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Spool drive setup? building a new design computer

kustomsigns&designs

kustomsigns&designs

New Member
I'm getting ready to build a new 8 core 20gb ram system, and i'm not sure how to arrange the hard drives. I'm thinking i want 2 300gb 10k rpm VelociRaptors to use for scratch disk and storage and a third for the operating system.

I am assuming i should put these 2 drives in a raid array to make them faster, but which raid? and will i be able to use the 2 drives for staoage space and scratch disk?

I would love some input on this, i'm just not real familiar with scratch disk and raid setups.
 
kustomsigns&designs

kustomsigns&designs

New Member
Ok after a little research I found that I will put the 2 - 300gb VelociRaptors in raid 0 and use those as the main storage and for the OS.

Second I will get the 150gb VelociRaptor leave it empty and assign it as the scratch disk. Or I could buy 2 of these and raid 0 them, would that be over kill? especially with 20gb of ram?

I will have a third drive (1Tb) for backup storage.
 
cptcorn

cptcorn

adad
I would spend the couple houndread dollars and get a 2nd drive for your scratch disk...

Two drives running Raid0 for your OS/main storage... 7200 is fine

Two drives running Raid0 for your scratch... 10k best.

What happens is... as the ram fills up... it goes to scratch, and then it goes to your OS drive. Having 300gb worth of scratch is a decent amount and very little if any information would be written onto the OS drives. I'm using 16gb of ram and haven't noticed much drive activity flowing onto the main OS drives.

Two slow drives running Raid1 for backup... rather this this (what i did) is get a NAS that supports a raid setup... I have a Buffalo NAS and it is slick... I also have an external hard drive hooked up to this to provide an additional back up
 
cptcorn

cptcorn

adad
kustomsigns&designs said:
Are you saying speed for my OS/main storage drive is not very important?<--serious question.

What is NAS?
Click to expand...
It is and it isn't. If you have the cash go for 10k drives. If you want to save a bit go for the slower ones. The OS isn't doing a whole lot where you require that speed. I tested some and didn't notice much of a difference. Huge improvement with the fast scratch disks. That's because Photoshop will be writing to that scratch before it writes to the main OS drives. Once the images is loaded into Photoshop, well, that's stored in RAM until it fills up, and then it gets pushed on to the scratch. Once that's filled then to the OS drives. RAM > Scratch > OS ...
kustomsigns&designs said:
So in my network i have, a cable modem into a wired hub then it splits throughout the shop. The hub is where i would plug in the NAS? would it be secure there?
Click to expand...
Correct. It would be just as secure as your computer... but not anymore... unless you setup a user/pass for it.
 
cptcorn

cptcorn

adad
This is the NAS I have.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165075

It's pretty much just a mini storage server... Set it up to run Raid 1, and you'll have two copies of your files. You can also link multiples of these devices, or you can (in my case) hook up an external HD to it, and it will do nightly backups to that. I think it has two usb connections on the back. Hell you can even hook a printer to it and it works as a print server.
 
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