HDD Advice for Photoshop

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Pieter2008

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Hi, busy assembling pc for friend who works almost exclusively with Photoshop.
Budget +- R1k for HDD(s)
Was planning on buying 3 Samsung Spinpoint 322 F4's for +- R900.
1 for windows/program files and the other 2 in raid(0) configuration for the photoshop 'scratch disk'
Unfortunately all spinpoint 322 F4's are sold out at all dealers I checked.
I could go the Seagate route, but don't have experience regarding their quality or performance.
Anybody have a solution that could be similair regarding quality/speed or getting the max performance
from photoshop without sacrificing too much space/money? (eg. a 30gb SSD won't help)

Thanks
 
Not much difference to me between WD, Samsung, Seagate, and Hitachi. Have had equal number of failures across all drives. To me the operating conditions are a far more important consideration.

Therefore I believe you can quite safely go with Seagate.
 
Seagate recently downgraded all their drives to a 2 year warranty. So, I'd avoid them. Just not worth the potential headaches.

With R1k budget for any and all hard drives, I dont think a raid 0 array is feasible or necessary. I would just buy a 1TB Caviar Black, which should deliver the performance and capacity he needs. If he wants anything more, I'd go to a 64GB SSD for the OS, programs and swap, and the 1TB hdd for everything else.

Photoshop is probably a better candidate for a performance boost from raid 0, but I'm still not convinced the performance gain would be worth it. If you wanted to do RAID0, I'd buy 2 x 500GB Caviar Green drives, for R560 each. You still have the problem of the array possibly failing though.
 
South_Bit said:
RAID 0 only ever ends in tears :cry:
Click to expand...
The Raid(0) will be a scratch(swap) disk so data loss is not really a problem here

EDIT : But too come back to the point, a would prefer to seperate the windows and scratch disk and I am aiming to get the best performance from both.
 
Then buy 2 x 500GB Caviar Green drives and dont use them in RAID 0. For your budget, thats the best bet.
 
You will not get additional speed from Raid 0 (if that is what you are wanting), simply because most of the motherboards have not got a real hardware RAID card on them. They support RAID in the BIOS, but the main CPU is still left to do the work, so any kind of RAID activity is gonna be slower than a single drive. If you are not worried about data integrity on the scratch disk, then use one drive. RAID 0 is simply used to extend the capacity (in most cases) of drives. So if you have 2 500GB drives in RAID 0, all you gonna get is a 1TB volume. Why not just get 1 TB Drive? less power, less heat, faster etc... and also, since its just a scratch drive, you probably won't need GBs of space, rather just get a smaller drive for it. Get a SSD for the boot / photoshop drive if you are worried about speed or a big TB sized drive if you want speed and space.
 
Yes you are right about the neglible performance with onboard an onboard raid controller. Think I'm just going to go with 2 x Spinpoint F3 500gb drives.

EDIT : If I can find stock
 
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I'd steer clear of Seagate if possible, I've had 5 of them die on me and customer support is pretty shocking (in my experience). I've been using WD caviar blacks for a couple of years now and I've never had a hitch. What kind of photoshop work is being done? I give PS access to 6gb of my 8gb DDR3-1600 and the rest on my main disk and it's quite prompt. If billboards are being designed then maybe SSD is the only viable option - otherwise it doesn't make a huge difference in my experience (9 odd years).
 
South_Bit said:
RAID 0 only ever ends in tears :cry:
Click to expand...

It does?

Perhaps if you store important info but it is awesome. I have been addicted to hdd speed since i got going with pc's :D. Raid 0 was insane :D. Seemed like much more performance. Never once had a raid failure nor did i ever store anything of value on it. Back up is the key for anything actually. You have just as much chance of a single drive failing.

If it fails you just reload, no worries. Easy enough.

What is the cheapest raptor these days? Wow 1.4k for a 300 gb raptor :eek:. Epic. Try push for a raptor. Awesome drives.
http://www.biosonline.co.za/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=169&products_id=13845
 
Thank goodness. I got hold of 2 Spinpoint F4's just in time. HDD Prices are going through the roof because of the floods in Thailand! :wtf:
 
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Pieter2008 said:
Thank goodness. I got hold of 2 Spinpoint F4's just in time. HDD Prices are going through the roof because of the floods in Thailand! :wtf:
Click to expand...

I always preferred Thailand over China for hdd's, but all my hdd's that broke, it seems none of the Chinese ones did? South_Bit, what do you think?

BTW my 4.5 year old Seagate 500GB is performing quite slow, and getting quite noisy, what now? Chuck it? Or just put it away, and leave duplicates on it?
 
xera said:
I always preferred Thailand over China for hdd's, but all my hdd's that broke, it seems none of the Chinese ones did? South_Bit, what do you think?

BTW my 4.5 year old Seagate 500GB is performing quite slow, and getting quite noisy, what now? Chuck it? Or just put it away, and leave duplicates on it?
Click to expand...

Of the 4 drives I currently have on the bench, 2 are from China and 2 are from Thailand. There really is no pattern or trend, they fail when they fail no matter which factory they're from.

Check the SMART status of your 500GB, see if anything looks obviously wrong. Noisy...bearing is probably going.
 
South_Bit said:
Of the 4 drives I currently have on the bench, 2 are from China and 2 are from Thailand. There really is no pattern or trend, they fail when they fail no matter which factory they're from.

Check the SMART status of your 500GB, see if anything looks obviously wrong. Noisy...bearing is probably going.
Click to expand...

I think it's just noisy when the head is moving (seeking data, when i open folders or files)? Is that also bearing?

Will check SMART status now... am worried about doing a long diagnostic on it, as it may just collapse. I have used it as my music hdd the whole of the 4.5 years, maybe its the continuous access that's wearing it out?
 
There's a bearing on the head stack arm as well, could be that. Or your motor controller on the PCB is going.
 
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