Have SSD, what now?

[jage]

Building a computer for photoshop mostly. I haven't figured out my HDD solution yet.

I already have a 60gb SSD, planning on installing Win7 on it.

My main goal is backups, I currently keep everything on a 500gb external and there is plenty of space, but I back up to a 300gb pocket drive and have to pick and choose.

So I was thinking either two 1TB drives in RAID 1 or two 500GB drives in RAID 1 for storage.

My question was do I need some other drives in RAID 0 for current work, or will the SSD be enough (speed not space) to do projects? Will I see any benefit to doing more drives in RAID 0 when the OS is on SSD?

Or should I use the SSD for something else and get a larger SSD for my OS and active work, putting completed work on the RAID 1 TB drives?

 

[leandrodafontoura]

Dont work on RAID 1 as a backup solution. For backups, get a larger external drive. There are plenty of 500GB and even 1TB external drives. Afterwards, if you can afford, you may get a RAID 0, it will speed up large files trasnfer and game loads.

 

[jage]

OK, I get that RAID 1 doesn't protect against human error or disaster but I've ONLY lost important work in the past to HDD failure, stuff that had not gotten into the backup drive or onto CD, or before that my iomega tape drive (which I still have with 100+ backup tapes sitting at the edge of my desk)

If I produce anything and have a HDD failure before I manually back up then I lose my work. I manually save my work all the time, CTRL+S is part of my work flow almost every time I pause. When I'm done with a project I back it up to an external drive, if it's important I'll burn it to a CD or put it on a server somewhere. In addition my older CDs seem to be failing more lately.

Frankly I'm exhausted by all the work and maintenance. I'd hoped RAID 1 would give me a solution between saving constantly and backing up files- because again that's the ONLY place I've lost work in the past. I'm also sick of all the external media. I've got nearly 1000 burned CDs, at least 3 external drives at the moment... something I'd like to get organized since there are multiple disorganized copies of projects all over- many half baked projects have gotten backed up multiple times in different directories. It's a mess that I'd like to clean up, and I know I have a tendency to just shove stuff over to an external drive.

If my 500GB external drive is 3ft from my tower and my files are backed up nightly, how is that different from a RAID 1? Different as in BETTER. Well aside from accidentally permanently deleting an important project file and catching it before the backup is removed as well, because I don't want my backup filled with things I've deleted either.