Internal Hard Drive Strategy for Windows 7 & Photoshop CS6?

joey_B wrote:

It's surely true that bigger disks have bigger data density or more heads and platters, but the improvement in data flow that this gives isn't linear to the disk size. A 1 TB disk will not outperform a 2 TB disk by a factor 2. The data that is wrote/read has to pass other bottlenecks. Also it is dependend on the actual place on the platter where data is written. If your 1TB drive is 80% full, the read/write speed for the added content will be substantially lower than that of the older content. and search times on a big disk are greater.

If you think otherwise, post some disk tests that prove your statement.

That is were RAID has an edge, because it splits up the data in two parallel streams that each have their own trajectory. I wouldn't dare to say how much of an improvement you would get, that totally depends on what kind of data is written/read, where on the disks it is written and so on.

And a final thing to think about: swap data is non-critical. for you systems integrity it wouldn't matter if the RAID-array got broken. But you wouldn't want any other data on that drive, and you'd want it to be a real physical array, not a partition. For that matter you could use the smallest drives available to build a dedicated swapdrive. Using a 1TB for that would be a waste of space, and even if you would put data alongside it, the access to that data would slow down the swapping.