Posted by Colin Smale on September 11, 2009 at 7:25 AM
With lightroom and photoshop my PC began to run out of RAM. I got it taken up to 3.9gb so now ok, for now. (It was just short of 1gb)
Not sure if to get a seperate hard drive to store all the lightroom pics which I understand run slow or an additional C Drive in the PC, or both.
I know very little of what goes on inside that whirring box of wires by the way so be gentle with me !
Posted by Hali Sowle on September 11, 2009 at 1:07 PM
To be honest I've got both. I put in a second internal drive (1.5TB) and I've got external drives to backup and store on. You would not have an "additional" C drive because the computer can only have one drive with an operating system (which is your C drive) but you can have additional hard drives within the system (they'll be known as different drive letters) or you can get a larger C drive and then reinstall all your programs and any data that you need to have made back-ups of first.
Posted by Gene Lugo on September 11, 2009 at 1:46 PM
If you put in additional drives, please take the precaution to implement, at the very least, disk mirroring (RAID 1), or better yet, a RAID 5 array with one disk as parity, as a safety measure. The thought is that when (not if) a drive fails, there will be a copy of everything on a second drive. In the RAID 5 you have the added benefit that with three identical drives you can add the capacities of two of the drives together, and the third parity drive offers redundancy so one drive can fail and it will not compromise the system.
The $100, 1 tb or bigger drives that you see in every advertisement are NOT the same as the high end 300 - 400 gb drives that cost $300-$400 or more that typically go into high availability servers. The server drives are very high performance, usually SAS interface, 10,000 or 15,000 rpm and are built to be ultra-reliable in a properly vented enclosure.
Of the cheaper SATA drives, the WD Black series seems to stand out as being reasonably reliable and still cost effective. I just ordered (3) 750 gb drives to install in my desktop because I too ran out of room.
Another really good thing to do is to get a carbonite subscription, so you can upload all of your important files to a super-safe online storage server. I cannot think of a better way to spend $60 a year. Lastly, a local external drive would complete the scenario.
Taking these precautions, you will have your primary storage large drive in the computer, a mirror of that data on a second drive, another copy of the data on an external drive, and everything written to an off-site storage server that is backed up continuously.
When I had an IT business I used to tell my customers that there were two kinds of computer users, those that had lost data due to hard drive malfunctions, and those that would.
If none of this makes any sense to you, send me a direct email and I will be happy to go over it with you.
Discussion
2 repliesNot sure if to get a seperate hard drive to store all the lightroom pics which I understand run slow or an additional C Drive in the PC, or both.
I know very little of what goes on inside that whirring box of wires by the way so be gentle with me !
The $100, 1 tb or bigger drives that you see in every advertisement are NOT the same as the high end 300 - 400 gb drives that cost $300-$400 or more that typically go into high availability servers. The server drives are very high performance, usually SAS interface, 10,000 or 15,000 rpm and are built to be ultra-reliable in a properly vented enclosure.
Of the cheaper SATA drives, the WD Black series seems to stand out as being reasonably reliable and still cost effective. I just ordered (3) 750 gb drives to install in my desktop because I too ran out of room.
Another really good thing to do is to get a carbonite subscription, so you can upload all of your important files to a super-safe online storage server. I cannot think of a better way to spend $60 a year. Lastly, a local external drive would complete the scenario.
Taking these precautions, you will have your primary storage large drive in the computer, a mirror of that data on a second drive, another copy of the data on an external drive, and everything written to an off-site storage server that is backed up continuously.
When I had an IT business I used to tell my customers that there were two kinds of computer users, those that had lost data due to hard drive malfunctions, and those that would.
If none of this makes any sense to you, send me a direct email and I will be happy to go over it with you.