I can't take that stupid flashlite!

[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

 

[philo]

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.

Well I'm sure your plan is fine...
but I don't know why you are seeing the flashlight.
I've got quite a modest machine here
(amd-1100 with 640megs of ram)
and the only time i see the flashlight is if i'm
using my browser to access an ftp site.

 

[Paul]

I need to build 2 PC's.

Give each machine one disk.

Who is going to help those users, when the RAID arrays break ?
Even for the technically proficient, you will see all manner
of questions in this newsgroup, about what are they supposed
to do when the RAID is not working properly. Few people (myself
included), know the right recipe for fixing a trivially broken
mirror, and you'll get tired of the support phone calls for this
after a while. The anxiety level alone, will mean your customers
won't be letting you build their next machine for them (you can
tell people really get stressed, when an array breaks, and they
have no backups.)

Provide your customers with a good backup strategy. A "one button"
backup solution is more likely to be used than some complicated
piece of software. At least most customers will understand the
concept of a backup, even if they are too lazy to do it
regularly

HTH,
Paul

 

[philo]

Give each machine one disk.

Who is going to help those users, when the RAID arrays break ?
Even for the technically proficient, you will see all manner
of questions in this newsgroup, about what are they supposed
to do when the RAID is not working properly. Few people (myself
included), know the right recipe for fixing a trivially broken
mirror, and you'll get tired of the support phone calls for this
after a while. The anxiety level alone, will mean your customers
won't be letting you build their next machine for them (you can
tell people really get stressed, when an array breaks, and they
have no backups.)

Provide your customers with a good backup strategy. A "one button"
backup solution is more likely to be used than some complicated
piece of software. At least most customers will understand the
concept of a backup, even if they are too lazy to do it
regularly

In theory...there is nothing wrong with mirroring...
in that if one drive dies...you can remove it...and all data should
be ok on the 2nd drive...
of course if the entire OS is corrupted...then all you have is two drives
with the same problem...
so your point about *backups* is extremely good!

i suggest both a large external drive and plenty of DVD's !!!!

 

[Michael C]

Give each machine one disk.

Who is going to help those users, when the RAID arrays break ?
Even for the technically proficient, you will see all manner
of questions in this newsgroup, about what are they supposed
to do when the RAID is not working properly. Few people (myself
included), know the right recipe for fixing a trivially broken
mirror, and you'll get tired of the support phone calls for this
after a while. The anxiety level alone, will mean your customers
won't be letting you build their next machine for them (you can
tell people really get stressed, when an array breaks, and they
have no backups.)

I agree, I supplied a customer with a raid and one of the drives died almost
straigh off. It took me over a month to solve the problem, although that was
mainly due to difficulties getting to the site when I could turn off the
server. I'd only do raid for servers I think.

Michael

 

[oddhobby]

I know good advice when I see it, and yours is good advice. Thanks!
Thank you all.