Multi-HD vs FILE Configuration

[virtualrain]

[QUOTE=james bennett;2797648]

Do you think it would help my performance more if I used the samsung for paging? I mean I have 4gigs of physical memory how often can i be using the virtual memory.

I monitor my physical RAM usage and my PAGE file usage and right now with 4GB of physical RAM it shows I'm using 1.3GB of physical and 2.6GB of page file.

This is because Vista tries to balance the use of physical RAM between apps, disk cache and superfetch. It may decide that some of your physical RAM is better utilized loading an often used APP into memory and paging out some crap you haven't used in awhile. XP is more crude in this regard.

As for disk configurations... here's what I would suggest... in the interest of parallelism, you want 3 different physical drives...

1) OS and Apps. The OS is used to boot, the apps are used after boot. No sense putting these on different drives since they aren't accessed at the same time in general.
2) Files. This is where your video and pictures live
3) Scratch/Page. This is where temp crap will be written to in the editing process. Partition the first 10GB of this disk and use it for your page file for all drives. Use the other partition for scratch. In general, the data written to/from this disk will be in small chunks so performance of the HD isn't as imporant here (since most will have ample 8-16MB cache anyway).

If money is no object, get an Areca 1220 with 8 SATA ports and put each of these disks on a RAID-0 array with dual 150GB raptors each.

If this is too rich, at least get an Areca 1210 with 4 SATA ports and run #1 and #2 on RAID-0 arrays and use a 5th drive (Non RAID) for #3. This is what I do. The cache on the Areca card makes a huge difference... it's worth buying this card just for the cache, even if you don't use RAID. If the Scratch disk is really a bottleneck, then you could opt to put that on RAID0 on the Areca and run your OS/Apps on a stand-alone drive. I'm more of a gamer so the OS/Apps gets priority for me.

A couple of larger 500GB drives in RAID1 could be used for archival but these could be on a NAS, another PC, or in the same chassis... it doesn't matter because you will likely only backup to these overnight over GigE and after the first backup the time will be insignificant.