What is your digital processing computer hard disk array??

[mochanjava]

I'm planning on upgrading my current computer. Will increase my RAM, switch to Vista 64 and am going to upgrade my hard drives to include some WD Caviar blacks. I just haven't decided how many drives to go with. So I am just wondering what kind of hard disk arrays do you people have set up for your digital imaging computers...

According to Adobe (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb401088) it's best to set the primary scratch disk to a different hard disk than the one Windows uses for its virtual memory or paging file.

So do any of you have 4 drives?
1 for os and apps
2 for data
3 for ps scratch
4 for os scratch

I've been reading about how a RAID 0 with 2 of the newer WD caviar blacks drives are faster (and cheaper) than a 10K Raptor. Do some of you have even MORE drives, using a pair of striped drives in RAID 0 for scratch or OS/apps?

My current set up is a 3 disk array.
A 32 GB Raptor for OS/apps
A 250 gb SATA for data, where I also have the windows paging file.
A 250 gb SATA for some data and CS3 scratch drive.

[skymasteres]

Okay,

I was a nerd first before I got into photography so here is my setup:

Boot Drive: WD Velociraptor 300gb
Scratch Drive: Mtron 32gb SSD (Photoshop & Premier)
Swap Drive (windows & Photoshop): 4gb Gigabyte I-Ram
Storage: WD 1000FYPS Raid 6 on a Promise EX8650 controller.

All told I have about a dozen drives in the system, but I also use it as a media server.

1) Raid is a good thing. Disks are so cheep now that even buying two and mirroring them will not be prohibitive.

2) Backing up is something you will never regret. (I also have a 1tb external that I use for my pictures, even though they are on the raid 6 array, to protect against the off chance of a virus taking stuff out)

3) Best performance is achieved when you only have one program using a disk at a time. (It gets a little more complicated as you get into raid)

Hope this helps

[Damian75]

First off Stripping is a bad idea if you plan on using it for anything other than scratch if you loose any drive in a stripe you can kiss all your data goodbye this is my personal setup.
Boot = Hitachi 300BG 15000rpm SAS dirve
Storage = Seagate 1tb X4 set up in at Raid 0+1 config

[adam8080]

Four 750GB hard drives in a raid 10 for my main hard drive,
one 250GB hard drive as a scratch drive for Photoshop and Lightroom,
one 1TB hard drive for backup of all real data (including photos) on my main hard drive,
one 500GB hard drive to backup photos only,
and one 250GB hard drive for transferring data between computers.

The last two hard drives listed are removable in these cases to take with me when i go on trips, or just need to take that data with me.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817123302

[philmar]

WOW - I am feeling envious. Do you guys have to buy a hydro-electric dam to run this stuff?:)

[adam8080]

WOW - I am feeling envious. Do you guys have to buy a hydro-electric dam to run this stuff?:)

Nope.

My back yard:
http://www.our-energy.com/pictures/energy_facts/nuclear_power_plant_steam.jpg

[philmar]

you should upgrade to Canadian nuke technology.
Much prettier site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

Plus I am sure they could use the heavy water coolant system to help cool down the vid card and disk arrays you lucky buggers have.


I currently have a 3 HD setup - old 32 gb Raptor for my os/apps and 2x 320 gb WD SATA drives - 1 for data and the other for scratch disk and some data (like Picasa, ACR and bridge cache files).
I will be upgrading this soon....very soon. But I just saw how cheap memory is and will do that first.

[adam8080]

Only if I had known about that before I built my 6 reactors. I'm thinking about adding 2 more. 6 isn't really keeping up to my demands when when everyone is my house is blowing their hair and the iron is on when my computer is running.

[tim]

C: System drive. It probably has swap or page file on it too.
D: Personal data, documents
E: Images only
Y: part of the D drive partitioned off as my ACR/Bridge cache, to avoid fragmentation

[bioman35]

Two SSD in Raid 0 would be pretty quick.

[In2Photos]

C: System drive. It probably has swap or page file on it too.
D: Personal data, documents
E: Images only
Y: part of the D drive partitioned off as my ACR/Bridge cache, to avoid fragmentation
Mine is similar.

C: OS and Apps
D: Personal data
E: Images only
F: Internal Backup
N: External Backup

I have my page file on one of the drives also, but forget which one. I think D.

[skymasteres]

Really data security shouldn't cost you much more than a regular hard drive.

Windows 2000pro and XP pro will let you set of a software raid 1 (mirroring) so you don't "need" a controller, the CPU handles everything. If you have two equally sized drives it is simple. Convert them to dynamic disk and then create a mirrored array. You can even do it with two disks of unequal size. All you need to do is create a logical volume on the larger drive that is the same size as the smaller drive. Then you raid them.

Alternatively you can use one of my favorite methods which just requires a second drive and no fancy setup. The dos backup command. Simply create a scheduled task and set it up to back up files that have been changed since the last time it ran.

http://www.computerhope.com/backup.htm

I have had bad luck in the past with data loss so I have learned all of those lessons the hard way. I used to run RAID 5 which allows for one drive to go bad and not compromise anything. Now I run RAID 6 which allows for two drive failures. On top of that I have the external with the DOS script running once a week. Paranoid, yes! (You never regret backing up)

Oh and for the power question, i recently had to upgrade to a 750watt power supply as my 480watt wasn't cutting it anymore. (I think the water pump put it over the edge)

[skymasteres]

Oh, and one more thing...

If you are looking for a good scratch disk defiantly go solid state!
Yes they are expensive, but how much scratch space do you really need?
I have a 32GB and the thing is amazing! Less than 1ms seek a read write rates of 60+mb/s I do not use it for storage, just as a swap disk. I could have gotten away with the 16gb if it weren't for the video stuff I do.

The other huge factor is your budget.
I spent about $1k on my upgrade, but I kept some components in the process. Had I spent more I would have gone with a solid state boot drive to simplify all of the registry stuff I had to do to get the ram drive utilized. Also, check out the listings for hard drive lots. I got 10 1tb drives for $450 from a company that was selling a server. You just have to look around for your deals.

[Palladium]

Oh, and one more thing...

If you are looking for a good scratch disk defiantly go solid state!
Yes they are expensive, but how much scratch space do you really need?
I have a 32GB and the thing is amazing! Less than 1ms seek a read write rates of 60+mb/s I do not use it for storage, just as a swap disk. I could have gotten away with the 16gb if it weren't for the video stuff I do.

The other huge factor is your budget.
I spent about $1k on my upgrade, but I kept some components in the process. Had I spent more I would have gone with a solid state boot drive to simplify all of the registry stuff I had to do to get the ram drive utilized. Also, check out the listings for hard drive lots. I got 10 1tb drives for $450 from a company that was selling a server. You just have to look around for your deals.


I've posted this before - If you have an external powered e-sata connection on you computer - take a look at some of the fastest solid state drives

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_throttle_esata_flash_drive

[Raceshooter]

Raid 1 500GB Mirrored drives OS and apps
500 GB paging drive
Raid 5 - 5) 1TB drives photo storage
Another 4 TB (backup) on networked drives

[tim]

I would buy more RAM instead of getting a fast SSD for scratch. I wonder though how much RAM photoshop can use, and if you'd need to use a ram disk to take advantage of it.

[Moppie]

If your familar with RAID, and aware of its weakness's then using it improve read/write speeds can be advantageous.
But you need to be doing a lot of batch proccessing and dealing with very large files for the increased performance to be worthwhile.

Using it for redundancy in a personal computer is not much use, and of course it is no good as a back up solution.


I like to keep my set up as simple as possible.

1 x 80GB drive for the OS and software. This is actually getting quite full now, 120-160 would be better.

1 x 320GB drive for stuff. Just stuff. Things I don't care about if they go missing as it is not backed up.

2 x 500GB for photos.

2 x 500GB externals for back ups.

Now the 2 500GB internals drives are "mirrored" but not with any fancy software.
Because I only keep photos and the LR catalouge on them, it is very easy to use a simple program like Karens Replicator to simply copy everything on one drive to the other, and to my external drives.

Thus one drive get used to work from etc, and every so often I simply copy the new or changed files to the other drive.
I then get a back up I can access easily with out needing back up software, and I have a very simple solution.

[skymasteres]

As far as photoshop is concerned, I have 8gb of ram and it doesn't come close to using half of it. Even when I am doing 500+ file batches. (If you know you are doing a batch moving your files to a SSD or ram drive can be a HUGE performance booster)

[smcclelland]

I've got a few configurations running on my box.

C: 100gb OS
D: 76gb scratch
E: 500gb data1 - work files + unedited photos
F: 500gb data2 - completed projects + edited/final photos
G: 100gb games

On top of this I have:

2 x 500gb externals that sync/mirror data from data1 and data2 to each.
4 x 1TB WD Caviar Black in RAID5 which also mirrors/syncs data off of the data drives and keeps my drive image backups.

[Damian75]

Really data security shouldn't cost you much more than a regular hard drive.

Windows 2000pro and XP pro will let you set of a software raid 1 (mirroring) so you don't "need" a controller, the CPU handles everything. If you have two equally sized drives it is simple. Convert them to dynamic disk and then create a mirrored array. You can even do it with two disks of unequal size. All you need to do is create a logical volume on the larger drive that is the same size as the smaller drive. Then you raid them.


Just a note for the Mac users this can be done through software as well Disk Utility will allow software RAID in 1, 0 or 0+1 .

[mochanjava]

I would buy more RAM instead of getting a fast SSD for scratch. I wonder though how much RAM photoshop can use, and if you'd need to use a ram disk to take advantage of it.

HMMM, you made me look at RAM prices. I was planning on getting a few new hard drives but now that I look at the price of RAM I can't believe how cheap it is since I last bought it 2 1/2 years ago. THANKS!

Avoiding the scratch disk is a better solution than a fast scratch disk.

So I guess I'd like to know from those who have 6 - 8 GBs of RAM, Vista 64 and CS4: How often does CS go to scratch disk? Only with large batch operations of large multi-layered files.
FWIW: I shoot with a 30D RAWS

[Bobster]

by default Photoshop creates scratch, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have, you will always have a scratch file

[Faolan]

Main system:

C:\ - 73Gb Raptor
D/E and F drives are all 1Tb WD GP drives, for Data, Data backup and Versioning respectively. The Versioning drive is used for the scratch file as well. I have a fourth 1Tb drive as a spare. These are all contained in a hot swap caddy.

I'm in the process of upgrading the drives:

2x 146Gb 15k SAS drives - RAID 0 for OS
1x 73Gb 15k SAS drive Scratch disk

Then the 4 x 1Tb (or 4x 2Tb) drives for the data/MyDocs etc.

All these drives will be controlled by a Adaptec 5405 controller with battery cache. I've got the HDs but now awaiting the controller card. The OS drive is imaged weekly and the data drive backed up to a file server.

[jemann]

As far as photoshop is concerned, I have 8gb of ram and it doesn't come close to using half of it. Even when I am doing 500+ file batches. (If you know you are doing a batch moving your files to a SSD or ram drive can be a HUGE performance booster)

If you're using a version of Photoshop before CS4, then it's a 32-bit application and even running under 64-bit Windows is still somewhat limited in the memory it can use. I think the limit is 2GB by default, sometimes 3GB.

CS4 is 64-bit aware though, so it should support as much memory as the OS supports.

[bsmotril]

I read a lot of bad reviews on Solid State drives regarding the ability to get good fast writes of large files to those drives. True, the read super speedy. But, if you use it as a scratch where you write as much as you read, do you still see big gains?

Also, since FLASH memory does have a finite life for RW cycles, what is the anticipated time you'll be able to use such a drive before it fails? I admit I'm no expert on this stuff, but from what picked up on line, I thought SS drives were best used for mostly read applications like a boot drive, or application drive.

[smcclelland]

Also, since FLASH memory does have a finite life for RW cycles, what is the anticipated time you'll be able to use such a drive before it fails? I admit I'm no expert on this stuff, but from what picked up on line, I thought SS drives were best used for mostly read applications like a boot drive, or application drive.

I read that some of the cheaper drives are said to have around 10,000 RW cycles before failure and the higher end are up to 100,000. Unfortunately the king (Intel) of SSD's slipped a bit and people are noticing degraded performance over time on their high end drives. Apparently they're looking into fixing this though.

[Franko515]

In the process of a new build now (recieved parts today)

C: OS & Software - 250GB
D: Photos, Docs, Music, Home Movies etc. (working drive) - 640GB
E: Photos Only (Internal Back-up) 640GB
F: External - Photo only back-up 1TB
G: External - Back-up (music, home movies, docs etc.) 500GB

I dont have any seperate drives for paging or scratch because I dont know enough about the performance increase if any to do it. If any gains can be had as far as performance, how much and why?

[YP5 Toronto]

I read a lot of bad reviews on Solid State drives regarding the ability to get good fast writes of large files to those drives. True, the read super speedy. But, if you use it as a scratch where you write as much as you read, do you still see big gains?

Also, since FLASH memory does have a finite life for RW cycles, what is the anticipated time you'll be able to use such a drive before it fails? I admit I'm no expert on this stuff, but from what picked up on line, I thought SS drives were best used for mostly read applications like a boot drive, or application drive.


I have Three OCZ Vertex 30GB SSD drives on the way, should have them by the weekend.

The latest SSD from OCZ are to say the least incredible with regards to WRITE and READ speeds.

I am positive that I will see visible, noticable, real life improvements in all applications including those in the PS world.

I'm expecting (based on results i have seen from others with the exact same setup) aroundn 310MB/s write, 425MB/s read.

SSD is still pricey though. I priced out mine for $159 CAD each, minus $20 MIR. So $417 CAD for 90GB of fast storage.

No need for raid cards as the setup will be done using the ICH10R controller found on my Asus P6T Deluxe V2.