I've set up my new system similarly, Dave. I have a 500G main drive,
a 250G secondary drive, and an external backup/archive drive
(actually two). The work files are normally on the main drive, PS
scratch on the secondary drive. These two drives are both SATA ultra
on the internal bus, and I'm really seeing the improvements in disk
IO (as well as the enormous improvement in having a G5 DP/2Ghz system
with three times the RAM as well!).
If you have really large files, a FireWire 800 interface becomes
important to keep the IO from becoming a bottleneck. It's not as
important when working with still images, though ... my brother does
audio recording work and MUST have FW800 external drive interfaces to
keep up.
Which FireWire disk enclosure did you get? I've been very happy with
the Vantec NexStar NST-350UF enclosures I'm using. I have two with
250G drives and two with 400G drives in them. They've proven to be
very fast and very reliable, delivering data at very close to the
FireWire 400Mbps spec maximum or USB 2.0 spec maximum, and they're
not expensive.
Godfrey
On Mar 21, 2006, at 6:45 PM, David Mann wrote:
Hi all,
I've started to run very short of hdd space, and since I'm too
nervous about deleting pics and relying entirely on my DVD archive,
I caved in today and ordered a Firewire disk enclosure and a 300Gb
drive to go into it.
I did consider simply replacing the second disk in my computer, but
after reading Adobe's documentation recently I decided that a third
drive is the best option. That way I'll have my system on the
first drive, Photoshop scratch on the second, and my big files on
the third. In addition to putting PS scratch on a separate drive
from the system, Adobe also recommends having it on a separate
drive from your file, if your file is large. In my case, I just
can't win with only two drives :)
So in addition to freeing me from space issues (for now), I'll
hopefully see a bit of a speedup... although loading/saving files
over Firewire may be a little slower than direct SATA. I wasn't
prepared to pay double the amount for a Firewire 800 box.
Now, if only I had the money to upgrade my memory as well...
Cheers,
- Dave
