PC Lightroom setup

[DoubleCheese]

I'm considering a new HDD for my Lightroom catalogue and the photos therein.
Currently my OS and programs are on a 250Gb SATA2 16Mb Cache drive and all the photographs are on a 1Tb WD Green drive.

The issue is Lightroom is a bit sluggish when rendering images and I'm sure I can hear the 1Tb drive spinning up and down as the photos load.
So I was thinking of buying a 640Gb WD Black drive for the Lightroom catalogue and photos and then use the 1Tb drive as an additional backup. I also suspect my CPU might not be up to the task, its an E6420 C2D @ 2.2Ghz, the rest of the rig is 6Gb DDR2 RAM, X1800 graphics, Win 7 HP.

What do other photographers use?

 

[Psychouk]

My systems as per sig.

I have photos/catalogue and docs on one drive, OS (win 7 64) /programs on another hd and the LR and Cs5 caches on another hd - plus another hd where I store a back up docs and an external hd where a full system / docs back up us stored...I'm a bit paranoid about losing stuff!!!

My understand is that having the cache files on a different drive to the OS and photos speeds things up hence my set up.

At times LR still can be sluggish. Not been able to really put my finger on why or how to sort it out. I've done all of these things in the past and sometimes they work and sometimes not - most of the time a closure of LR and reppen or a PC reboot seems to have got thing back to normal - things I've tried:

Purging Cache

Changing Cache size - from 20gb to 50gb

Changing preview sizes from - for me having the smallest preview make the LR 'appear' to be less prone to sluggishness but the pay off is it takes longer to initially get a 'full' image

Optimising Catalogue

Not one I've done as I only have 4-5000 photos but using multiple catalogues is supposed to help a lot if you have 10000+ photos.