Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Hey Everyone,

So I took advantage of the Newegg.ca black friday special for the WD 640GB Caviar Black drives last week and bought myself 2. I currently already own one so it will bring my total to 3 of them.

My current setup is basically just running WinXP off my existing drive (not even partitioned)... However, when the two new drives come I am thinking of installing Win7 64-bit on them.

However, I am wondering how I should go about organizing/setting up the drives... I've recieved a suggestion to setup a matrix raid on the two new drives (after physically unplugging my current drive from the system) using ICH9 with a raid0 volume of 320GB (160GB on each physical disk) for OS, etc. followed by using the remaining 480GB on each disk and setting up a raid1 volume for photos, etc. After this has been setup and Win7 is installed, I'll plug my existing drive back in and transfer files, etc. Once the transition is complete, I will probably just use this third drive as its own separate drive. On this note, suppose I go this route... Would it be faster to keep page files/scratch disk on the raid0 volume or on the third separate drive?

Is all of this worth the performance enhancement? I'm running on a Q9300 and with 2GB of ram (in the process of buying more to take advantage of the 64 bit).

The obvious alternative is just to run all 3 drives separately...

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

That's my setup for the two 640GB Caviar Blacks I have. I don't bother with RAID, but I do partition the drives to create performance zones and to avoid fragmentation in some cases. I used to have a pair of 74GB Raptors, and when I switched to the 640GB drives, I did not notice any drop in performance. The new drives not only cost less, but they have all that extra space which is useful for non-critical files (like my TV shows, MP3's, etc.) and for disk image backups. The C: volume is automatically backed up to Depot2 on the other drive, and also cloned to a physically separate drive (not shown).

Scratch is for Photoshop's scratch file only, while Temp is for things like ACR's preview cache, Bridge's database files, Lightroom's preview cache, XnView's thumbnail cache, Firefox's cache, etc.

I haven't payed around with setting up a portion of a group of drives for RAID0 then another for RAID1, etc. I just used two WD6401AALS and configured it as RAID0 using the ICH10R:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanm/4119082830/" title="2xWD6401AALS RAID0 (ICH10R) by Tanner., on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2548/4119082830_340d05face_o.jpg" width="580" height="470" alt="2xWD6401AALS RAID0 (ICH10R)"></a>

Improvement in boot times and application load times was noticeable, especially going from a single drive that was only achieving a max 80MB/s (which wasn't a WD640).

I created a separate partition for the OS, swap file and a partition for the temporary files (just pointed the %TEMP% to this other partition). Data files are on a different drive all together. More of a way to minimize the amount of fragmentation.

Performance increase is noticeable, especially when my old setup was using a different hard drive that only achieved 80MB/s initially then gradually decreased like any other hard drive.

Tanner's graph is the reason why I partition off the first 10% to 20% of a drive, and place files that require high performance on that partition. Performance (both in terms of throughput and access time) drops off as you approach the inner tracks of the hard drive platters.

I'd steer clear of RAID0 for all desktop purposes.

Raid0 is awesome for applications that you don't care about losing, and generally used with more than two disks. Splitting your OS onto raid 0 will get you a very minimal gain but it guarantees a complete pain in the butt when a drive fails. Raid 0 guarantees data loss. Your data is striped (written) across the number of disks in the array and is 100% useless without the other bits. It just doesn't make sense to sacrifice the amount of time to reinstall your OS and all applications when a disk fails.

Raid 1 on the other hand will keep your data safe, as well as your operating system. Trust me when I say this will save you oodles of time (read money. or cold cash if you're not savvy enough to do it yourself).

Hmm.. So I know the risks of raid0 and so I guess thats why I was asking if the performance improvements were noticeable. I've heard conflicting opinions and so I can't really decide!!!

Another question I have is, say I use my original scheme where I am using raid0 AND raid1... In the situation that I lose one of my drives, I will lose my applications/OS (aka the raid0 volume), but I will still have the data that I have stored on my raid1 volume, correct?

Also keep in mind that not only will RAID-0 result in data loss but it also provides multiple points of failure, increasing the possibility of that failure occurring.

It depends on your usage patterns. Obviously, if you are in a situation where Photoshop will be hitting its scratch file very heavily, the faster you can make that, the better your experience will be. But since CS4 is available as a 64-bit binary (at least for Windows), I would simply load up on RAM instead. 8GB of RAM is $250 or less these days.

I give Photoshop about 6 GB of RAM on my 64-bit system. It rarely needs that much, which means it hardly ever touches the scratch file. Putting that on RAID-0 in my situation would be a waste of money. OTOH, if my Photoshop work is such that it is constantly reading and writing to the scratch file, then it would be worth investing in an SSD or multiple HD's or just more RAM.

Thanks for the help guys!

I may just end up using them as separate drives, then.

Here's a question... I am most likely going to do a full switch over to Win7 from XP (I don't want to dual boot or anything). So seeing as my existing drive has all my data and everything on it, can I unplug it and plug in my two new drives to install Win7 and when it is done, plug in my old drive (set the BIOS to boot from Win7 drive only) and then copy over the files from my old drive to new drive?

Is there any risk in doing this? The way I see it, before I wipe my old drive, if I want to boot into it, I just have to change the bios to boot from that drive only and vice versa?

And just in case, would this work if I actually do setup some raid volume with my new drives and install Win7 on them?

That should work, or just throw it into an external enclosure.