Colocating images and catalog on same drive

[Kuryan Thomas]

I'm planning to set up a RAID-0 (striped array) on my Mac Pro to hold my image files. Should I plan on placing the Lightroom catalog and preview caches on the same RAID array or on a separate (non-RAID) physical disk?

How about Photoshop and ACR scratch files and caches? On the RAID or separate physical disk?

I'm aiming for performance, not redundancy. I do have multiple backups of my images, including offsite rotation.

Thank you.

[genemcc]

You get a performance boost if the catalog is on a different drive from the source images. Scratch disks are also best if a separate drive. If you can dedicated a drive or partition exclusively to a scratch disk even better. Erase the scratch disk drive periodically to insure the maximum contiguous space.