RAID 0 Raptor X 150

[gentrinity]

I dont really care about the price, I just want to know if I will see a big difference when rendering video and using photoshop. Someone told me that video rendering benefits greatly from really fast drives, but they also told me that photoshop does better with multiple drives for scratch disks, up to four I think. Can someone please comment?

 

[axilon]

You put two raptors in a raid, and your not going to be disappointed.

 

[hatsurfer]

You put two raptors in a raid, and your not going to be disappointed.

Here we go again Wusy...

gentrinity, please at least do a quick search of the forum before posting. This is an extremely repetitive question and invites all the typical foolish RAID0 users to post their 1 sentence GO RAID advice.

Here's one just a little ways down from your top post...

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/drives-Raid-ftopict201969.html

And another...

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/fastest-game-loadtime-benchmarks-raid-raptor-ftopict201863.html#1267055

 

[glockman]

Without getting into the RAID argument, I think you will get better performance by putting your OS and Program Files on a Raptor and assigning a different Raptor to your Photoshop scratch file. Don't know about video though.

 

[gentrinity]

Well, the idea about the scratch file was getting a raid 0 raptor x and then having two seagate barracudas as storage drives, non raid, I just wanted to see if someone can confirm the extra performance gain in photoshop from having multiple scratch disks and where I would see this added gain.

 

[glockman]

You will see the benefit in Photoshop when you switch between open files and do copy / past operations or minimize Photoshop for a while and then go back to it and doing operations on any file that exceeds the amount of available RAM and especially when it exceeds available RAM by a bunch as in files with many layers.

If you work on a lot of small images such as web design you may not notice it but in the world of print production and artistic Photoshop retouching where images can easily reach 100 layers during a build Photoshop will page a *lot* and I don't think many people will argue the benefit of having the virtual memory on a different spindle - it even suggests this in the Photoshop preferences if you have it set for the same disk as the rest of your install is on.

 

[glockman]

I just re-read the previous post and saw that you mentioned multiple scratch disks - I'm not sure of the benefit there, I would not tend to do this unless I had to for some reason.

I also thought a bit more about using two drives in video rendering applications - I think you'd get better performance if your source and where you are rendering to are on separate disks - that just makes sense.

 

[gentrinity]

Thanks, that was some pretty usefull info, ill make sure to do some heavy reaserch tomorow. So far, I dont think it would be worth buying a second HD just for that. I do want my Raptor and my Seagate for storage, maybe if I need another drive ill get another seagate, but definately on a needs only basis

 

[gentrinity]

Alright, sounds interesting. Could you be a saint and help point me to a web site where I can research rendering performance, preferably adobe products like premier, photoshop, illustrator, and after effects. Youd make my life a little easier. Ill be happy to post back my findings.

 

[glockman]

How about having your OS and Applications on the Raptor (and the OS pagefile) and creating a partition on your other drive just for the Photoshop scratch - that way it won't get fragmented and if it gets gunked up you can quickly re-format it.

 

[axilon]

Sometimes I just expect people to understand how the RAID system works.

 

[hatsurfer]

Sometimes I just expect people to understand how the RAID system works.

That is why the OP originally posted was to find out if Raid would be a viable speed imporvement to his system. I realize some people like to be spooned this info, but posting 1 liners "Get RAID YEA" doesn't help anyone. Purchasing drives specifically for Raid should probably be one of the last performance increases to consider(especially with Raptor 150 x's). As RAID is a very steep slippery cost$/performance slope. Most users would be better to improve things like CPU, RAM, ect before thinking about buying expensive Raptors. Now if you already got the nice rig and a fat wallet than "it's a hobby" is all I got to say.

 

[axilon]

and a nice hobby at that. Ive used two 80 gig in raid 0 for going on 3 years.. flawless operation. I will myself, shortly, upgrade to a complete new rig and deck it out with two raptors.. mainly because processors are so cheap now. Anyhow, I look forward to that kinda power, it lets me sleep easier at night. I am, of course, well aware of the risk. Hence, anything important is stored on a USB drive for the eventual 're-format'.

 

[gentrinity]

I never asked for spoonfeading, just in case, I just like to get some initial reactions before I start doing research, and trust me, I DO research.

I have changed my interest from the RAID subject since its something that will require heavy research, so right now I just would like people to comment on web sites that are more pro app oriented, cause these forums are mostly gaming oriented rigs. I plan on gamming, but that wont pay the bills so if anyone can point me to a good site that has information that explains the rendering processes used by adobe products, and the hardware each process requires, plus tricks to increase performance. I would be in research heaven. Gotta go to work!!!

 

[Codesmith]

Two 150 GB Raptors in RAID 0 is definately going to be fast.

The X version is noiser, so you might want to get the non-Windowed Version instead.

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People tend to vastly overestimate the number of activities in which the hard drive forms a bottleneck.

Rather than guess or listen to other people guess, its best to search the web for some hard numbers.

If you see benchmarks showing Raptors beat 7200 drives in the types of photoshop operations you will be doing then go for the Raptor.

If you see benchmarks showing RAID-0 beating single drives in the types of photoshop operations you will be doing then go for two RAID-0 Raptors.

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If you simply want to know (or brag) you have the fastest hard drive setup possible then forget about the benchmarks and buy the Raptors.
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Make a small partition at the begining of the drive for your OS & Software. This is the fastes section of the hard drive and it will ensure maximum performance for you C: partition as well as help you keep your software and data seperate.

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Given that you will have 300 GB of storage that has double the normal changes of failing, use backup software to automatically protect anything important.

Save the images to another hard drive and move them to DVD/external hard drive as often as you feel is necessary given the importance of the data.

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PS post links to any good benchmarks you find.

 

[RichPLS]

Given that you will have 300 GB of storage that has double the normal changes of failing, use backup software to automatically protect anything important.

Save the images to another hard drive and move them to DVD/external hard drive as often as you feel is necessary given the importance of the data.

Keeping this in perspective, that if both hard drives work initially (not DOA) then the chances of failure for a single Raptor within the first 5 years is extremely small, and if you double that chance of failure via RAID0 the failure rate is still very low... but still twice that of a single drive... 8)

 

[gentrinity]

Thanks for the advice Codesmith, I would like to know which sites to base my research on? Should I go to app specific forums and see what they have to say, or are there any web site in particular that help people like me do research on app performance.

The quandry I find myself in is the fact that most tech sites are mostly directed to a gamer kind of audience, so the research on adobe products is a little skimpy. I will start looking right now and see what I can dig up, but if anyone can give me a heads up as to where I should concentrate my search, yall would help me out a lot.

 

[glockman]

You can just Google for Adobe RAID performance, Photoshop RAID performance and video application performance RAID - you will find more than you will have time to read.