Laptop Hard Drive and Photoshop/Lightroom

So I got a new laptop and it has space for an extra hard drive. What will be the largest improvement when using Photoshop and Lightroom. Current I3, 4GB ram, 500gb hdd.

1. Add another 500gb hard drive and setup windows in a RAID 0.

2. Add a smaller hard drive and use it as a scratch drive.

Also, is there anyway to replace a DVD drive with another hard drive? Thanks!

If I only had two disks i'd use one for OS, programs, swap, and cache. The other i'd put images on. I wouldn't bother with raid, personally, just because it sounds like a pita.

PITA indeed, but for speed it would be worth it.

I'm not too worried about backup or storage since I'll be syncing/transferring the images off daily. Now If I could do 3 hdds, that would be a different story.

Have you considered having a SSD as the second drive? The setup I currently have in my MacBook Pro is a 100GB OWC SSD as my OS, Programs, etc. drive and a 500GB hard drive to store all my photos, movies and music. The SSD will be much faster than a conventional hard drive and you'll see a big difference from what you're used to. This is the SSD that I would recommend.

adam8080 wrote in post #10395417
So I got a new laptop and it has space for an extra hard drive. What will be the largest improvement when using Photoshop and Lightroom. Current I3, 4GB ram, 500gb hdd.

1. Add another 500gb hard drive and setup windows in a RAID 0.

2. Add a smaller hard drive and use it as a scratch drive.

Also, is there anyway to replace a DVD drive with another hard drive? Thanks!

You increase the speed by spreading reads and writes over more than drive.
RAID will not let you do that, it will read and write faster, but they will still cue up if your processing things fast enough.
Add a second drive and use it for the scratch in photoshop.
Nothing wrong with making it an SSD either.