Jo,

The ideal layout probably runs to a 3 physical disk setup. The OS is installed on one disk, the photos are stored on another and the Photoshop/Lightroom scratch runs off the third. Partitioning is a convenient way of dividing up a disk, but you can't make one disk perform like two by doing it. Photos, scratch and windows swap need to be on separate physical disks, not separate partitions.

If going with a two disk arrangement i guess i would go with a 40-50Gb or so partition for windows (C-Drive), with the rest of disk 1 housing the photos (D-Drive). Disk 2 can then have a partition for scratch (maybe 50Gb or something as Z-drive) with the rest given over to housing your normal files / backups etc (say E-Drive). That way the heavy load on the disks goes to C drive (windows swap) and Z-drive (PS Swap). The other two drives should get a lot less i/o, though there is a slight bottleneck when saving out the picture to D drive, as windows may also need to swap.

Thanks 15Bit, thats exactly the kind of info I was looking for.

Marcel, not sure why you pointed me where you did, I know my machine can handle Windows 7 already, not much additional there about partitioning and scratch disks, was there something else I was supposed to see?

Jo

^ My main reason for posting that link is to establish whether or not you might encounter any driver issues. If you have already researched that, great!

Well since this topic is still going - I had another thought. I've just installed photoshop on my laptop with Core2Duo, W7, 9800GT with 1GB RAM, 4GB RAM, SSD for OS and HDD for storage. Wow what a slowdown compared to my desktop.

Jo, you didn't specify if your photoshop is slow all the time - like during regular tool usage(it shouldn't be), when you process a lot of files, or only when you working with large files; in any case watch your CPU/core usage and disk activity during the slowdowns.

Overall it seems like you have a good plan for now; and I agree with 15bit on 3 disk setup. With price of HDDs so low you might as well get another one for the scratch.

The thing to consider: though you don't need a lot of space for scratch or OS you should get a moderatly large drive (640GB -1TB) - they are faster then the smaller ones (<500GB). WD blacks seem to be a good compromise of speed without going to Raptors or SSDs, but any (not green) latest models should be fine.

If you do ever install Linux (Ubuntu) - do use it for all your browsing, and office needs. It is really nice.

Please let us know how much faster is everything after your upgrades.

Hi - in addition to the other suggestions - Windows 7 is DEFINITELY worth the upgrade compared to VISTA.

Install the 64 bit version of windows 7 -- a 25 GB partition will be more than enough.

Cheers
-K

Kyle Yates wrote:
Hi - in addition to the other suggestions - Windows 7 is DEFINITELY worth the upgrade compared to VISTA.

Install the 64 bit version of windows 7 -- a 25 GB partition will be more than enough.

Cheers
-K
I agree on Win7, and disagree with 25GB. W7 alone with hibernate and page file could be 20GB - true, but you don't want to fill the partition too much it could lead to the problems later. I'd at least double the space, unless you on are on a 30GB SSD, than I'd Vlite it (I'm not sure if there is a 7lite).

Thanks Alex and Kyle, and everybody else! CS4 is normally fast for small adjustments, it's only once I add a multitude of layers and complex processing that it gets slow. And, I need to be realistic, slow is all relative. I don't make my living with photography, and I don't need lightning fast response times. I've decided to just fine tune my current machine to maximize it's potential, glad to know that W7 is worth the upgrade. Adding HDD's, 1 more, 2 if I can, will create a better environment than my current 500gb HD with no partitioning.

Jo

PS speed and other running programs can use lots of RAM. With 64 Bit Vista (and a motherboard that takes much more than 4GB) you can address far more than your, present, 3/4 Gb RAM limit. So save your money until you can get a new machine.

not sure HOW into PC you are, but a mac mini w/ 8 gigs of memory might serve you better then windows 7 *mac mini +dual 500G harddrives in raid0 ~ $900 w/ snow leopard server installed*.

That being said, in regards to your PC:
Go separate raid controller, I laugh everytime I see someone posting "integrated raid controller". Using a software raid protects your data no more then having a single drive, I have actually seen people lose all their data b/c they trusted the integrated raid setup. . Pickup a 3ware or some other HARDWARE raid controller capable of raid 5 w/ 4 SATA ports, either use raid 5, or multiple mirror setups. But if you are dealing w/ layers and such a motherboard that supports up to 16GB of memory is a good thing, start w/ 4 or 8 and expand as it is affordable/neccesary. in most cases, I personally believe you can gain more of a boost from a memory upgrade then a CPU upgrade. but that's just my opinion as far as what I would build for a PC (bare specs). Any modern Nvidia or ATI based video card as well, dual output.

m34tba11 wrote:
not sure HOW into PC you are, but a mac mini w/ 8 gigs of memory might serve you better then windows 7 *mac mini +dual 500G harddrives in raid0 ~ $900 w/ snow leopard server installed*.

That being said, in regards to your PC:
Go separate raid controller, I laugh everytime I see someone posting "integrated raid controller". Using a software raid protects your data no more then having a single drive, I have actually seen people lose all their data b/c they trusted the integrated raid setup. . Pickup a 3ware or some other HARDWARE raid controller capable of raid 5 w/ 4 SATA ports, either use raid 5, or multiple mirror setups. But if you are dealing w/ layers and such a motherboard that supports up to 16GB of memory is a good thing, start w/ 4 or 8 and expand as it is affordable/neccesary. in most cases, I personally believe you can gain more of a boost from a memory upgrade then a CPU upgrade. but that's just my opinion as far as what I would build for a PC (bare specs). Any modern Nvidia or ATI based video card as well, dual output.


I agree on that one. I didn't bring the controller issue up because it is probably out of the target price range and could be another separate issue in it's own. Good true hardware RAID controller alone could be starting at $200 to $500. With that you probably better off experimenting with SSDs and if the budget is "unlimited" bringing a good RAID could make big difference. It also unloads the CPU from a lot of I/O operations. While RAID 5 is pretty fast, RAID 0 will give the most speed advantage. You do have to back up your data regularly from RAID 0 as the probability of loosing it at least doubles. You can also use RAID 10 (1+0) but the price doubles again for the drives and while mirrors will save you from drive failures they will not save you from viruses - backups could. Mac should have less problems with viruses, but they do exist. My friend had one a few month ago.

Hmmm. maybe I should just take the old PC to BestBuy Geek Squad and say "make it go faster"

Lots of stuff here to ponder, much of it would clearly be addressed IF I COULD AFFORD A BRAND NEW MACHINE. If I could do that, I'd go to AvaDirect and build one. Unfortunately, I can't afford that right now and was trying to spend a reasonable amount of money to speed up what I have now. Vista64bit, 1 500GB HD, and a MAX of 4gb of ram. More ram would be wonderful, but requires new MB, which opens all type of cans of worms and cost.

What's a poor girl to do? I've got it, give up this money sucking hobby and take up knitting

Jo Dilbeck wrote:
Hmmm. maybe I should just take the old PC to BestBuy Geek Squad and say "make it go faster"

Lots of stuff here to ponder, much of it would clearly be addressed IF I COULD AFFORD A BRAND NEW MACHINE. If I could do that, I'd go to AvaDirect and build one. Unfortunately, I can't afford that right now and was trying to spend a reasonable amount of money to speed up what I have now. Vista64bit, 1 500GB HD, and a MAX of 4gb of ram. More ram would be wonderful, but requires new MB, which opens all type of cans of worms and cost.

What's a poor girl to do? I've got it, give up this money sucking hobby and take up knitting

Jo,

I think you're proceeding wisely, spend about $300 or thereabouts on a HDD and configure it properly and you should see an improvement in the speed. When you're ready for that custom-build, it will be a quantum leap, that's for sure.

I finally realized that off-the-shelf computers can only be upgraded to a point, mainly because the companies lock their BIOS's. My custom-build has given me much more confidence working with the BIOS and playing with the hardware, I spend a lot of my free time surfing the overclocker-forums and I'm really fascinated by it all.

I thought that when I had a really top-notch D-SLR and then saved up to buy some expensive, quality glass to put in front of it, I'd be pretty much done. But, just like you, I began reading about other photographers editing with super-charged PCs and I got the "need-for-speed" bug , and the rest is history.

Nicholas
www.copperhillimages.com

Jo,

Ignore the big spenders here. Those suggesting hardware RAID clearly haven't read your posts. In the future when you do upgrade, do not be tempted by expensive hardware RAID - its a total waste of money on a home desktop computer.

I think you've got the right balance for now with a Win 7 upgrade and a new HDD. Both will transfer to a new computer later on, so are not wasted cash if they don't yield the speed up you want.

15Bit wrote:
Jo,

Ignore the big spenders here. Those suggesting hardware RAID clearly haven't read your posts. In the future when you do upgrade, do not be tempted by expensive hardware RAID - its a total waste of money on a home desktop computer.

I think you've got the right balance for now with a Win 7 upgrade and a new HDD. Both will transfer to a new computer later on, so are not wasted cash if they don't yield the speed up you want.



+1

Thanks again all. Final decision is to go with W7 and another 500gb HDD with partition for new OS. However, I need to make sure my power supply can handle the new HDD. This is especially final since I just invested in a laptop for my husband and I, so a speed-ball desktop machine is pretty much out of the question right now. I like the idea of a new HDD and OS at the same time because I can put the new OS on the new HDD and not have to format the old HDD until I've got everything running smoothly on the new HDD!

Jo

Jo Dilbeck wrote:
Thanks again all. Final decision is to go with W7 and another 500gb HDD with partition for new OS. However, I need to make sure my power supply can handle the new HDD. This is especially final since I just invested in a laptop for my husband and I, so a speed-ball desktop machine is pretty much out of the question right now. I like the idea of a new HDD and OS at the same time because I can put the new OS on the new HDD and not have to format the old HDD until I've got everything running smoothly on the new HDD!

Jo

That sounds good, Jo. This may help with your power supply:

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Best,
Nicholas
www.copperhillimages.com

Jo Dilbeck wrote:
Thanks Alex, but if I upgrade the motherboard, HDD's, graphics card, OS and RAM, I might as well shell out the ponies for a brand new machine. It's really frustrating that a machine that was pretty much top 2 years ago is now not able to keep up with what I need it to do. Maybe I need a new hobby, like knot tying or something simple like that

But, the HDD's and OS should cost me less than $350, and maybe that will hold me over for another year or two......until I upgrade to the 5DMII............

Jo

How is your specified machine unable to "keep up" with what you need to do? What are you doing? We've got a fairly old (2.5y+) Intel Mac with 4GB of RAM and fewer cores; it handles my wife's imaging needs quite well (Our highest MP camera is an Olympus 12.8MP camera that shoots RAW). I've run 5DII files on and it does quite well, from a production standpoint. (Let alone a hobby).

Maybe you need to update or reinstall the OS? Win7 may help. Based on the hardware spec you described, your computer should do quite well with 22-30MP files. Heck, I was painting in 16-bit 3600x4800 .PSD files with up to 30 layers using a 6y old PowerPC. I can think of no reason why your system can't keep up with your needs.

You definitely should not need a new computer yet, unless you're running Maya or a MF digital photo workflow.

Arka C.

lordarka wrote:

How is your specified machine unable to "keep up" with what you need to do? What are you doing? We've got a fairly old (2.5y+) Intel Mac with 4GB of RAM and fewer cores; it handles my wife's imaging needs quite well (Our highest MP camera is an Olympus 12.8MP camera that shoots RAW). I've run 5DII files on and it does quite well, from a production standpoint. (Let alone a hobby).

Maybe you need to update or reinstall the OS? Win7 may help. Based on the hardware spec you described, your computer should do quite well with 22-30MP files. Heck, I was painting in 16-bit 3600x4800 .PSD files with up to 30 layers using a 6y old PowerPC. I can think of no reason why your system can't keep up with your needs.

You definitely should not need a new computer yet, unless you're running Maya or a MF digital photo workflow.

Arka C.

That was my point all alone, thanks Arka. I have a very similar computer and like I said, it's very fast with 5D2 files, at least in photoshop. I have assumed that OS was optimized already, but maybe that's all is needed - reinstall, optimize settings. I guarantee that all 2 year old computers will be fast if they'd receive a clean OS install.

Great link Nicholas, thanks!

Yup, I know a clean OS install would make a big difference, and if I'm going to do that, I'm getting the hell away from Vista. I never should have changed out XP-Pro, that ran great on my machine, but NO, I had to get the latest and prettiest OS (NOT).

Arka - it's not that it really "can't" keep up, it processes the files, just some with multiple layers seem to take forever, and as I said, it's all relative. However, I do know that in the case of Vista, and SP2 in particular, I have some problems. SP2 seems to have some sort of bug that causes cold boot to take somewhere between 3-5 minutes (experienced by many on MS Knowledgebase). I have no doubt that this is causing some problems elsewhere in the system as well. Apparently just removing SP2 is a problem because then you don't get the additional updates.

Oh well, from what I've heard Win7 should be much better, I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but won't have time to do this until after the holidays are over.

Jo

Jo Dilbeck wrote:

Arka - it's not that it really "can't" keep up, it processes the files, just some with multiple layers seem to take forever, and as I said, it's all relative. Jo

Jo,
I know the frustration you're having now, I had it with my last computer. Opening a RAW 26 MB file in Nikon NX would take about 12 seconds to render, my new computer opens the same file in 2 to 3 seconds. Naturally one could say 12 secs isn't a long time, but if you have 20, 50 or 100 photos to process and you're using a ton of layers, speeding up your machine even 50% would be a huge help. And yes, Vista is/was a dog!!!

Just for future reference, when the time comes to "go for broke" (literally ), here are a few shots of my custom-build I stumbled upon last night.
http://www.pbase.com/copperhill/image/119803786/original I removed the shell and the heatsink fan for this pic. The WD/Caviar is on top with the 2 VelociRaptors below. The 2 fans keep them at 26, 27 degrees.
http://www.pbase.com/copperhill/image/119803796/original (again without the shell)

Nicholas
www.copperhillimages.com