Best Pratice for Creating Cached Basemap Imagery

[RyanEckdale-Dudley]

I'm working with several thousand raster files in MrSID format for an entire county that are seperated by township . My end goal is to create a cached basemap in ArcGIS Server of the imagery. Can you reccomend best methods?

Mosaic tool is crashing.

Raster Catalog works but I've read source files should be converted to Tiff or Jpeg first. Is there a way to batch export? Also there is a big difference in image resolution when i convert a few?

Mosaic Dataset works but only viewable at a scale up to 1:10,000? Otherwise I only see the
outlines?

Best,
Ryan

[JakeSkinner]

A mosaic dataset would be the best option.  You  may not see the mosaic dataset at smaller scales because Overviews are not built.  To build overviews right-click on the mosaic dataset in ArcCatalog > Build Overviews.