Please help med find the best hardrive setup ?

[Dr.Ralph]

I'm upgrading my system a bit....................my new system will look
like this:

Intel P4 3 Ghz 800 Mhz FSB,
Asus P4C 800 DeLuxe motherboard,
4 X 512 MB Kingston HyperX DDR 3500 ram,
Zalman CNPS7000 Cu cpu cooler,
Zalman ZM-80A GPU passive cooler (for my Radeon 9800 pro AGP video card),
Zalman ZM-2HC1 passive harddrive coolers,
Lian LI PC-70 alu BIG tower case,
4 80 mm papst low noise fans,
Gigabyte Radeon 9800 pro video card,
Plextor Premium CDRW
Sony DRU500AX DVD dual burner
Plextor PX-116 DVD rom
Liteon 52/52/24 CDRW
Adaptec 29160N SCSI controller
Adaptec 39320R SCSI controller (capable of doing raid 0 and 1)
Audigy sound card,
Enermax EG651P 550 Watt PSU
Dell 2000FP 20,1' TFT@1600X1200
Samsung 172T 17' TFT@1280X1024

and.......................................

4 Seagate 15k.3 36 GB SCSI drives,
2 Maxtor Maxline Plus 250 GB SATA drives

I need some help finding the best harddrive setup for this system.
I use programs like photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver, fireworks,
indesign, flash, Corel draw suite and Microsoft office XP a lot.

I think I'll continue running two of my 4 scsi drives in raid 0 on adaptec
39320R for win xp but can't quite figure out if it would give me better
performance to place all of my programs on this raid 0 array together with
my win xp or place it on one of the two other scsi drives (both of which I
plan to run in normal single scsi mode on adaptec 29160N) ?

If I place the programs and win xp on the same raid 0 array they both yield
from the raid 0 performance boost - but on the other hand if I did place
the programs on a single scsi drive and win xp on the raid 0 array, I would
make effective use og 3 harddrives (2 in raid 0 and one single) instead of
2 (the two in raid 0) when using my programs.

I plan to use the fourth scsi drive for data and documents - and the third
(if I place the programs on the raid 0 array) for swap and scratch files
from win xp and photoshop.

The two 250GB SATA drives will be used for my Mp3 collection, digi photos
and raw data (movies, games, progams) - but I still have to decide if I'll
mirror these two identical SATA drives via the onboard SATA raid 1 chipset.

So please fell free to comment on my new and upcoming setup.......and make
new suggestions

 

[Dr.Ralph]

A guy at www.storagereview.com suggested that I placed my win xp on one
single scsi drive, my graphics programs on another single scsi drive and
then placed my officeprograms, scratch disk and games on my raid 0 array.

This is a new solution that I haven't thought about.

What do _YOU_ think would be the the best harddrive setup for _ME_ ?

 

[Dr.Ralph]

A guy at www.storagereview.com suggested that I placed my win xp on one
single scsi drive, my graphics programs on another single scsi drive and
then placed my officeprograms, scratch disk and games on my raid 0 array.

This is a new solution that I haven't thought about.

What do _YOU_ think would be the the best harddrive setup for _ME_ ?

Hey guys - isn't this a storage NG - I've got a serious question here - and
no response

 

[John Yuen]

If you intent to do any work related stuff on this PC, I would suggest that
you forget about using RAID 0 at all, Use RAID 0+1 or RAID 5 will give you the
security of being able to recover your work/data in the case of a drive
failure as a Drive failure in a RAID 0 array will mean lost of all data. Since
it looks like you will be dealing with a lot of fairly larger data files, the
logical placement is the Applications, OS, on the non RAID volume and all you
data/work files on the RAID volume.

Regards
John Yuen