a good PC Photoshop system

tim wrote in post #11952684
Clever. I guess good is the operative word. I wonder if on mobo raid does that.

No, not the usual stuff, e.g. everything from NVidia, Via etc is right out. But I wouldn't trust it with my raid1 anyway. People keep saying that Intel's onboard RAID is actually good but I haven't tested it.

Myself I use Linux' software RAID and it kills everything else. FreeBSD also has decent raid1 and a filesystem with integrated raid functionality (ZFS). That's probably not an easy option for most photographers, but if you have a fileserver separate from your PP box anyway it might.

Windows does have software RAID built in but I didn't test that either.

"Test" is critical here. Before you put anything on a raid1 you need to test it, how it behaves on a sudden disk fail and how it recovers. You need to pull the cable off one disk, see what happens, write some more data (so that it is only on one disk), plug the other disk back in and then when it starts recovering you pull the power plug out of the whole box. After reboot you'll see how well it recovers. The NVidia onboard stuff is legendary to fail here, because the two parts (the driver in the OS and the part in the BIOS that does it before the OS is up) apparently sometimes disagree on who the good disk was. KABOOM there goes your data.

As long as you have good disconnected, ideally offsite backups, it doesn't much matter about the recoverability of raid.

tim wrote in post #11956379
As long as you have good disconnected, ideally offsite backups, it doesn't much matter about the recoverability of raid.

I agree. If you've enough external backup space, you might as well just reap the performance benefits of Raid0. Raid 0+1, 1, 5 (or 6), 10 all afford you redundancy options not backup options.

Therefore, if you have a solid backup system & routine, HD RAID redundancy is (dare I say it ?) redundant.

I am, however thinking of getting a Promise PCIe 4 port SATA RAID controller for the Raid0 array I store my images on. If anything, to make the backup to my eSATA LaCie run a little quicker (read speed).

My computer is 5 years old, 3 gb of ram, 3 gb processor, using CS3. Its never crash, lagged or froze.

Raid and backup are different concepts. If you run windows in particular then losing disk contents, even if backed up entirely, is usually a big hassle. Raid isn't backup, it is availability.

You also don't want to lose the thing you worked on in the last hour or whatever interval you have for pushing to backup.

kjonnnn wrote in post #11956737
My computer is 5 years old, 3 gb of ram, 3 gb processor, using CS3. Its never crash, lagged or froze.

Excellent.

uOpt wrote in post #11956764
Raid and backup are different concepts. If you run windows in particular then losing disk contents, even if backed up entirely, is usually a big hassle. Raid isn't backup, it is availability.

You also don't want to lose the thing you worked on in the last hour or whatever interval you have for pushing to backup.

This is true. However, those scenarios are rare (I've never actually had a HD fail on me in 15 yrs of building PC's) so this is all "just in case". For me, having a daily backup to an external drive is enough. I'd rather use raid for speed, speed and a bit more speed.

quickben wrote in post #11956802
This is true. However, those scenarios are rare (I've never actually had a HD fail on me in 15 yrs of building PC's) so this is all "just in case". For me, having a daily backup to an external drive is enough. I'd rather use raid for speed, speed and a bit more speed.

But that makes you the statistical odd duck. Broken harddrives are generally not rare. And decent raid1 and raid5 bring you both safety and a speedup for certain patterns.

I've yet to have a hard drive fail, and i've been using hard drives since hard drives were available to consumers. I usually have 4 in my PC, currently they range from 2 months to about 5 years old.