RAID/Partitioning/Scratch Disk Advice

[Evergreen]

I am going to have a 320GB, 1TB, and 500GB drive to work with. My question is whether a striped raid between the 1TB and 500GB drives would be faster than a single scratch partition on the outer tracks of the 1TB or 500GB alone.

I am planning something like this:

320GB-
120GB OS X
100GB Windows
100GB Linux or free

1TB-
32GB Scratch (raid-0)
900GB Data
68GB OS X backup

500GB-
32GB Scratch (raid-0)
468GB Data backup

I'll eventually buy another 1TB drive when I go beyond the 468GB available for backup.

 

[Evergreen]

I'm still looking for input on this question.

 

[Horst]

http://macperformanceguide.com/ , and maybe Google around a bit for info on Raid, different drive specs + Raid, and partitions.

Your plan sounds rather bizzare, but I'm not really an expert.

You should use same size HDDs for a Raid, preferably the same drive model, make your scratch disk larger, and I'm not sure if you can Raid only one partition of an HDD.

 

[Evergreen]

It is possible to raid partitions on disks of different size with Disk Utility, AFAIK. The 1TB drive would be about 2x faster than the 500GB for scratch, but I'm not sure if having the data on the same disk would offset any gains over the 500GB drive.

What do you think a good scratch disk size is? For my needs 64GB should be more than enough, because I don't work with files over 250MB very often.

 

[Horst]

It is possible to raid partitions on disks of different size with Disk Utility, AFAIK.

Yes it is. And the raid array will only recognize the size of the smaller disk, AFAIK .

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

If you're gonna use raid, then make the HDD's/partitions the same size. That way you wont lose any space.....

Just curious as to why you think you need 8 partitions with multiple scratch disks & back-ups.......seems like you're over-thinking this & making things more complex than they have to be

What apps are you running that use/need scratch disks anyways, huummmmm ?