4 SAS drives.... or one Solid State

[JasonSTL739]

Hi all - new here on this forum.

I'm in the process of building a new rig around a Supermicro X7DA3+ motherboard with dual quads and 16GB RAM. I'm a heavy photography/graphics/video guy, so things like the photoshop swap matter.

I have an array of 8 500GB WD drives for storage. That is pretty much a done deal.

Options for OS/program/swap storage:
-Four 10k 73GB Fujitsu SAS drives
-32GB Solid State OCZ version II drive
-RAMDrive using some of the 16GB
-Two 150GB Raptors
-Two 36GB Raptors

I already own all of the above except for the 32GB solid state. Anyone have any advice on which to use?

Perhaps 32GB SS for the OS and OS swap, SAS for program installs, RAMdrive for photoshop swap, and just sell the Raptors?

For RAID use, I have:
Areca PCIe 8-port, headed for the 8-drive storage array
onboard SAS and SATA RAID, possibly with ZCR card, on the Supermicro board.

 

[MixManSC]

Looks good to me. Short of the SSD your config is near identical to mine (box in my sig). For such a pure high performance workstation I'd personally ditch the raptors and go with the SSD as you mentioned. My biggest boost for Photoshop came from allocating 12GB of the ram as a ramdrive. I'm not considering doubling my ram to 32GB or going all out and going to 64GB.

 

[Verge]

sas is great, just make sure it's raid1+0

 

[JasonSTL739]

sas is great, just make sure it's raid1+0

I was thinking RAID0 actually for all four drives.

Looks good to me. Short of the SSD your config is near identical to mine (box in my sig). For such a pure high performance workstation I'd personally ditch the raptors and go with the SSD as you mentioned. My biggest boost for Photoshop came from allocating 12GB of the ram as a ramdrive. I'm not considering doubling my ram to 32GB or going all out and going to 64GB.

Sweet. Do you think the SSD would benefit as the base? Interested in why you haven't gone there.

 

[MixManSC]

I think it would benefit some but they are just too new for me is all. When I built this box up they were really not viable yet. That being said I dont have an issue with Windows or other applications loading up. It really all about cache for me. I think my next big step will be upgrading the ram to 32 or 64gb, then increase the ramdrive size up to 28 or 60gb, and then move the Windows paging file to the ram drive as well.

 

[JasonSTL739]

I think it would benefit some but they are just too new for me is all. When I built this box up they were really not viable yet. That being said I dont have an issue with Windows or other applications loading up. It really all about cache for me. I think my next big step will be upgrading the ram to 32 or 64gb, then increase the ramdrive size up to 28 or 60gb, and then move the Windows paging file to the ram drive as well.

What are the best tools to test things here - I have the flexibility to build it up a couple different ways and test to see what is really fastest. I'm happy to post any detail I get from it if someone can direct me towards the right resource to get "real" data and not just HDTach?