Which RAID setup is faster?

[uzor]

I'm in the process of configuring the caching disks for a dedicated DVD duplicator (4 burners total). I have 4 10k 36GB SCSI disks in an external enclosure. The way that the software that will be using these disks works is that it keeps two sets of cache files going at once, per drive. It will first fill cache A for the initial burn on that drive. Once cache A has been filled, disc A begins to burn and cache B begins filling with the next different disc image (while A is burning). That way, once disc A finishes, the prog switches from cache A to cache B as active and begins burning disc B immediately (no down time to reload the cache), and so on and so forth.

My question is as follows: Would it be better (RAID 0 in either case) to create 2 partitions that each span all four disks (so each disk would have a piece of partition A and B, but across 4 disks), or have partition A dedicated to disks 1&2, and have partition B dedicated to disks 3&4? Since these will be used only for cache files, I don't care about the increased risk of data loss (i.e. no permanent data will be stored on these disks).

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lazn_Work]

I would not try to read and write to the same disks at the same time.. Talk about head thrashing..

Make one RAID 0 array with 1 partition of Disks 1&2 for cache A and one RAID 0 array with 1 partition of Disks 3&4 for cache B. This should keep the data flowing a little better.

==>Lazn