Scratch disk options

[Chucaro]

My pc it is configurated with 2 500gb Sata disks in Raid and I need a separated scratch disk for photo processing.
The tower have Sata ports inside and Sata and Firewire outside.
An external Sata HDD would be as fast and efficient as the one inside or not?
An external firewire HDD it is as fast as a Sata HDD or not?
OS is a Win XP
Your inputs are appreciated.
Cheers

Arthur

[scanfor]

I bought an external HDD docking cradle with SATA extension lead from Jaycar.
It plugs straight into the MB next to the other SATA drive cables.
With the Quantum Fireball, or the WDD Caviar fitted into the cradle, it behaves just like another disk mounted internally, and doesn't seem to be any slower at all.
I use it for storing rendering temp files, so it would be like your scratch disk setup.
I haven't had any experience with Firewire, so can't help there sorry.

[dmdigital]

Unless it's Firewire 800 it will be about the same as USB2. Even Firewire 800 is slow compared to Sata speeds. I'd look at internal or external Sata.

Did you see if you could put an SSD in?

[Chucaro]

Unless it's Firewire 800 it will be about the same as USB2. Even Firewire 800 is slow compared to Sata speeds. I'd look at internal or external Sata.

Did you see if you could put an SSD in?

The SSD cost about $400 :eek: to expensive for my purpose.

[HangOver]

An external Sata HDD would be as fast and efficient as the one inside or not?

yes eSATA is same speed as SATA, it's just an extension lead, more or less




An external firewire HDD it is as fast as a Sata HDD or not?

firewire = faster than USB1 and in practice USB2
eSATA wipes the floor with both of them

[HangOver]

i forgot to mention if you can get hold of USB3 in theory its faster than eSATA or firewire.
You can buy motherboards now with USB3 now sure about the availability of add-in cards though, even then I'm not 100% sure the motherboard it was put it would handle the through put.
bottom line go for eSATA now, if your in the market for a new motherboard go USB3

[5teve]

for the cost i would dump 2 x 500gb disks in Raid 0 inside the case and be done with it... you should get good read and write speeds and of course you dont need any kind of data security for a scratch disk. 500's are about $60 each at the mo...

Steve

[Chucaro]

for the cost i would dump 2 x 500gb disks in Raid 0 inside the case and be done with it... you should get good read and write speeds and of course you dont need any kind of data security for a scratch disk. 500's are about $60 each at the mo...

Steve

Raid is very good to protecting the data but not fast enough for scratch disk, for that reason I am considering using a stand alone HDD for scracth disk and live all my data in the exsisting pair of 500gb Raid Sata HDD

[5teve]

Incorrect..sorry


Raid is in several levels Raid 0 or striping as its known is rubbish at protecting data but you get performance closing in on N x single disk where N is the number of disks. so if a single disk writes at 60mb/s the raid 0 will give close to 120mb/s with 2 disks / 180mb/s with 3 etc etc etc

Protection happens when you use Raid 1 or Raid 5 & 6 Raid 1 is directly mirrored, ie 2 disks gives 1 disk capacity but it mirrors data to each disk. Raid 5 and 6 uses parity data to spread disk content across multiples of disks and give good performance + redundancy capacity is N-1 x single disk so 8 x 1tb disks in raid 5 have 7tb of data space roughly

I had 3 years designing raid storage systems so i do know what im on about ;)

You might want to check what raid level (1 or 0) you are running on your system as if you are running raid 0 you are risking your data every second.

Thanks

Steve

Ps this is one of my designs http://www.nexsan.com/satabeast.php

[Chucaro]

Steve I do not know about hardware at all so I appreciate your inputs
My system is Intel based with 2 500gb WD HDD.
The RAID/AHCI is an Intel ICH8R/9R/10R.
The 500Gb HDD have 2 partitions.
C: for the OS and the software
D: for the data
Beacause the data and the photo processing software it is in the same HDD I believe that the system operates to slow by having the scratch disc in the same HDD.
I was under the impression that if I have the scratch disc separated from the software the processing will be faster.
Also by having a separated scratch disc I can store on it the files "in progress" there fore minimaze the fragmentation.
Many times I upload 100 images of 25mb in raw each plus 70mg in tiff and then duplicate, transfer and delete some of them.
Many time I processing files of 300mg and the Intel Core Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz take up to 3 minutes or more to do a task.
This tasks was done faster in the old PC with less power.
Because I am using Win XP it is not use to have more than the 4GB ram that the board have on it.

I would appreciate if you can suggest how to go about to increase the speed.

Cheers
Arthur

[5teve]

Steve I do not know about hardware at all so I appreciate your inputs
My system is Intel based with 2 500gb WD HDD.
The RAID/AHCI is an Intel ICH8R/9R/10R.
The 500Gb HDD have 2 partitions.
C: for the OS and the software
D: for the data
Beacause the data and the photo processing software it is in the same HDD I believe that the system operates to slow by having the scratch disc in the same HDD.
I was under the impression that if I have the scratch disc separated from the software the processing will be faster.
Also by having a separated scratch disc I can store on it the files "in progress" there fore minimaze the fragmentation.
Many times I upload 100 images of 25mb in raw each plus 70mg in tiff and then duplicate, transfer and delete some of them.
Many time I processing files of 300mg and the Intel Core Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz take up to 3 minutes or more to do a task.
This tasks was done faster in the old PC with less power.
Because I am using Win XP it is not use to have more than the 4GB ram that the board have on it.

I would appreciate if you can suggest how to go about to increase the speed.

Cheers
Arthur

Hi Arthur

From what you say its hard to determine how our disks are set up You have Raid hardware but the disks may not be set up that way. Do you have 2 x 500gb disks but show a total capacity of 500gb split over C & D? if you do then you have Raid 1, which is slow (same speed as 1 disk) but very secure. You can lose a disk and lose no data. If you have C at 500gb and D at 500gb then there are 2 way it could be configured, 1 being as single disks with no link between them or as Raid 0 with the 2 disks creating 1 big disk (1tb) and then its been split up into 2 partitions C & D i think you can find this out by going into control panel > administrative tools > computer management > disk management and see how they are broken down. if you can screen shot it it may help.

if we can sort out how thats configured we may be able to make a better educated guess at how to help things along.

By the way ... what software you using for photo processing?

Thanks

Steve

[Tombie]

Install another internal HDD (SATA) into the box...

A nice quick 500Gb 7200rpm 32Mb jobbie.

Partition it with 100Gb as the first partition - Name this "Scratch"
Partition the remainder of the drive "WIP" (Work In Progress).

Set CS5 etc to use the 100Gb partition as a scratch drive
Use the remainder as your WIP area until complete.

This will do everything you want, cheaply and effectively.

If you need more speed, get an I7 based MB and the best I7 processor you can and some super fast ram...

[Chucaro]

Thank you Steve for your rapid replay.
I have asked to set the RAID to secure the data. I can see only 500gb space (one disk) so it is RAID 1.
If it is of any help the system is based on an Itel board DQ35JO with the Intel Core Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz as I have mentioned before.
The software is PSCS3 fully loaded with several plugins wich in many cases with one comand they operate several layers at the time.
Also I have Nikon CaptureNX2 wich many times is working or it is open in the BG.
Because I installed 4gb of ram and the limitations of Win XP I programed Boot.ini with an /userva=2800 /3GB switch wich have improved the speed considerable. ( MS recommendation)

Cheers

[5teve]

Thank you Steve for your rapid replay.
I have asked to set the RAID to secure the data. I can see only 500gb space (one disk) so it is RAID 1.
If it is of any help the system is based on an Itel board DQ35JO with the Intel Core Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz as I have mentioned before.
The software is PSCS3 fully loaded with several plugins wich in many cases with one comand they operate several layers at the time.
Also I have Nikon CaptureNX2 wich many times is working or it is open in the BG.
Because I installed 4gb of ram and the limitations of Win XP I programed Boot.ini with an /userva=2800 /3GB switch wich have improved the speed considerable. ( MS recommendation)

Cheers

Ok so your data is secure but slow....ish...

The WIP that you store is that based on copies of originals? ie you arent going to lose anything of any importance if the disks go down? if thats the case, then i would go with 2 x 7200rpm 500gb disks (anything fast) and raid 0 them. this will get good write speeds, but lose data if a single disk goes down. (out of interest i ran a raid 0 array for 5+ years and didnt lose anything) if it is important to not lose anything then either go with tombies suggestion of the single disk, but store wip on the D drive so its safe. however it wont have the same speed as 2 x disks in raid 0...

I prefer Raid 5 myself but its expensive to impliment well. It has redundancy but if using a hardware controller gains you huge read write speeds

Hope that makes sense?

Steve