Digital BW, The Print

> I'm about to build a new PC for working on large images (500 MB) in
> Photoshop, and trying to decide between SCSI or IDE disks. I know this
> is fairly off-topic, but I respect the members of this group, and many
> of the images will be B&W, so be nice.
>
> The IDE setup could be a Western Digital 100G 7,200rpm (with 8MB buffer)
> as the system disk, plus a RAID-0 array of two 40G 7,200rpm drives for
> the scratch disk. Or, for about $400 net cost increase, I could use
> smaller but faster SCSI disks: a 73G 10,000rpm system disk and an 18G
> 15,000rpm scratch disk.
>
> I think the biggest advantage of the SCSI disks would be faster access
> times, but I don't know how much faster the SCSI machine would really be
> in practice, because I don't know what size data blocks Photoshop reads
> and writes to its scratch disk. Can anyone help?

I think you'll find the IDE drives fast enough. Not quite as fast as SCSI,
but very close. SCSI would show a much greater advantage if you were
building a server, but for a workstation it's value is questionable. In
addition to the extra expense, SCSI drives are also noisier and run hotter
(which in turn means more fans and more noise).

I'd suggest a small (30gb or so) drive to hold your operating system and
program files, and a large pair of striped drives for storage/work space. A
single or striped pair of 20gb files would be plenty for scatch space.