At the moment I am running XP on my workstation and server, would I feel much benefit if I switched over to a RAID configuration, also I am thinking of switching to windows server 2003 so that I can use 4Gigs of RAM to try and speed things up. I know I asked a related question earlier this month, but I have not made the switch yet because knowing my luck the system would crash just when we are starting to get busy after a slow summer due to bad weather
Rob
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Rob, What is your goal of going to RAID? There are a bunch of different level of RAID, it has been a long time so I would verify what 0&1 are because I could be backwards on them.
0 - Mirroring, disks are always in pairs and write to both disks at the same time and read from 1st available. Write performance the same as a single disk and better read performance. Can only use 1/2 the physical capacity
1 - Striping, NO DATA PROTECTION, better read and write performance. Higher risk of data loss then single disks.
5 - Stiping + parity. I believe this is the most popular do to reasonable trade offs. Minimum of 3 disks, I recomend 5+ in a set. Data and parity is stripped across all disks and data is available during a single drive failure. Read an write can be slower then a single disk but close. You only loose about 20% of the physical capacity.
There are many others, i think up to 15 but none of them appear very popular. There are also combinations like 0+1, it really increases your disk cost but has protection since the stripe sets are mirrored.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I really like RAID 0 (complete mirror) as it gives me peace of mind when I'm shooting big events. Imagine having 10,000$ worth of pictures getting erased for hardware issue!!! Other type of RAID would really be useful for video stuff (need large storage, with speed).
Performance wise, my RAID 0 setup is a simple 2 X 160 gb SATA drive and it gives me a 74Mb/s reading speed (which is more than enough)
From the sound of the original post, speed is what's being sought. In my own simple-minded way I think of RAID as offering solutions on two fronts (not necessarily simultaneously). 1. Lots of stripped drives spinning furiously to keep up with something very speed sensitive like video or audio; and 2. secure, redundant, archiving/backup.
I honestly don't think you would see a tremendous difference in speed for editing/cataloging still photos. Unless maybe you're moving Gigs of stuff around a lot. RAID gets expensive and if all you want to do is speed up Photoshop (as an example), there are other more cost effective ways to go about it.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Y'all do have it backwards: RAID 0 is striping with no redundancy while RAID 1 is a two disk mirror. Here is an article with all the RAID levels: RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Back to the original question, I think it would only speed up your machine if you used a RAID 0 setup. To me it isn't worth it though. Personally I use RAID for the redundancy it provides against drive failure. I run hardware RAID 1 in my desktop machine and my image archive is on a NAS with RAID 5.
With a redundant RAID setup having a single hard drive crash wouldn't matter if "the system would crash just when we are starting to get busy after a slow summer due to bad weather." The remaining working drive would keep on going just fine. As long as a second drive didn't crash before you replaced the failed one (and let it automatically rebuild) you'd be just fine with zero downtime.
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