New Computer or enhance existing?

[TurboDean]

One blind decision I made was the 2 HDs. Now what will I do with them? I presume I have a choice.

- All apps on one, all data on the other?

- O/S and all other miscellaneous apps & data on one, and then all photo processing stuff (apps & data) on the other?

- All apps and on one and RAID1 data?

[expatdude]

It would be good to partition the drive. I'd allow perhaps 30 gigs for the first partition for windows and all apps. Then you can back that up and restore by completely writing over the partition. I use True Image for backing up, Norton Ghost is also good. I haven't had much luck with the built-in system restore feature of XP--I prefer to turn it off and just back up myself periodically. That way I don't carry over garbage when I restore, just completely replace the partition with one I know worked well.

I use Tweakhound.com as a guide to install XP.

http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/installxp/installXP1.htm

Create an image of your partition just after installing XP and the drivers and such. Then another image after you get your programs on. Then about a month in, create another image when things are working very smoothly. You can store the images on your second drive, and restoring an image should only take a half an hour or less. You can also back up to dvds.

The other partition on the main drive you can use for data, but the main data drive should be your second drive, from my understanding. It should also be your scratch drive for photoshop. Something I've learned, transferring a file from one drive to another will be lightning fast compared to transferring files between two partitions on one drive.

[expatdude]

Oh, if you want a version of XP with SP2 already built in, let me know. It makes life easier on the original install.

[tonylong]

TurboDean,

It sounds like you're on track!

Once you have everything, the first task will be reading the manual for your motherboard and identifying the various jumpers and cable connections. This may be a bit perplexing, especially trying to match up case cables with motherboard connections, but don't get too frustrated. Be patient, and realize that some things from the case may not be exactly as pictured in the manual, a little improvising may be needed.

Also, there may be a CD with your motherboard with BIOS stuff that needs to be installed before installing your OS.

The main thing is to review all your documentation for the MB and the microprocessor and get physically oriented to things until you're comfortable with jumping in.

Have fun!

[TurboDean]

Originally Posted by expatdude

It would be good to partition the drive...

I'll try to comprehend all this later.


For the moment the PSU has me wondering which modular output puts out which specified V/A. http://www.corsairmicro.com/_product...et_English.pdfshows a pic of the mod-outs near the bottom, as well as the specified outputs. Has me stumped at the moment, so I'm checking e,mail and having a glass of wine.

Originally Posted by tonylong

This may be a bit perplexing...

Ya, a bit. I'll have a bald spot from scratching my head by the time I'm done.


I'm sure the next one will be easier. So far I have spent ~20 minutes assembling, 2.5 hours reading, 1 hour re-reading, ~30 minutes comprehending and the aforementioned scratching.

[kcbrown]

Originally Posted by TurboDean

One blind decision I made was the 2 HDs. Now what will I do with them? I presume I have a choice.

- All apps on one, all data on the other?

- O/S and all other miscellaneous apps & data on one, and then all photo processing stuff (apps & data) on the other?

- All apps and on one and RAID1 data?

I'd go with a RAID-1 setup, a.k.a. mirroring. The reason is that if you lose a drive, you can replace the dead drive with a new one, resync the data, and presto -- you're back in business without having lost a thing. It also means if you lose a drive, you can continue to operate (if necessary) on the remaining drive until you rebuild the mirror. The mirror will just appear as a single physical drive, even though it's composed of two. We generally refer to such entities as "volumes".

You can partition the mirror however you like. What people are suggesting here is that you keep a separate partition for you data. A partition is just an area of the disk. You can "split" the disk (or mirrored volume, in this case) into multiple areas, and each will get its own drive letter. In essence, each will appear as if its a separate drive when in reality, it's just another part of the same physical disk (or, in this case, volume).

The advantage of splitting the disk up that way is that it makes it easy to separate programs from data, so that making backups becomes much easier -- you just back up the "drive" (partition) that has all your data on it, knowing that if you lose the system, you can reinstall all your applications and restore your data and you'll be back in business.

The RAID setup will protect you from losing a drive, but it won't protect you from other failures (such as being hit with a nasty worm or something). That's why it's best to have backups as well as RAID.

[expatdude]

With a raid setup, do you lose the advantage of having a scratch drive?

[kcbrown]

Originally Posted by expatdude

With a raid setup, do you lose the advantage of having a scratch drive?

Not sure what you mean by a "scratch drive". I'll guess that you mean a drive dedicated to temporary file storage.

If you need or want to create a separate area for scratch operations, you can do that by creating another partition on your RAID volume. But you have to know ahead of time that you want it. Repartitioning a volume or disk is not a trivial thing to do once filesystems are created (a filesystem is the structure on a partition which tracks where files are located on that partition -- there's one filesystem per partition).

If you create such a scratch volume, its only advantage to you will be organizational -- keeping things separate and contained -- and not performance.

A mirror just by its nature will give you a significant performance improvement in reads (but no such advantage in writes), relative to a single disk. But it gives you a significant boost in reliability (if the chance of a single disk failure in 3 years is, say, 5%, the chance of your entire volume failing in that same amount of time is 0.25%), assuming you replace the failed drive immediately.

Fortunately, nothing prevents you from hooking up a third drive and using that for scratch, and with the prices of drives being what they are, that's probably a worthwhile thing to do. The scratch disk doesn't need to be mirrored because if it fails you haven't really lost anything except the current processing operations.

EDIT: one more thing: if you get a scratch disk, make it the same size as the disks in your mirror. That way, if one of the disks in your mirror fails, you have an immediate replacement. You'll lose the use of your scratch volume until you replace it, but you'll minimize the chance of losing your mirrored volume entirely (the volume is vulnerable, just as as single disk is, as long as it's in a "degraded" state, meaning it can no longer recover from a single drive failure. Replacing the failed disk and resyncing the mirror returns it to its normal, protected state, from which it is capable of continued operation in the face of a single drive failure).

[expatdude]

Originally Posted by kcbrown

Not sure what you mean by a "scratch drive". I'll guess that you mean a drive dedicated to temporary file storage.

Here's what I mean, from:

http://www.easyelements.com/scratch-disk.htmlbr />

Placing the Photoshop Scratch Disk

The Photoshop scratch disk can be moved to a location which best suits your system. You might have multiple hard disks or disk partitions, and if so moving the scratch disk can improve performance. To alter the scratch disk location, go to 'Edit - Preferences - Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks'. Using the four drop down boxes in the dialog that appears, pick the disk drives you want Photoshop to use. For best performance, use a drive that does not contain your operating system (This is C:\ for most systems). Preferably it should also not contain virtual memory, or the Photoshop or Photoshop Elements program files.

I was under the impression that the Photoshop scratch disk should be on a different physical drive from the drive containing the operating system. I could be wrong. Does anyone have the latest scoop on Photoshop scratch disks?

Another site:

http://www.photoshopninja.com/2006/0...-scratch-disk/

Firstly - a word on partitions. It is a common misconception that if you have a single drive partitioned into 2, the first for system and the second for scratch disk you are getting the most out your system - THIS IS WRONG! The drive still only can shift a certain amount of data through the connection and this can actually reduce performance as the drive has to whip around all over the disk!

It is, however, a good idea to keep a completely clean partition on a separate hard drive for scratch disk. This makes it easier for Photoshop to find big, unfragmented areas of the drive to use as a scratch disk. For this reason it is a good idea to format this partition every few months or so to keep it in tip-top condition. Also, if you go for the kind of configuration I have outlined above DON’T be tempted to use this to store files you are working on, just keep it as a dedicated scratch disk and Photoshop will be happy! Finally, use the first partition, I have been told this will use the inner sectors of the disk which are more efficient than the outer sectors.

[kcbrown]

Originally Posted by expatdude

Here's what I mean, from:

http://www.easyelements.com/scratch-disk.htmlbr />
I was under the impression that the Photoshop scratch disk should be on a different physical drive from the drive containing the operating system. I could be wrong. Does anyone have the latest scoop on Photoshop scratch disks?

OK, so my guess at what you meant seems to have been correct, which means my comments that followed should apply.

Another site:

http://www.photoshopninja.com/2006/0...-scratch-disk/

What they say is true, but there are organizational benefits to be had in splitting your primary disk (or volume, in the case where you're using RAID 1) into two partitions (one for OS+programs, one for data): you only have to perform regular backups of the data partition.

To be honest, I'm not terribly attached to doing that, but in my case I'm not using a Windows system for my primary file storage anyway.

[expatdude]

I doubt there's a huge speed advantage to having your Photoshop scratch disc on another physical drive, but again, I'm not sure. For backups, I just backup to DVDs periodically, but then I'm not a professional and so don't need a high level of redundancy.

I think I do notice increased performance when, say, I play a movie that is on a physical drive different from the Operating System (OS) drive, so I like having most frequently accessed data on that second physical drive.

Here's my setup: The first partition on the OS drive is for the OS and programs, as I said about 30 gigs is plenty. The second partition on the OS drive is a data drive, for less used data. The second physical drive is the main data drive.

I guess the decision whether to go raid or not is whether increased safety is more important than increased speed and more space.

[kcbrown]

Originally Posted by expatdude

I doubt there's a huge speed advantage to having your Photoshop scratch disc on another physical drive, but again, I'm not sure.

Photoshop probably attempts to use RAM first, and drops back to using temporary files only if it has to. That is, if the people who wrote it knew what they were doing...

So, if better performance out of Photoshop is what you're looking for, you'll probably get the most by adding more RAM to the system.

For backups, I just backup to DVDs periodically, but then I'm not a professional and so don't need a high level of redundancy.

Yeah, the actual mission makes a big difference in terms of how far you should go with this stuff.

I think I do notice increased performance when, say, I play a movie that is on a physical drive different from the Operating System (OS) drive, so I like having most frequently accessed data on that second physical drive.

Playing movies and other types of media is a much more latency-sensitive task than most, so the improved performance you're seeing is the result of your movie player not being interrupted in the middle of reading the movie file by something else that has to read from the disk. Even something that doesn't need to read much from the disk can have an impact on a media player because while the disk may be able to transfer a lot of data in a short amount of time, it has a relatively high latency if it has to move the heads.

Photoshop, on the other hand, isn't (or shouldn't be) latency sensitive, but it is throughput sensitive. That is, it's trying to read and write relatively large amounts of data from/to the disk, but those operations aren't time critical the way they are for a media player. So as long as the total amount of bandwidth demand by the other processes is fairly small, Photoshop won't be impacted much by them.

Here's my setup: The first partition on the OS drive is for the OS and programs, as I said about 30 gigs is plenty. The second partition on the OS drive is a data drive, for less used data. The second physical drive is the main data drive.

I guess the decision whether to go raid or not is whether increased safety is more important than increased speed and more space.

In your case, if you lose a drive you haven't lost everything. That certainly helps. I tend to lean towards RAID 1 simply because I really, really hate reinstalling the OS and its applications, and I like having the extra read performance it gets me.

These days, I won't build a machine for my own use without some sort of disk redundancy. The pain of a drive failure is too high without it, and the cost of the redundancy is quite low.

[TurboDean]

Welp, it is built, but not fired up. Perhaps tomorrow. I need to finish reading through the Mobo manual and all the BIOS stuff.

I do plan on setting it up RAID1. I have never experienced a HD failure, and have never really thought that much about it, but now that I have if I don't set up and safety net, surely I will have a failure. Now's the time, I figure. I certainly have the HDs to do it with. I also do plan on partitioning the drives. Dunno how, yet, but I will!

[expatdude]

You have the option of partitioning the boot drive when you install windows. It's a simple step.

[TurboDean]

kcbrown (or someone??), at "Making a SAT RAID/AHCI Driver Diskette" on page 89 of the manual, I have questions. Configuring in BIOS looks straightforward enough, but getting the drivers on is another story.

- The instructions say to "Prepare a startup disk that has CD-ROM support". OK, how, and what does "has CD-ROM support" mean? Not a floppy, but a CD??

- The instructions also say to have a blank floppy available. OK, I have one, but I don't have a floppy drive on the new machine, so what good is it? Using my old machine I now have the drivers on a floppy, and I was thinking I could put it on a USB Flash Drive for loading onto the new machine, but going through the instructions further it looks like the setup system will be looking for a floppy.