Best Hard Drive Configuration on New iMac?

Hi all,
I am in the process of purchasing a new iMac and will be installing Lightroom on it.  This will be my first installing Lightroom on one of my machines, so I am not very familiar with the program, though I have read up on it (and will continue to do so) and have seen it in action before.
I plan to get a 27' iMac, 3.4 i7 CPU, with at least 8GB of RAM (will probably upgrade to more later).  I have the option of selecting a 1TB Fusion drive, which is sort of a hybrid drive (a small part of which is SSD for most often used files/programs and the rest is a regular old hard drive), or a 3TB Fusion drive.  I'm trying to decide which would be better for Lightroom.
Obviously, the 3TB brings the convenience of size and the ability to store more pictures on a single HD without the need of an external drive (at least right now).   However, I am leaning toward the 1TB because the 3TB does not allow one to install Bootcamp, which is a program that let's the user run Windows on the iMac, which I may want to do at some point for work purposes.
All things being equal, and except for purely backup purposes, do most users split up their storage when using Lightroom or they just use one large internal hard drive? Would this have any impact on performance?  To be honest, the whole catalog thing is throwing me for a loop.  Sounds like I could store the physical images on an external drive, and just have Lightroom itself and the catalog file on the internal Fusion drive, but I'm wondering if this would at all degrade performance/speed of loading/viewing/editing pictures.  Obviously, I'm assuming much will depend on the speed of that external drive.
I will continue to read up, but I would appreciate any tips regarding the HD situation before I place my order, as well as any general pointers for a first time Lightroom user starting fresh so that I can get off on the right foot.
Many thanks!

Hallo,
I have the same or at least very similar question.
Just ordered the 21.5" imac with 1TB fusion drive. I need to transfer 450GB of photos from my old windows PC to the new imac set-up. This set-up will include some drive(s) for back-up, but not sure yet which drives.
Just moving the 450GB of photos to imac HD seems a bit much: with photos, applications and some other stuff 60-70 % of the imac HD would allready be consumed up right from the start.
I am using Lightroom for organizing, editing, etc.  of my pictures. So this should run as smooth as possible.
Any advice on a good configuration on how to work with iMac, Lightroom, 500 GB of pictures, external HD, back-up is welcome.
thanks,
Maarten

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