New System / What HDs??

[HulaMike]

Think I may want to upgrade my order for a new work station with Dell. I have ordered two 80 gig ATA /100 hard drives (7200 rpm) but have found that other HDs are available, maybe preferable for Photoshop.

My choices are:
SATA drives (faster)
RAID 0 drives (no mirroring)
RAID 1 drives (mirroring)

With a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz processor and 2 GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM, would a hard disk upgrade make a real difference in performance??

Thanks.

Mike

[Bill C]

Mike ... here's my opinion, which of course, others will probably disagree with :)
Raid 0 - is just striping the data which can result in improved performance - however, there really isn't 'built-in' data protection - if you lose a drive, you have to recreate via a backup (if you took one!). Raid 0 would be good for an application with large amounts of data reads - for PS it won't make a bit of difference.
Raid 1 - mirroring - much different story for data protection - typical Raid 1 solutions mirror the entire drive, including all OS files ... therefore, if the primary drive fails, the system swaps over to the alternate drive and the system stays up and running with no data loss. The downside - if your primary disk is 80gb then the secondary is 80gb....you have 80gb 'useable', not 160GB (good news is that disk storage is relatively cheap these days)... So, the decision you have to make is whether or not you want a fault-tolerant disk system (Raid 1) or if you want to chance a failure and have to rebuild your OS and hope that you were diligent and backed up your data files. Even with a Raid 1 system you should backup your files.
Good luck!
Bill

[HulaMike]

Thanks again Big Bill! But also of importance to me is would the upgrade from ATA 100 drives make the system faster at all??

[Bilbo]

Think I may want to upgrade my order for a new work station with Dell. I have ordered two 80 gig ATA /100 hard drives (7200 rpm) but have found that other HDs are available, maybe preferable for Photoshop.

My choices are:
SATA drives (faster)
RAID 0 drives (no mirroring)
RAID 1 drives (mirroring)

With a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz processor and 2 GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM, would a hard disk upgrade make a real difference in performance??

Thanks.

Mike

It's probably not worth the extra buying SATA. SATA allows 150Mb/s transfer speed whereas ATA gives 133MB/s so there's only a small gain. SCSI might be a better choice (320MB/s I think).

Bilbo

[proberts]

Think I may want to upgrade my order for a new work station with Dell. I have ordered two 80 gig ATA /100 hard drives (7200 rpm) but have found that other HDs are available, maybe preferable for Photoshop.

My choices are:
SATA drives (faster)
RAID 0 drives (no mirroring)
RAID 1 drives (mirroring)

With a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz processor and 2 GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM, would a hard disk upgrade make a real difference in performance??

Thanks.

Mike

Mike:

Serial ATA is a hardware specification, RAID is a redundancy one, there's no reason you couldn't say run mirroring on SATA. But it's a serial bus, so like most things RAID, if you can mirror over two channels it's a lot better. Hardware mirroring beats software mirroring for performance, but real hardware mirroring beats the pseudo-hardware mirroring of some motherboard chipsets (such as the Highpoint 370.) If your motherboard has a BIOS that does mirroring, then it's probably limited to EIDE/UDMA drives without adding a new controller. With UDMA, the cables make a lot of difference, as I suspect does shielding.

There are several issues here:

1. Drive rotation speed. The quicker the drive heads can get to the right place, the faster you get your data- note that at least at one point in time it was possible to have misses because the heads hadn't positioned by the time the platter had rotated. In any case, 7200RPM drives aren't bad, but you can get 10,000 RPM drives and I think there are some 15,000RPM drives out now- they come at a premium, and meantime between failures is likely to be higher above 10k. Going from to 7200RPM seemed to make my laptop about 5% faster.

2. Disk cache. The more cache, the better, since the drive can "read ahead" and buffer the data. For this to make a lot of difference, you want the files to be contiguous on the drive, so a low fragmentation filesystem is necessary, and defragmenting the filesystem becomes important.

3. Connection type. IDE, EIDE, SCSI or SATA. SCSI comes in different flavors, which have different transfer characteristics. These days, there's not much actual difference in the drive itself, most manufacturers just put a different controller board on the same physical drive.

4. Controller. A bus mastering controller makes a significant difference in interrupt processing, if the system is doing lots of things, this can really be seen. PCIX will make things even more interesting as it starts to replace PCI.

Mirroring is the only RAID level I'd do. I've seen every other level fail too often (especially 5 having the wrong drives fail due to a bus or powre issue)- the failure mode for a mirror set is the same as for every other RAID level (wrong two drives go and your're hosed) but recovery is significantly easier. However, if you can do backups to tape and store the tapes off-site, you're much better off than with mirroring for a major disaster. Another alternative is to put the mirror drive in a removable drive tray, and have an extra tray or two and occasionally pull one drive out and have the set re-mirror, and take the good drive offsite. Drives are pickier about storage conditions/handling than tapes, but it's not that bad.

As far as transfer speeds, SCSI goes from 5mb/s to 320MB/s depending on the type. SATA 1x is 160MB/s, andd there's a 4x spec for 640MB/s. IDE is up to 8.4MB/s, and EIDE is up to 13.3MB/s until you get up to the UDMA, which are 33, 66, 100 and 133MB/s.

Going from 100MB/s to 160 is >50%, and should give ~5-7% better overall throughput assuming the same rotation speed and cache size. If you have cheap cables, you may see more throughput- going to 640MB/s would be better, but I'm not sure how much bandwidth you get on a typical 66MHz PCI bus- ~256Mb/s maybe, though that depends on if you have slower cards on the bus, as they'll drag the bus down to 33MHz (~127MB/s.) PCI-X goes up to 1024MB/s though I think most chipsets split it to 1066 and 800 for each channel.

Probably more than you wanted to know.

Paul

[Andre]

Think I may want to upgrade my order for a new work station with Dell. I have ordered two 80 gig ATA /100 hard drives (7200 rpm) but have found that other HDs are available, maybe preferable for Photoshop.

My choices are:
SATA drives (faster)
RAID 0 drives (no mirroring)
RAID 1 drives (mirroring)

With a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz processor and 2 GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM, would a hard disk upgrade make a real difference in performance??

Thanks.

Mike


Hi Mike,
I realize that this is probably a bit late. But you can always change whatever you buy later. Disks are cheap.

If I was to buy a new system right now, I would like to put in 4 SATA drives. I would configure them as RAID 1+0, or striped and mirrored. 2 disks striped for performance, and then mirrored to the other two. This will give the best performance, as well as redundancy.

I would then take it a little further. I would format them as NTFS with 64K clusters. This will waste a lot of space if you have a lot of small files (i.e. files under 64K), but so what. Disk is cheap. This will scream. When working with Photoshop, this is the performance you want.

You know when you boot up your system and you see that white progress bar along the bottom before the Windows 'start' screen comes up? With 64K clusters, I don't see that bar. My PC boots faster this way.

Andre

[S_Leeper]

If I understand how PS primarily operates a faster hard drive will have a minimal impact on your PS tasks.
From what I see most of the PS work is processor driven, load the image into RAM cook the data, save to the drive.
One question/area I'm not sure about is the stratch(?) drive???

HD speed is primarily controlled by two factors: speed of the HD & bus speed...

Long story short, unless you are doing minimal processing on hundreds of files that need to be opened then saved, I would suggest that you data storage size & security (maybe a external HD or DVD system).

Also, have you checked out http://www.alienware.com/ they make some really hi powered laptops with an emphasis on quality graphics (mostly for gamers).

[Andre]

Sam,

HD speed is very important in PS. I have 1GB of RAM, and I frequently fill that when working with images. Yes, you need scratch disk. Sometimes just applying a filter to a large image will make the disk go nuts. Remember, everything you do needs "undo" space too.

Andre

[HulaMike]

Bilbo, Sam, Paul, Andre,

Thanks for the input. Its all clearer to me now. I need to call Dell tomorrow to speak with a human being as the order page at Dell doesn't seem to want to allow me to select SATA drives for the machine I have configured. I can add RAID drives but if I'm reading correctly, there's no real gain in speed or productivity using RAID, just a way to mirror a drive for backup purposes. Right? (short of 4 HDs as Andre suggests. I think 4 HDs is a bit overkill for me right now)

Right now I have selected two 80 gig ATA 100 / 7200 RPM drives thinking 80 gig is surely large enough for a PS scratch disk but after reading Andre I'm not so sure. Maybe I need an 80 gig for programs and system data and a larger 120 gig ATA or SATA drive for the scratch disc. Keep in mind I am going to attempt to keep this system cherry for Photoshop ONLY. All other spreadsheet, internet, etc will be done on my old system.

Any more advice or clarification would be appreciated. I must make a decision tomorrow, Tuesday the 6th.

[Linda G]

Only one small piece of advice....Dell, from reports from several friends and aquaitances of mine, have come close to bait and switch tactics when ordering on the phone. Decide what you want and stick to it unless they sell you on something you want.

[HulaMike]

Thanks Linda. I'm pretty close to a decision but don't want to make a really stupid mistake. I'm sure I could build and enjoy a dream machine like Andre and the others suggest but do I really need it? I'm coming from a Pentium 1, 384 MB RAM, single 9gig HD and have been able to crunch 69 meg S2 files (barely). Almost anything will be an improvement for me. This area of type and size of dual HDs is what's confusing to me. What does one really need if using a fast processor and 2 gigs DDR SDRAM?

[HulaMike]

For anyone who's followed my little melodrama and helped me along the way, here's the final configuration of the system I'll be receiving from Dell. Thanks to all of you.

Dell XPS / Pentium 4 HT 3.2 GHz 800MHz FSB / 1MB cache
2GB Dual channel DDR SDRAM @ 400MHz
256MB DDR ATI RADEON 9800 XT video card (I upgraded)
HD: 74 GB SATA / 10,000 RPM (upgrade)
Second HD: 160 GB SATA / 7200 RPM (upgrade)
Logitech MX 500 Optical Mouse
Dual 8X DVD R+W / 48x CD R+W drives
15" flat panel monitor for PS tools

Around $2900 today through Dell Small Business Division which has a 15% online discount going till tomorrow, 7/7/04. They probably do that all the time but you never know.....thought I'd post this boring personal detail in case someone else was considering a work station from Dell.

Can't wait! This will replace a tired Pentium 1 with 384 MB RAM and WIN 98. Woo-Hoo!!!

[Andre]

Mike,

It sounds like what you've ordered will do the trick.

Keep in mind that I am a geek, and I do not like to wait around for thiings - especially loading RAW files, and applying filters. If you're used to a Pentium 1, then this one will fly.

My system is nowhere near as fast as what you have ordered, so it would be very nice even for me. I'm currently using a 1.8 Ghz system with 1GB and 2 x 20GB disks. It is time to upgrade.

Good luck with the new system.
Andre

[HulaMike]

Thanks Andre.

I got a lot of advice over the past few weeks, all appreciated cause I'm definitely not a geek. Some suggested a 256MB video card was overkill for PS for example and others said the only way to go was the matrox Parhelia card but Dell doesn't offer the matrox, and so it goes. After I crunched the numbers I decided why not go for extra speed within Dell's offerings right now. I don't buy new systems very often. Who knows how large a file we'll be mashing next year. I probably could have stayed with two 80 GB ATA drives but like you said, HDs are relatively cheap..and SATA drives are a bit faster evidentially. I'll take the 5% gain.

The part I need now is someone to help walk me through the set up. I know nothing about setting up a scratch disc drive, PSCS will be totally new to me as will XP. Lots to get on top of all at once. I'll gladly pay a fee. (wink)

[Andre]

Pay for my flight and I'll come set it all up for you ;)

[HulaMike]

Don't tempt me! If I got you on a value tourist Jumbo jet the cost would probably be the same as hiring some local guru by the hour.....how about I pay you for time on the phone to walk me through? :righton: :rockon: :cheers:

[Wichita Wayne]

CompUSA has a $200, Maxtor, 250 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB Cache on sale for $130. Great deal on a really big drive.

[HulaMike]

Thanks Wayne but its a done deal.