Hard Drives for Gaming/Work?

[Castiel]

I have been out of the PC Hardware world for over a year now and I don't know whats good or what to use with all the hardware, I just know what is and what does.

With the future game releases I have been thinking of building myself a computer that plays games amazingly and can run all the stuff I use for work.

What I am here for is I am wondering what hard drive selection should I use so I can play Games really well, and all my programs I use for work can load fast and run smooth.

So I need help from TPU to help me decide what is the best hard drive selection is for Work and Gaming.

I was thinking a build like this: Very Expensive
SSD: OS
Velociraptor 6.0 GB/s HDD: Gaming
6.0 GB/s HDD: Work

2nd Build: Less Expensive
6.0 GB/s HDD: Os & Work
6.0 GB/s HDD: Gaming(Non Velociraptor)

For gaming, I am no Crysis addict to get the highest FPS so I can to beat the world record. I would just like to play games well.

And work, I mainly use Adobe CS5, all of it. I'm a Photographer, Video Editor and Web Developer so I use everything. My main focus is Video Editor, I need a system that can Read/Write(Rendering) fast.

See where I am coming from? If you have any other thoughts, or concerns please ask or state them, all will be welcome. Thanks guys!

PS. Excuse my current Hardware to the left, it has nothing to do with the build.

 

[scaminatrix]

And work, I mainly use Adobe CS5, all of it. I'm a Photographer, Video Editor and Web Developer so I use everything. My main focus is Video Editor, I need a system that can Read/Write(Rendering) fast.

See where I am coming from? If you have any other thoughts, or concerns please ask or state them, all will be welcome. Thanks guys!

PS. Excuse my current Hardware to the left, it has nothing to do with the build.

Since your main focus is Video Editing, I'll chuck in my input.
I sometimes hang around in the Adobe forums, here's a few threads you want to have a look at.
General Guideline for Disk Setup
Storage rules for an editing rig
To RAID or not to RAID

It all depends on what resolution the videos are that you're editing. If you're editing 1080p videos, you want only video editing stuff installed IMO. No games.
If you're only editing 640x360 videos, you'll get away with also installing games.
The threads above will give all the answers to your questions, plus more.

 

[RejZoR]

If you don't mind somewhat higher price but you still need loads of space, take 2x or 3x 600GB Velociraptors and pair them in RAID or use them as stand alone drives. You'll get like 250-300MB/s sequential read/write which should be plenty even for Full HD video.

If you want a good all around blend of price, capacity and performance i suggest you look into WD Caviar Black 2TB or maybe Barracuda 2TB. They are quite speedy and massive sized, yet they are still good value. Expect speeds over 120MB/s on such single devices.

SSD, i don't think they'll be any good for you here. You could have Photoshop installed on it to get faster app startup and better responsiveness but other than that you won't benefit much from it.

 

[Castiel]

Since your main focus is Video Editing, I'll chuck in my input.
I sometimes hang around in the Adobe forums, here's a few threads you want to have a look at.
General Guideline for Disk Setup
Storage rules for an editing rig
To RAID or not to RAID

It all depends on what resolution the videos are that you're editing. If you're editing 1080p videos, you want only video editing stuff installed IMO. No games.
If you're only editing 640x360 videos, you'll get away with also installing games.
The threads above will give all the answers to your questions, plus more.

Resolution. Right now I am working with a couple projects that are in 2k and 4k. haha
And I have storage taken care of, I have back up servers and things to save the media in.

So would you suggest that I could run everything on a 2TB HDD?? Video everything.

What about gaming?

If you had the money, what would your hard drive setup be for my situation?

 

[scaminatrix]

Resolution. Right now I am working with a couple projects that are in 2k and 4k. haha

RED? I thought that used more bandwidth than 1080p?

So would you suggest that I could run everything on a 2TB HDD?? Video everything.
What about gaming?
If you had the money, what would your hard drive setup be for my situation?

Well, if I had the money:
1xSpinpoint F3 1TB for boot drive (partitioned into 2x500GB)
On partition 1, I would install OS and games.
On partition 2, I would install OS and Video editing programs.

Then I'd get an Areca ARC-1680-ix and 7+ F3 1TB's and have them setup as a RAID 5/6 array, and stick your media, project saves, media cache and previews on there.
Depending on your usage, you can also setup another 4-drive RAID 0 (no backup in case of failure) for disposable items such as your media cache, previews and/or pagefile.

Original media and project saves are things you want backed up. If any drive on that array fails, you want security of the data (RAID 3/5/6).
Media cache, previews and pagefile are disposable, if a drive on that array fails it's no problem at all (RAID 0).

If you're working with 2k and 4k, you want to really have a read on the Adobe forums, otherwise you may run into a ton of performance problems.

 

[Castiel]

RED 2k will be hard to edit, maybe impossible the way I am building the machine. But I am taking a shot, just for fun. Because I can only find a reasonable MAC Pro to edit RED on, and I have done that before, but thats a $20,000 system right there.(Friends have a system like that.)

But what I like is shoot in 2k, reduce it down to 1080p. So it looks amazing, and still have a not so large 2k file size.

 

[scaminatrix]

Read this. It's a quick tidbit introing you to an optimal CS5 setup.
And read this. It will guide you into buying the best bang-for-buck editing system.
IMO You want:
i7 930
12GB RAM
MPE enabled GPU (GTX 470/480)
Areca or other decent RAID card
6+ HDD's

To make sure you eliminate the HDD's as the bottleneck in your system (as it will be with an MPE enabled GPU), you can do a 6-drive RAID array and keep adding more drives until there is no more performance gain.

This is all just little bits of random (but slightly useful) info.
I know you say you want to take the shot just for fun, I just don't want you to make the same mistake I did when building a video editing rig.
I should have got a GTX480 and made myself familiar with RAID earlier. Luckily, I've had the discipline to keep everything separate, no games installed etc. so my rig's performance has been acceptable.

EDIT: Here's another very interesting thread:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/598040 This thread was made before CS5 came out, ignore it.

 

[Castiel]

Thanks for everything!

If RED fails on my machine, I will revert to a MAC...