Best Hard Drive for Photoshop CS5, Current and new Build

[Dedloke]

Hello,
Running XP with 4 gigs, and 2 WD 1TB caviar blues, getting a new hard drive to run as either scratch or data store for Photoshop CS5 to increase speed (hints on which would help more would be welcome as well, I believe the data store is more important for opening/saving which is where i need to save time, very large files), what model should i get, probably going western digital.

2nd question
Building a new Photoshop rig, Win 7, 8 gigs of RAM, 2 HDD's on Raid 0 for scratch, 2 HDD's on Raid 0 or 5 for Data store, 1 HDD or SSD for OS/Startup drive. Which Hard drives would be best for the two Raid setups...Western Digital RE4's? Thanks in advance, if more detail is needed please ask.

 

[nikorr]

1.Western Digital VelociRaptor http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136557

2A.2x for the best HDD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136557

2B.2x 2nd best HDD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136798

 

[LordConrad]

Two things. First, RAID 0 is very bad for data storage, and RAID 5 requires at least 3 hard drives to create the array. Second, Storage drives are not nearly as speed sensitive as Boot and Scratch drives.

My recommendation:

Boot : SSD
Scratch : 2 WD VelociRaptors in RAID 0
Storage : 1 large WD RE4 Hard Drive, or 3 Hard Drives in RAID 5 for data protection.

 

[Dedloke]

First off, thanks tons for your quick responses guys, a question to LordConrad though. The only reason I was thinking speed was a big issue for data store was from reading an adobe article about best drive set up. I know that the editing and overall performance of Photoshop wouldn't be affected by my storage drives, but wouldn't the opening and saving of files? (on the old machine currently we're looking at at least 12 second image open times and i sometimes have to open around 15 at once. Saving is worse. This is where I'm really needing to shave off some time) are you suggesting that other components/a fast scratch disk/fast boot drive will help me more than the storage drive?

 

[RetiredChief]

For mechanical HDD, toshibia is coming out with a 2.5" 300 gig 15K RPM drive.

Toshiba MK01GRRB/R series HDD, a 300GB 2.5-inch enterprise-class drive with a 15,000 RPM spin speed and a 6Gb/s SAS interface.
No info on cost
Avg access time 2.7 mSec read/3.0 mSec Write. so still not as fast as SSD

 

[LordConrad]

First off, thanks tons for your quick responses guys, a question to LordConrad though. The only reason I was thinking speed was a big issue for data store was from reading an adobe article about best drive set up. I know that the editing and overall performance of Photoshop wouldn't be affected by my storage drives, but wouldn't the opening and saving of files? (on the old machine currently we're looking at at least 12 second image open times and i sometimes have to open around 15 at once. Saving is worse. This is where I'm really needing to shave off some time) are you suggesting that other components/a fast scratch disk/fast boot drive will help me more than the storage drive?

In your case, I would go with a RAID 5 setup for storage. RAID 5 will give you some data protection as well as increased speed. Three or four RE4 drives in RAID 5 should be plenty fast for storage.