Storage decision for new setup

Schlotkins · Post by **Schlotkins** » Sat Jan 10, 2009 6:36 pm

I'm putting together a new machine that's mostly for Photopshop CS4. Here are the specs so far:

Asus P6T Deluxe
Core i7 920 (will O/C some)
Thermalright HR-01 Plus
12 GB DDR3
ATI 4670 Passive card
Blu-ray burner

Now I'm left with the decision on storage, which I'm having a lot of trouble with. At this point, I have about 500GB of pictures that I'd like to keep online. I think I'm going to go with a 1.5 TB seagate RAID 1 as that will give plenty of room to expand. The question is what I use for a boot drive. I could stick with the RAID 1 setup or I could add something else. Right now I'm thinking about the following:

1) Intel SSD 80GB: Fast, but small and expensive. I'm not sure if I'd notice much difference for the extra cash.

2) New Raptor: Very quick, pretty cheap. However, can I keep it quiet?

3) I have two of the 150GB raptors just sitting around at this point. I don't want to sell them because of data erasing issues, but they are fairly quick. The downside is they are noisy. I have some extra 5 1/4" bays so I don't know if I could try and quiet them down and RAID0 them. They would only be for the OS.

Any tips are appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris

tknd · Post by **tknd** » Sat Jan 10, 2009 8:13 pm

My suggestion is don't use raid 1 or any raid at all. Keep the disks separate and make copies to other disks on regular intervals. The problem with raid is if the file system gets corrupted or you accidentally delete something, the action is performed on all raid copies. Raid is never a backup solution, it is only for reliability and even in that arena the benefits are questionable.

Munters · Post by **Munters** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 5:12 am

Of course Raid is not a replacement of a backup.
Raid-1 is fine if you need to continue work if a disk fails. You (or other persons) can continue work while ordening a new disk.
Buying a new disk and restoring a backup costs about a working day. So if it is not a problem to continue your work an tuesday, if you get a diskfailure on friday-afternoon, in case of a disk-failure, running a non-raid setup is fine. It is just a costs analysis.

I would forget the noise velo disks, and just buy a new 7200 disk. The startup times of Windows and Photoshop wouldn't differ hardly (and is once a day max), while the noise you notice is all day long.