Hi Folks,
The time has come for me to build up a new PC. I have already purchased most of the components in readiness, but as I've just started looking at going over to lightroom as the main workflow tool and have been doing a few experiments, I'm having doubts now because its ... er ... not exactly the nippiest piece of software in the world, although I do like a lot of its features. It will be used for processing large batches of data at one go, maybe a 2000 image wedding shoot for example so all of these will have to be loaded in one go for sorting and adjustment.
It seems to me that you ideally need THREE independent hard disks to hold:
1. OS and apps
2. Main Data
3. Page file
I'm sure having these separate will give you max performance and I'm sure having six 10,000RPM raptors arranged as three pairs of RAID0 will be the ultimate arrangement, but life and the bank balance being what it is, sometimes one has to make compromises!
Can someone give me advice on what sort of relative speed increases I'm likely to get with increasing cost and splitting of the drives? I was going to stick in a pair of reasonably fast WD 7500RPM 500GB SATA2 drives as a striped array, run a fast core2duo processor with 4GB of RAM and hope that it wouldn't run out of memory, but I now have my doubts and I think its going to use the pagefile a lot especially as I'd probably be needing it to initially render the previews for subsequent speed.
If I only split the pagefile disk (i.e. and have two drive channels), is it best to have it separate from the OS/app drive, or the image data disk?
At this moment I'm thinking a decent compromise would be to have the two 500GB striped drives as the main data (which I already have bought) but buy a 10K Raptor drive which will contain the OS, apps and a fixed pagefile (I'm assuming with 4GB of RAM that once windows and lightroom etc are loaded, its not really going to be accessing this first drive that much apart from the pagefile use - but is this an accurate assessment? windows is a funny thing ....)
Any comments appreciated.
TIA
Gareth
