my 500gb system drives. I also have the RAID 0 70gb of
> scratch disk which is two drives and I also have a pair of RAID 1 750gb
> drives for my photo storage. All in all I have 6 drives in my system with
> room for 2 more as needed.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> Pal
>
> On 1/29/08 2:24 PM, "Richard Smallfield" <r.smallfield@paradise.net.nz<r.smallfield%40paradise.net.nz>
> >
> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > So how many physical hard drives does that give you?
> >
> > If you had Raid 0 for everything surely that would be a lot of drives?
> >
> > I'm wondering if I could do that with a Scratch partition on each of my
> two
> > IDE storage drives.
> >
> > thanks,
> > Richard
> >
> > At 11:07 AM Wednesday 1/30/2008, you wrote:
> >> >I use a RAID 0 pair of 36gb 10,000 rpm drives for my scratch disk.
> This
> >> >gives me a scratch disk of 72gb that is more than enough and very
> FAST. I
> >> >have also used this configuration for my C (system) drive in the past
> but
> >> >this is a dangerous way to go if you don¹t back up frequently. With
> faster
> >> >SATA II drives I am now configuring my C (system) drive as a pair of
> RAID 1
> >> >drives. This is reasonably fast and 100% fault tolerent.
> >
> > --
> > Backroads Essay:
> > http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmallfield/TheBackroadsOfWarkworth
> > Greeting Cards available for purchase:
> > http://picasaweb.google.com/rsmallfield/GreetingCards
> > http://photos.smallfield.vze.com
> > http://smallfield.vze.com
> >
> > "Do all the good you can,
> > By all the means you can,
> > In all the ways you can,
> > In all the places you can,
> > At all the times you can,
> > To all the people you can,
> > As long as ever you can."
> > ---John Wesley
> >
> >
> >
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
> 
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]