Ordering today, help me decide.

[VirtualRain]

Anyone care to give me some advice on setting up my HDDs? Thanks in advance!

What do you mean?

If I were you, I would get an SSD for your OS/apps and your active project work. Use the 1TB monster drive to archive your projects, photos, and iTunes library.

 

[BG-Mac]

What do you mean?

I'd like to utilize all four bays and have plenty for iTunes storage. Would an SSD be best for OS/Apps? What would you suggest for the rest? Max out with 2TB WD Greens... or 1TB WD Blacks...? What would be the most efficient RAID configuration?

 

[Tesselator]

I'm not sure why everyone is recommending an Octo core for CS4?

What's behind these recommendations? Is it the RAM? If so, just get the 12/16GB for the Quad from OWC with the money you would save on the extra unnecessary CPU.

A quad core is overkill for most of this work. Most people running CS4 would be unable to fully utilize a quad. If you were doing rendering, 3D, video, or some scientific or financial modelling then I'd be all for an Octo, but that's not what this person is doing.

Because he said:

Adobe CS4 Design Premium
Photoshop CS4
Dreamweaver CS4 (developing and managing several sites)
inDesign CS4
Dedicated iTunes server / storage
Amateur Photography
Aperture 2
.....and obviously day to day iLife '09​

Not just photoshop. 8 cores will help with some of those and also even PS in 25% of its tools. Especially his photography. Lots of photo editing apps make good use of all 8 cores! Especially CaptureOne! but Aperture too and others.

 

[VirtualRain]

Because he said:

Adobe CS4 Design Premium
Photoshop CS4
Dreamweaver CS4 (developing and managing several sites)
inDesign CS4
Dedicated iTunes server / storage
Amateur Photography
Aperture 2
.....and obviously day to day iLife '09​

Not just photoshop. 8 cores will help with some of those and also even PS in 25% of its tools. Especially his photography. Lots of photo editing apps make good use of all 8 cores! Especially CaptureOne! but Aperture too and others.

Some filters in Photoshop... yes... the other apps? I still think it would be very difficult and extremely rare to saturate a quad with hyperthreading with this app suite.