I can't take that stupid flashlite! SATA harddrive question

[oddhobby]

I have 4 Western Digital SATA 250mb hard drives with 16 mb cache,
I also have 2 Maxtor 250 PATA with 16 mb cache,

2 D945PSN mother board with an 840 dual core CPU, 2 gigs of ram,

I need to build 2 PC's.

One for an artist and one for a programmer.

For the artist:

I'm thinking I should run 2 of the SATA drives in raid 0 and use the 2
PATA (EIDE) configured in raid 1 (mirrored) as storage.

On the SATA raid 0 will be windows XP, Photoshop and the Photoshop
scratch (temp) files.

Should I put the scratch file on the mirrored PATA drives?

My main goal of course is to get rid of that stupid flashlite... yes,
I've turned off the index service. Waiting for the files to list is
driving me crazy.

For the programmer:

Raid 1 with the remaining 2 SATA drives. Why? Because the programming
PC will take days to set up and if the boot drive fails I don't want to
have to reinstall all the apps. Reinstalling Photoshop is not that big
of a deal.

Any improvements to my plan?

If I used harddrives with an 8mb cache in raid 0, would I see a
differance? Should I use the 16mb PATA in raid 0 and mirror cheaper
8mb cache drives?

I guess the question is: do I gain anything by striping drives with a
16mb cache instead of an 8mb cache.

I also have a couple of AMD pc's to build next month, should I use the
same strategy?

TIA

 

[JAD]

try setting the system to use resources for file service primarily, to rid
yourself of the cursor.

 

[oddhobby]

Do you mean that setting in "SYSTEM" that sets apps running background
vs. the app with focus? That's the only setting I know of... but while
I was looking for it I read that I should have my page file on a fast
drive and not on the same drive as the OS. I'll try that as well.

Does the 16mb cache help with the page file?

 

[JAD]

what OS? I was guessing XP

 

[JAD]

Do you mean that setting in "SYSTEM" that sets apps running background

vs. the app with focus? That's the only setting I know of... but while

control panel - system - advanced - performance -advanced - processor
scheduling / memory usage

Using these controls, for the most part, effects things minimally under home
use,
I suppose under server conditions anything that assists in file management
is a good thing.

Also having HUGE amounts of data in the system folder, 'my documents'
causes performance hits.

I was looking for it I read that I should have my page file on a fast
drive and not on the same drive as the OS. I'll try that as well.

Does the 16mb cache help with the page file?

I believe it would have a positive effect, however that wouldn't be my area
expertise.