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In a lot of ways this is a bit of a duh but I found it interesting so I'm sharing the news.
I recently got more ram for my main rig, and a 750GB Seagate drive from my server. That freed up one of my 250gb sata samsung drives from the server and allowed me to transfer all my audiobooks off the old 120GB ide drive on my main rig. I'm going to install XP x64 on the 250 to see how I like it before copying it to my current seagate 320gb sata. I have 4gb of ram now, and 1 of that is useless... but if it still hasn't matured enough I'd be hesitant (and no I'm not going to use Vista yet... SP1 is SP0.5 for the most part).
The extra drives means though that I can have a proper scratch disk on the main rig for photoshop. I decided to benchmark with the RetouchArtist's Photoshop Speed Test just to please my inner geek. The results were in the order I expected, but the range surprised me.
System: X2 4200+, 4GB DDR2 800 (3gb useable), XP SP2. 320GB OS drive (60gb used, defraged). Followed setting requirements for PS settings.
No scratch, just boot disk: 4 minutes 54 seconds
250GB sata as scratch: 3 minutes 4 seconds
120GB IDE as scratch: 7 minutes 40 seconds
Like I said the order of speed is about what I expected but not to this extreme. I ran HD Tach on all three and the IDE got a 91.1 MB/s burst, 41.1 average, 13.7ms random access and 5% cpu util. The 250sata had a 171.4 burst, 60.4 average, 14.1 access and 4% util. The 320 bursted at 122 (not surprising as the OS drive), 61 average, 13.4 access and 0% util.
So... Photoshop is FAR more sensitive to the hard drive speed than I would have ever guessed and if you think you can speed things up by using your older drive as a scratch just don't bother, use it for file storage and keep your os drive mostly empty. You'd obviously be better off with an extra newish drive but if you don't have that choice keep your os drive extra empty and/or shrink it and have a scratch partition. If I was going to build a photoshop box this would be the only time I'd recommend a RAID 0 configuration, and just for the scratch drives. I'd Raid 0 them, have them in two partitions, first partition (the faster) would be the scratch and the bigger rear partition would be file storage. Remember that the bigger drives these days tend to be the faster due to tighter platters (unless of course you want to buy those extreme 10k but small amount of GB drives).
I recently got more ram for my main rig, and a 750GB Seagate drive from my server. That freed up one of my 250gb sata samsung drives from the server and allowed me to transfer all my audiobooks off the old 120GB ide drive on my main rig. I'm going to install XP x64 on the 250 to see how I like it before copying it to my current seagate 320gb sata. I have 4gb of ram now, and 1 of that is useless... but if it still hasn't matured enough I'd be hesitant (and no I'm not going to use Vista yet... SP1 is SP0.5 for the most part).
The extra drives means though that I can have a proper scratch disk on the main rig for photoshop. I decided to benchmark with the RetouchArtist's Photoshop Speed Test just to please my inner geek. The results were in the order I expected, but the range surprised me.
System: X2 4200+, 4GB DDR2 800 (3gb useable), XP SP2. 320GB OS drive (60gb used, defraged). Followed setting requirements for PS settings.
No scratch, just boot disk: 4 minutes 54 seconds
250GB sata as scratch: 3 minutes 4 seconds
120GB IDE as scratch: 7 minutes 40 seconds
Like I said the order of speed is about what I expected but not to this extreme. I ran HD Tach on all three and the IDE got a 91.1 MB/s burst, 41.1 average, 13.7ms random access and 5% cpu util. The 250sata had a 171.4 burst, 60.4 average, 14.1 access and 4% util. The 320 bursted at 122 (not surprising as the OS drive), 61 average, 13.4 access and 0% util.
So... Photoshop is FAR more sensitive to the hard drive speed than I would have ever guessed and if you think you can speed things up by using your older drive as a scratch just don't bother, use it for file storage and keep your os drive mostly empty. You'd obviously be better off with an extra newish drive but if you don't have that choice keep your os drive extra empty and/or shrink it and have a scratch partition. If I was going to build a photoshop box this would be the only time I'd recommend a RAID 0 configuration, and just for the scratch drives. I'd Raid 0 them, have them in two partitions, first partition (the faster) would be the scratch and the bigger rear partition would be file storage. Remember that the bigger drives these days tend to be the faster due to tighter platters (unless of course you want to buy those extreme 10k but small amount of GB drives).
So then it indeed is easier to keep it as one...
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