Raid 0 and photoshop

The Thing with raid 0 is if one drive fails you just lost all your data. If this is for a business I would suggest either a raid 1 or raid 5 setup. Raid 1 can be as small as 2 drives, one will be the "working" drive and one will be the mirror dive, sorta. If either drive fails you still have a full working backup ready to go. And you could have little to no down time.

If this is just for personal photoshopping for gits and shiggles then you can use a riad 0 and would likely see a little performance increase but I don't know if the price justifies the performance. Just be warned of the possible out comes of raid 0.

I would personally rather have both drives and JBOD and have double the space for whatever I need. Unless I can ever get my storage server built.
 
Wanna know how to really squeeze every last drop of performance from Photoshop? Here's how:

Get more RAM. And then get some RAMdisk software (my recommendation is RAMDiskPlay from SuperSpeed.com). And then learn how to put the scratch file on a RAMdisk which will make Photoshop literally scream like no RAID setup can even hope to achieve.

And it'll cost you less money in the long run and offer you 50x the performance of even the fastest RAID you're gonna attempt to build. If you're interested in RAID for other aspects, that's fine, but you simply have no idea how fast Photoshop - even the pig-bloated CS3 and the upcoming CS4 - can be until you've set up a proper RAMdisk and let Photoshop just have at it.

Multihundred megabyte TIFF files snap open with nearly zero loading time. A lot of processing operations have speeds that simply skyrocket compared to using physical hard drives even in RAID because there's efffectively no random access time to add up with every single write operation. RAMdisks make even multi-drive SSD RAID setups look like they're standing still.

Max out that machine with RAM, get some RAMdisk software, set it up properly, and watch Photoshop breeze through stuff physical hard drives can't even load before the RAMdisk powered image processing is completely done.

Serious speed... seriously.
 
Hulk said:
I am in the process of building a pc system that will be mainly used for photoshop.

Someone suggested I buy two of these

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218 and run it in raid 0.

How much faster is raid 0 over buying just one of those HDDs?
Click to expand...
I own 2 of those. I put them in raid zero for awhile but due to instability of Nvidia raid drivers, I went back to 1 drive. Here are some benchmarks for you.

Raid 0

Single drive has around 120 MB/s maximum and 90MB Average.
 
If you can, boot off a single drive, and RAID 0 two others for a scratch drive for photoshop, this will have your Scratch spindles not be accessed by Virtual Memory, Windows accessing Dll's etc. Don't save your work exclusively to the RAID 0 array (keep copies of important stuff to multiple places) and if you haven't maxed your RAM yet, do that first. This setup is cheaper than a Areca card and almost as fast for Photoshop.
 
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