Optimizing System for Speed

[Emile]

I am in the process of optimizing my system for speed and wanted to know if any
folks out there can offer some advice.

What is the best way to allocate my files and applications across two internal
drives?  Should I run all the applications on the second internal drive, and
leave my system and user files on the original drive? 

Incidentally, all my image files are stored on external drives.  I only keep
image files of the take I'm currently processing on the original internal drive. 
After that take is completed, I back it up to 2 external drives in a JBOD setup.

I have a G5 dual 1.8 GHZ PPC with 8GB of RAM (maxed out), and an additional
internal HD (a 150 WD Raptor).

Thanks in advance for any advice, it's greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

-E
--
Emile Wamsteker
Editorial and Corporate Photographer
31 Rollinson Street
West Orange, NJ  07052
www.wamstekerphotography.com

[michael_stewart]

>Raptor drives are great; the 10K RPM does make a huge difference.  If your not running your OS on the Raptor,  I would consider going that route.  You can test your disaster recovery plan at the same time by imaging the drive and recovering onto a new Raptor drive. 

> I like to run my OS and programs on the same drive.  Running programs on a separate drive from the OS is a configuration problem for me.  I use a second drive for the scratch and a third for my working files.  My actual setup uses three separate hardware raid 0s backed up nightly with a SATAII JBOD.  The raid 0s are used for running the OS, Scratch, and Working files only!  The archived files are stored on single drives and redundantly backed up. Setting up a software based raid on a mac is a waist of time unless you need one really large drive. The speed boost comes from using a hardware raid. Sonnet makes some nice RAID cards for macs if you really want a speed boost. 

> Make sure you get that ram configured correctly.  Photoshop needs you to remove the tilde from a file to enable larger tiles and you need to tune your preferences.
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=331372
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=317280

> Get out the stop watch and do your own testing.   I also suggest running Sandra on your system- Sissoftware.com.  Each configuration has it's own sweet spots.  You can get some good general benchmarks and testing from barefeats.com and xlr8yourmac.com.

Cheers, Michael Stewart

[Emile]

Excellent!  Thanks Michael.

[Emile]

Hi Michael,

I tried going to the adobe links included in your post, but they won't load.

Do those links explain how to best configure RAM and preferences?  If so, is there another address?

Thanks again for your help.

Cheers,

-Emile

[michael_stewart]

   
This looks like the current link:

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb401089

[andris]

Here's a great, free speed test for photoshop based on a standard image file and a downloaded action.  Found out about this gem at Photoshop World in Vegas this year.  Great for determining how much real world benefit you're getting out of optimizations.

http://www.retouchartists.com/pages/speedtest.html

Andris

[michael_stewart]

The best part about the retouchartist speed test is that users are posting results.  The test does not account for the speed of opening and saving a file.  I believe in testing your settings for the task at hand.  A benchmarking program like the free Sis Soft Sandra http://www.sisoftware.net/ or Xbench  1.3 http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16231 are useful tools for testing your machines speed.

I use merge to HDR all the time and need that process to run fast, so hard drive speed is also essential.

The sliders and switches I tweak are:

Photoshop:
~Biggertiles (This is a file that you remove the ~ from)
Memory Usage
Cache levels
History States
Scratch Disks
On macs you get some Video card settings

Bios: (mac users can skip this)
Windows machines have all kinds of cool and dangerous stuff you can set in the bios.  This takes some research and understanding, but can greatly enhance the speed of your machine. Getting those settings correct and optimized will pump up your Photoshop speed. The most important part for me and Photoshop is the Ram timings.  WARNING: "Over Clocking" is dangerous if you don't know what your doing.

Good luck