I am working on building a cost-efficient graphics editing machine. I have a huge issue w/ the fact that I cannot find any small fast drives.

Wouldn't machines run better if you could buy a 1-5gig 10,000RPM drive that would serve only for things such as windows swap or photoshop scratch disk, etc. I mean, you still can't get 1gig sticks of RAM w/o spending a shitload.

As of now, my only real choice for a very fact scratch solution is to get the smallest SATA drives I can get (36Gigs). This solution cheaper than going SCSI.

So that leaves me with a RAID0 that will probably use 5 gigs at the absolute most and I would rather not have the drives serve any other function b/c that will take away from the performance.

So I am wasting about 67Gigs atleast. I know space is cheap, but that is ridiculous. Does anyone happen to know of a better solution for the most efficent swap setup? Maybe there is a solution I am missing.

Any input would be appreciated


Here are the smallest options that I see available w/ great speed/performance

SEAGATE [$137 ea]
18.0GB SCSI
10,000 RPM
N/A Cache
160MBPS rate
Seek time: 5.2ms

Western Digital Raptor [$122 ea]
36GB SATA
10,000 RPM
8MB Cache
150MBPS rate
Seek time: 5.2ms

IDE is too slow, USB is too slow, and Firewire drivers start @ 80BG.

Jon, i'd reccommend that you go for 20+ gig hd's, I'd definately go for the 36gb if I was in your shoes.

In my office I used IDE hard drives, 80+ gig, I'd reccommend that if you're planning on doing it right, always have more space than what you think you'll need...

but a 36 gig scratch disk? For video editing, sure, but not image editing.

Why not just throw in like 4 gigs of RAM? Not many graphics files (even .psd) would fill that up, you wouldn't use any scratch, so it'd fly.

Perg, he could use it for more than a scratch disk, he coudl also use it for image storage, like i use mine for... hell I have diablo II running on my disk where my scratchdisk is located...

I know he could, but he doesn't want to.

"I would rather not have the drives serve any other function b/c that will take away from the performance."


and stop capitalizing my name all the time. It's pergesu or perg

Yes. Giz, I could but as perg said I would not like to. While working in photoshop I would not want ppl accessing the photoshop files via the network b/c performance would slow there as well. As for the RAM idea, the mobo I am using has 4 slots for DDR 400MHz. I will get 4x512 and put that in there. I cannot find single 1gig sticks and 4slots is the most I have seen on any motherboard, so while some do go upto 4 as you said, the RAM isn't there yet and the price won't be for a while.

Perhaps I will just go w/ RAID0 using the 2 SATA 36gigs on a Promise Controller. Not sure if going to RAID will boost performance more overall then just having swap on a different 36gig, but this way there might be an increase in speed w/o wasting so much space??

/me shrugs

Jon, you don't have to share it :x...

Different ppl for different functions. There is one mean machine that does the fileserving and the actual multipose shots, etc. Another machine/person that does the cropping/editing, another machine/person to fix up the small image imperfections, another machine/person to do the lighting adjustments. So the main machine is the file storage/server and also the one that deals with multiple layers and pictures at once. Sometimes totalling over 1gig, fortunately, the files transfered are normally the flattened images.