Help Equipping a Photoshop CS5 Computer

Question

I am an ex photographer who is getting back into slide shows and photography after a number of years away.  I want to rework photographs for my slide shows so I have purchased CS5 Extended.  I also may want to do some limited video editing in the near future.  My desktop computer with XP is getting tired, so I am going to upgrade to a Dell Studio XPS 9100.  I won't be a heavy PS user, but want something that will handle it well and not be out of date soon.  I will also be using this computer for some business applications.
I have been following your forum on PS PCs. 
Does the following sound OK?
Studio XPS 9100
Intel IM7-930, 2.80GHz 64 bit
Windows Professional (So I can run XP stuff in protected mode)
8GB DDR3 SDRAM @1333MHz
1TB 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16mmCache
(No Solid State Drive offered by Dell for scratch disk, so I will buy one later)
Nvidia Genforce G405

Answer 1

SSDs promise much higher throughput with a single drive on a single SATA cable, but at the moment to get that advantage you pay a good bit extra money and the sizes are limited.
It can certainly be a big advantage to achieve a much greater than the approximately 90 to 100 megabytes/second throughput a typical spinning drive provides, which is why I use RAID to gang drives together so they work in parallel.  The advantage of this approach is that you can both multiply the throughput AND get the much higher capacity.  For example, two high quality 1 TB electromechanical (spinning) drives can provide a 2 TB partition (the biggest Windows 7 can boot from without special BIOS considerations) and throughput the equals or exceeds what a single SSD delivers...
The short answer to your question is this:  If you see your system on the hard drive a lot while you're waiting for things to happen, there's a good chance faster hard drive access will help you.
-Noel