Raid 0 or Raid 1 for graphics/photo editing

shocksyde

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[H]orde, ASSEMBLE!

So I've decided I'd like to get into this RAID business and am wondering if RAID 0 would really show me any speed benefits, or if I should just stick with RAID 1 for the redundancy.

Besides the normal web-surfing, I create graphics and edit photos on my computer. The graphics and photo files can be over 20 or 30MB each. Would RAID 0 be beneficial to me in this situation, or should I not even bother?

Now, I do have back-ups (an internal 1TB drive and 2 external 500GB drives), so having more redundancy isn't a necessity, but I guess it doesn't hurt.

So, what say you, Hardforum?

EDIT: The RAID setup would be 2 WD Black 750GB 7200 drives on an ASUS P5E-VM
 
RAID-0 would boost your linear throughput somewhere between 20 and 40 percent, which is a nice boost for loading your photos into RAM in programs like Photoshop or Lightroom. If you already have a backup system, RAID-1 only saves you the time of a reinstall when a physical disk failure occurs, which is probably about once every two years (or once a year with RAID-0)
 
RAID can actually hurt photoshop performance; single disks are better (one each for source, destination, scratch, etc)
 
RAID can actually hurt photoshop performance; single disks are better (one each for source, destination, scratch, etc)

How would you set up a system with a large rotational drive (probably 1.5tb Seagate) for storage and a 2nd Gen 80gb Intel SSD drive?

C: drive as entire SSD (no partitions) for the OS and scratch area (and destination?)?
D: drive (rotational) as source for photos

My wife uses Adobe Lightroom (Photoshop based) and I really know nothing about it, nor do I really care to other than I'm about to build a new system for her.

/threadjack
 
So I have Win7 already installed on my computer. Can I simply create an image of my current primary HDD and then copy the image to the new RAID array?

Or should I just start with a fresh install (current install is only a week old)?
 
@[LYL]Homer
IIRC, it's not that not optimal with the way you're planning. The scratch drive should be on another drive, even if it's a slower drive than the OS drive. So move the scratch drive to the D: drive. However, I have heard of others using a RAMDisk as the scratch drive. Example here:
In other words, as I said, the cost of the devices + the cost of populating them becomes absolutely ridiculous. Grab two Velociraptors and have fun... or even a handful of SSD drives and RAID 'em together. The overall price-to-performance ratio will blow these iRAM devices clear off the planet surface...

Sad, really, because I've been a proponent of actual RAMdisks for decades now. Hell, I used to boot my Amiga 500 off a RAMdisk, so I've seen pretty much every attempt at making such devices as the iRAM that have appeared, and they all suck, period. They just can't do the job adequately and keep the price-to-performance ratio anywhere near a reasonable level.

I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).

The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.

I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.

They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em. ;)

I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."

After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.

I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.

Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.

They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.

It was a very good week... ;)

@shocksyde
Fresh install all the way. It's only a week old and this way you can gurantee that there will be no problems.
 
Hmm, looking at that info about RamDisk....

If I have 8GB of RAM, could I create a drive with RamDisk to use as my scratch disk for Photoshop? How much would I allocate to the RamDisk drive? Would my system performance suffer if I'm using some of my RAM as a disk drive?
 
If I have 8GB of RAM, could I create a drive with RamDisk to use as my scratch disk for Photoshop? How much would I allocate to the RamDisk drive? Would my system performance suffer if I'm using some of my RAM as a disk drive?

You can create a RAM disk wit 8GB of RAM. Not 100% sure how big the scratch RAM disk should be. Though my guess would be 2-3GB max. Whether or not your system performance would suffer depends on what and how many other apps you're running while the RAM disk is running. If you're already hitting 6GB of RAM usage before the RAM disk is being run and going to use a 3GB RAM disk, yes performance would suffer.
 
OK, so I got everything setup last night and created a 1.5TB RAID 0 array. I then installed Win 7 RC1 and it seems incredibly snappy. Didn't need any RAID drivers during install, BTW. Is this normal for Win 7?

Now, I'm wondering if I should create an OS partition, a scratch disk partition for Photoshop, and then a partition containing the remainder of the drive. Would this method show me any benefits?

I may still look into the RamDisk scratch disk method discussed above.
 
Also, my motherboard uses Intel Matrix RAID which would allow me to have both a RAID 0 partition on each drive and a RAID 1 partition on each drive. Would this be a better option for me?
 
Sorry I'm all over the place here...

Can I do a RAID 0 for boot/OS, RAID 0 for scratch disk & RAID 1 for data?
 
OK, so I got everything setup last night and created a 1.5TB RAID 0 array. I then installed Win 7 RC1 and it seems incredibly snappy. Didn't need any RAID drivers during install, BTW. Is this normal for Win 7?

Now, I'm wondering if I should create an OS partition, a scratch disk partition for Photoshop, and then a partition containing the remainder of the drive. Would this method show me any benefits?

Can I do a RAID 0 for boot/OS, RAID 0 for scratch disk & RAID 1 for data?

It is normal for Windows 7 to not need RAID drivers as Windows 7 includes most RAID drivers already.

Yes you can do RAID 0 for the boot/OS and scratch disk and RAID 1 for data.
 
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