jasonsmith Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 For all you Photoshop Gurus who use PCs ? I was wondering what your opinions are on what may be the optimum hardware setup to get the best performance from Photoshop CS. I am running the following system. P4 3.0MHZ, 2 GB DDR RAM, FX 5200 128MB Hard Drive, 120 GB Serial ATA HDD Unfortunately my HDD is nearly full so am thinking about clearing it and adding another drive or two. I am interested in what Hard Drive configuration may provide the best performance. I have looked at running a RAID array (Striped configuration) as some claim it offers better write performance. Other posts that I have read claim that running a RAID Array may be unreliable. Is it be better to have a completely separate HDD for Photoshop to use as a Scratch Disc ? Would I get better performance by having my Operating system and programs on my main drive, and having a separate HDD for my images ? If the answer to the question above is Yes that would mean 3 HDDs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robert lee Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 By striped I think you mean RAID0. Yes, in this configuration, if any single failure will cause the whole array to fail. You'll see improved performance if the scratch is on a drive different from where you have the images. Actually, the you'll see the best performance by adding more RAM. If you add additional drives, use in order of preference: 1. SATA 2. Firewire 3. USB 2.0 USB 2.0 is actually slower than Firewire 400 and incurs much higher processor overhead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven_clark Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 Raid 5 (striping with an error-data drive) is nice when you can get it (providing the speed of striping with an entire drive worth of failure-tolerance) but tends to be rediculously expensive. Right now what I'm running is 5 partitions on 2 disks: 1.1 System 1.2 Programs 2.1 Swap 2.2 Documents and Settings (takes some playing with the registry to get working) 2.3 Data Storage. So far this seems to be working fairly well, but I haven't been using it long. The theory is to minimize file fragmentation. The System Drive and Program Files are isolated from eachother so that adding and removing applications doesn't fragment the operating system files. The Swap (AKA virtual memory, AKA pagefile) has it's own partition on a different drive from the programs so that hopefully programs loading into heavily used memory don't cause conflicting access with the swap file, and for Photoshop so that the swap file and Photoshop scratch disk are on different drives. The Documents and Settings folder got it's own entire partition because it is the biggest source of temporary small files which cause fragmentation for the bigger files. Isolating this source of fragmentation should keep the rest of the system runnning smoothely. The Data Store is the largest of any of the partitions and is used solely for large, fairly static, files. With the Data Storage seperate if worse come to worst I can simply wipe the other partitions and start over with all my current pictures and other large media intact. It also makes a great place to put Norton Ghost images of entire drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bob_a Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 I think your PC is fine performance wise. Any system is as fast as its slowest component - which in your case is not the HD, not the CPU - it's the human behind the keyboard. I.e, processing time - unless in batch - should be negligible. I'd be more concerned with reliability and backups. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peter_williams2 Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 Adobe have this to say: http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/318243.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peter_williams2 Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 And Microsoft have this to say: http://tinyurl.com/43gq8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garry_anderson3 Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 If your thinking about a RAID0 or RAID1 array just remember that there are only groups of hard drives. Those that have failed and those that will fail. The number of people who come through my PC workshop with out a backup is amazing. Sometimes we can retreive data from a single drive, but with an failed array we can only send it to the recovery experts, read $$$$. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
byronlawrence Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 with your current system (i think it should be fast enough) you have plenty of ram, so maybe all you need is another drive. or two. you don't have to set them up as raid with all the ram you have just have one or two more hard drives as back up and or extra storage. maybe burn older files to some discs and clear up some space or buy some cheap 40 to 80 gig hard drives from wal-mart and copy your older files over and then put the drives back in the boxes to store in a nice place (since cds can have a shelf life if they are cheap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawz Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 I'd drop a 36GB WD Raptor SATA drive in as a scratch disc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tom_keenan Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 I recently built a new system to improve Photoshop CS performance so I will share the configuration that in my hands works very well. I work on a few desktops so I have a long history for comparison. The system is Pentium based built around an ASUS motherboard (P4C800-E). I have two WD 36.7 Gigabyte serial ATA 10,000RPM drives configured in a RAID 0(striping) configuration (for performance). The operating system, Photoshop CS and various other programs are all loaded on this set of striped drives. For file storage, I have configured two 200 Gigabyte IDE drives in a RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration. If(when) one of the 200 G drives goes down, the system can rebuild a new drive. 2 Gigabytes of RAM. The system addresses performance and provides some piece of mind that one drive failure does not wipe out my important files. This is no substitute for a good back-up protocol. I have scratch disk space on the mirrored drives (just because I wanted to be on a different drive than the operating system). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
byronlawrence Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 That is a good drive setup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jasonsmith Posted June 1, 2005 Author Share Posted June 1, 2005 Thanks Guys - that has given me some ideas. Tom - performance wise - how do the mirrored drives compare to the Striped config ? Do you have the Mirrored Drives partitioned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
basscheffers Posted June 1, 2005 Share Posted June 1, 2005 Don't worry about write speed. Keep your scratch disk non-raid (fast) and use RAID 1 or 5 for data storage. Drives are so fast these days that even with the overhead of having to write to two disks, you won't notice. How often do you actualy save a big file? You spend fifteen minutes to half an hour toying with a 60MB file and then you write it, do you really care if that happens in one or two seconds? Reliability is the way to go and RAID 1 or 5 (plus backups!) is it. The easiest way to do RAID on windows is buying an SATA RAID controler. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scott_eaton Posted June 1, 2005 Share Posted June 1, 2005 What BAS said. Ideally you'd park the Photoshop and windows Scrach disk and *nothing* else on a RAID 0 with high speed drives *after* you've maxed out the RAM in your machine. Again, only the scratch disks would yield much of an advantage from such a config, and *only* if they were on a dedicated controller. FYI - Raid 5 has takes a serious write penalty and putting your entire system on a Raid 0 is dangerous. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tom_keenan Posted June 1, 2005 Share Posted June 1, 2005 Plan ahead! CS2 will access a maximum of 64 exabytes of scratch disk space. That is 64 billion gigabytes. Or 32 million 200 gigabyte hard disks! Don't worry about the drives. Build yourself an addition on your house. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jasonsmith Posted June 2, 2005 Author Share Posted June 2, 2005 Thats quite scary considering that 23 years ago my Tandy TRS80 had 16kb of ram, and it used to take 30 minutes or so to save a program to cassette. It took me another 5 years to save for a 5.25 inch floppy drive. I wonder what drive config I will be running in another 23 years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jasonsmith Posted June 2, 2005 Author Share Posted June 2, 2005 One last question for now - if I ran a complete stand alone HDD to use as a scratch disk for Photoshop CS (will probably upgrade to CS2 in the near future) and XP - what size should I look at. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tom_keenan Posted June 3, 2005 Share Posted June 3, 2005 Like many Photoshop related questions, there are no simple answers. I recommend you read the excellent reference material published by Adobe on the subject.<br> http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html <br> In the reference, Adobe suggests you review your history states in the history palette to determine your own requirements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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