So, having reached the limit (of my patience, at least) with Ubuntu, Inkscape and the GIMP, it’s over to Windows and Adobe for me!

My thoughts (such as they are) are below, I’d be keen to hear how you partition your machines.

I currently have a (moderately fast?) 40GB Corsair F40 SSD drive and two (okay speed for sata?) 500GB Western Digital RE2 WD5000ABYS drives.

It has been suggested to me that I buy another, faster, SSD drive and then partition as

F40 = Windows and Programs (each in own partition)
Faster SSD = Adobe scratch
1 x 500 = My Documents
1 x 500 = Media files (constantly streaming stuff around and about the place)

This seems like a bit of a waste of an SSD, and I’m open to any suggestions!

Thanks!

It depends what motherboard you have as well, from my limited understanding. A Z68 board can use the ssd for ‘pagefiling???’ and speed programs up. Not entirely sure how it works, but it’s an option

You can move the swap area to different partitions quite easily.

Remember Win7 takes up quite a bit of disk space, combined with Adobe products (and future updates/downloads/etc) you’ll soon be approaching the 40GB limit…

Personally, I would get a hardware raid controller, and have 80GB RAID 0, and put data on the other two drives….

Why have the distraction of the media files disk taking up processor time? For the price of the SSD, couldn’t you get something to hold the media files independent of your PC.

Given you’re ok with raid (IE: You have a back up strategy) you have the following type of options to consider, which includes the following myth buster:

1 Fastest:
Standard Drive for your boot disk. (you could raid this but it will only make the computer boot faster).
RAID x 2 Drives (or more) for your images / files / input + output.
Backup up drive – auto configured to run a system back up – if it’s important to you.
Move all program libraries (itunes, bridge, email etc… to the raid or back up drive).

Keep anything you’re actually working with inside the machine hooked up to it’s own SATA drive and use software RAID.

2. The Illusion of speed:
RAID (x2 drives) your OS
Raid (X2 Drives) your files
Same as above – but now it will boot in about 7 seconds or less depending on how much RAM you have.

3. Buy more RAM (Faster RAM).

The above assumes stripped performance RAID’s. Now the myth buster – you can have your scratch disk portioned on your OS drive, there’s no need to dedicate a drive to this – it will not run any faster fro oding so.

Finally set up Photoshop and what ever other CS5.5 apps you’re running correctly – scratch disks, image cacheing, history states etc.. all have a big performance impact – as does the navigator (ditch that).

Buying ‘faster’ RAM is irrelevant, unless the OP is overclocking the system… the performance gain would be almost insignificant..

Just bung 8GB of RAM in and Windows 7 shouldn’t need to touch the page file.

It’s not quite as simple as shoving more RAM in…. Windows is still designed to use the swap file…. although you can manually disable it, which isn’t really advisable..

Thanks all.

FWIW, I do overclock, but only a bit (!), my board is a P965 ASUS Commando, I’ve got 8GB ‘fast’ RAM and I back up to tape.

I like the idea of having a NAS device handle media work – plus would save me needing to turn the computer on each morning if all we want to do is listen to music and chill!

Also very much liking the RAID scenarios. I hadn’t been thinking of RAID in terms of speed, only security (thereby discounting RAID 0!) – though a bit unsure as to whether RAID 0 offered a performance increase for large files – will investigate.

More pondering required!

RAID 0 makes a big difference in speed. You reduce the data bottle neck by 50% – like a duel carriage way.
NAS depends on how it is connected to your PC. It may have 4 drives via a raid option but it’s connected by a single Network port then it’s going to be slower than running internal drives.

Overclocking a little is usually fine, but can make the system unstable if you’re OC’ing too much.

Don’t think you’ll instantly double your bandwidth with RAID0… on paper, yes. In reality, no. Performance also depends on if the controller is software or hardware….

It is good though, with 2 fasts drives, for manipulating large data files. My home PC has 2x 15k SCSI’s, with a hardware RAID controller (PC is an old workstation)

On option would be to have a ‘working’ volume?