How does this sound for HD setup ?

quickben · 7 Jun 2010 at 11:55

Hi, first post and all that.

As you can see from my signature, I'm building a new machine soon and I'm trying to decide what to get/how to configure the HD's. My current thinking is like this:

Intel X25-M 80Gb - Windows 7, Photoshop/Lightroom, iTunes (program only)
Samsung F3 1Tb x3 Raid0 - Games, Photoshop/ACR cache and scratch disk
Seagate Barracuda XT 2Tb - Image storage, iTunes storage

I'm fine with how much it costs, is there any changes anyone would make due to actual experiences with these drives ?

Cheers in advance

Gary.

AbsenceJam · 7 Jun 2010 at 12:02

Do you actually need 3TB for Games and cache/scratch? There are the 500GB F3's and even two is very quick.

Backup?

quickben · 7 Jun 2010 at 12:09

AbsenceJam said:
Do you actually need 3TB for Games and cache/scratch? There are the 500GB F3's and even two is very quick.

Backup?

You're right, I don't need 3Tb for this, but in all the bench tests I've seen, the 1tb's are considerably faster than the 500gb's and they're not that much more expensive. Also, x3 drives in raid0 will be a lot quicker than x2, again the cost is acceptable. Do you have any suggestions ? I'm not set in stone about this.

As for backup, I'll be getting a 2tb esata LaCie.

Gary.

OrphanBoy · 7 Jun 2010 at 16:25

Are you going to have enough SATA connectors on your board for this set-up? That's five needed in what you've listed...optical media too?

Mr Paul · 7 Jun 2010 at 16:56

I'd go for the OCZ 60Gb Vertex 2E SSD, as it's faster than the Intel

AbsenceJam · 7 Jun 2010 at 17:06

quickben said:
You're right, I don't need 3Tb for this, but in all the bench tests I've seen, the 1tb's are considerably faster than the 500gb's and they're not that much more expensive. Also, x3 drives in raid0 will be a lot quicker than x2, again the cost is acceptable. Do you have any suggestions ? I'm not set in stone about this.

As for backup, I'll be getting a 2tb esata LaCie.

Gary.

The 500GB and 1TB are the same speed.

jaybee · 7 Jun 2010 at 17:10

Well it compeltely depends what you are using it for, however, I notice that you have 3.08TB of space with only 2TB as a backup drive. Whilst I understand that when backing up, often you can use compression to minimize the space taken up, often it won't reduce the space that much if the files are already compressed aka jpegs/avi files etc. If you are going to run serious and regular backups, sometimes it is beneficial to exactly mirror the size of your total storage with your backup storage. Backups also run much qicker when doing like for like with no compression.

Striping 3 x 1TB drives seems overkill with regard to speed vs failure rate increasing by 3 times for minimal benefit. Plus do you need 3TB for that? If you think you do, it might be better to stripe (raid 0) two of the HDDs and have another on it's own. This could be beneficial for photoshop and/or video editing when reading a file from one set of disks and outputing to another. Or simply 2 x 1TB drives with no raid. It's not like they aren't fast those drives.

Maybe you need to consider your uses in more detail.