Raid = worth it ?

Dark_Angel

Dark_Angel

Dark_Angel

Soldato
Joined
12 May 2005
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Am highly considering getting a few sata drives soon (say 80 GB) just for windows and programs I use on a regular basis (for Photoshop, swapfiles, and whatever).

Is it worth it in terms of performance ? am I right when I say that I basically need 2 drives of the same speed / size (say 2 samsung 7200 RPM 16MB cache 80 GB Sata drives) and just use the raid tool to set them up ?

Is loading a huge amount faster ?

Thanks
 
Buying older SATA drives for anything is definitely NOT worth it, a new single platter 320GB drive would be twice as fast as an old 80GB ones and still better than two of them in RAID0.
If you have fast disks to begin with then a RAID0 scratch disk can be great for photoshop if you actually need that performance and buy plenty of RAM first. Spreading things over multiple disks is also good (OS/Pagefile/Scratch1/Scratch2/etc). You don't seem like a photoshop power user though.
 
Actually I do web design and graphics work for a living.

At the moment I am running 4GB ram, and a Q6600.

Photoshop basically doesn't really have problems on that at the moment, but video editting and whatever (which I really want to start getting in to) I figured might like raid.

Need to do more reading me thinks :/
 
What kind of video editing?

I use Sony Vegas 8 and loading that up on a WD 320gb drive takes about 6 seconds(then 3 seconds if you open it back up aagin). It loves quad core.

Just imported a 1.12gb file into Vegas. Took about 3 seconds for it to be fully playable.

See if you can get hold of a Samsung F1 320GB.
 
Last edited:
Dark_Angel said:
Actually I do web design and graphics work for a living.

At the moment I am running 4GB ram, and a Q6600.

Photoshop basically doesn't really have problems on that at the moment, but video editting and whatever (which I really want to start getting in to) I figured might like raid.

Need to do more reading me thinks :/
Click to expand...

Take it in stages. First you switch to fast modern drives, no point using slower ones. Then you use multiple drives to spread things around which is great for Photoshop and Video Editing (input/temp/output). And then if you feel you need higher STR's still then consider RAID but it'll only be of very limited benefit.
 
I did a little research on raid 0, it seems to offer very little extra performance tbh :(

I think I will just get a small very fast drive for windows and aps, and then just gem a few larger drives.

Greg - As for video editting, mostly just messing around at the moment. I only recently started to do it, but its one reason I upgraded to quad. I was getting bored waiting for the encoding :P want to start maybe doing it for web videos and the like eventually - as the company I work for do online learning. I might need to do videos eventually - so thought I may as well take it up now and learn about it :)
 
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