To RAID or not to RAID?

[MikeGreene]

Running Photoshop 7 on WinXP Home (SP1). Have two identical hard drives: Maxtor ATA133 250GB 7200RPM (8MB Buffer).

Which config will give me the best performance running Photoshop 7?

Option A: RAID 0 (striping 500GB).

Option B: 2 separate drives with Photoshop scratch disk on secondary and Windows paging file on primary.

Thank you in advance for any accurate guidance!

[Gary Hummell]

A further consideration is what plan you might have when (not if) the RAID 0 stripe is broken. RAID 0 arrays are substantially more likely to crash than individual drives. The crashes are almost never recoverable.

Lastly, unless you are working with huge files, I doubt that you will complete a PS project noticeably quicker with RAID 0.

[86]

I agree with Brent.

I have four HDD's:
1 as System & apps;
2 in RAID O
1 as scratch; page; backup (seperate partitions)

RAID 0 FLIES!!
I deal with 16 bit A4 - A1 300ppi images with layers, etc so files can grow to mammoth sizes.
Even with just a little 20mb file it's nice having it open in 1 second!
Writing time is super fast also.

As Gary points out, you're treading on thin ice though.
Backup important files to a seperate disk is essential!