Hi there, I'm looking for some advise on storage. I need alot of space and I need to access it quickly. I will be using the PC for photoshop, 3DS Max, Maya and a bit of BF3 as well as some Anno 2070. At the moment due to a budget build I'm running off a 320Gb 2.5" laptop drive but this needs to change sharpish. My first thoughts turned to a raid array of 500Gb or 1Tb Samsung F3's as it provides alot of space with great read and write speeds which will be perfect for large Photoshop or rendering files. I have little to no experience of setting up a raid array and not too sure of the pro's and cons apart from faster overall drives. Before any of you say just go SSD, I have had a 64 Gb vertex 2e but it died after putting the computer to sleep too many times apparently. I would like a large Crucial M4, say a 128 or higher but I don't think it will be enough space for OS, programs and files for all my projects. Also I dislike how fragile an SSD is, you have to tweak all the windows install, treat it lovingly just so it wont die and take all your data with it. And after you have done all that you run out of space and have to start installing programs onto a hard drive which is just messy. Should i just suck it up and get the M4 or try a bit of raid? Just to help my spec is: i7 930 x58 Sabertooth 460 GTX 650W Antec Truepower Cheers
I would get a 128 gigabyte SSD for the OS and your most used programs. Then I would get a 30-64 gigabyte SSD as a scratch drive for whatever programs you are working with. If you have the space for it, a 2x500 gigabyte raid setup for very fast data access and a 2tb disk to back it all up.
I've found Win7 to be pretty plug and go for SSDs myself. I recently upgraded a PC for a designer friend of mine who had pretty similar needs to yourself and I went with a 120Gb SSD (can't remember the make, but what was good a few months ago is probably old now), and a 1Tb F3 for most of his files etc. Changing the location of his Documents folders etc. only took a few minutes, and he tends to keep the files he's working on in a scratch folder, and then moves them over to the HD when he starts a new project. So I'd advise a medium sized SSD (100-250 Gb ish) and a 1-2Tb F3 (depending on what's good and/or cheap right now). You'll probably be able to keep the existing laptop drive and you can tell photoshop to use multiple drives for it's cache iirc.
