I shoot everything in RAW, and just switched from Capture One to DxO Optics Pro. What I've noticed about both programs is that they have a very difficult time functioning properly when images are located on external hard drives. Obviously, internal hard drives do not come close to being able to hold the vast store of images we all accumulate. I can see loading everything into the internal HD initially, do your work, then transfer to the external HD, but when you have to work on old images, transferring your images to an external everytime you want to work on them is a major extra step that just isn't feasible.
Does anyone have solution to this problem?
I use a MacBook Pro 8,2, 16 gig ram, 500gig internal HD.
Do you Windows folk have this problem or is it just us lucky Mac users? DxO and Phase One both seem to be clueless about this, which surprises me.
Opinions?
Nov 09, 2012 at 11:24 AM
Lars Johnsson Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: Off
I don't have Mac or those software. But I do all my PP and editing on external drives (Drobo's). It works very good for me with all my different software like Photoshop, Lightroom and others. I have also used Phase One a little bit without problem.
The main thing to get it working very good is speed. What connections do you have between your external drives and the Mac? I mainly use e-Sata and a few times USB3 . I would guess Thunderbolt or FireWire 800 would be good for you.
I really liked this program before LR 4 was introduced, but it still uses a numbingly slow raw converter, and frankly, the sharpness and distortion correction features are not all that much better anymore. Really tried to come up with a good reason to upgrade this software, but really can't see any advantages in 8. Also sad to see that it still has the same external HD issues I currrently have in 7. It isn't just an issue of connections or platforms Lars, it just doesn't like external drives, period. Oh, and forget about esata too, because that's the connection I use with my external. Come on, this is not a big fix fellas!
phil hawkins wrote:
Do you Windows folk have this problem or is it just us lucky Mac users? DxO and Phase One both seem to be clueless about this, which surprises me.
Opinions?
All my live work is done with internal hard drives (~22TB at the moment) and then there are 14TB of high speed externals, mainly for local backups. I have another ~30TB in rotating offsite backups. I'm not sure what cases are available for a Mac but a 10-bay case is common for PCs and the large towers hold 12 drives or more. I would not buy anything less than 3TB drives now. I should mention that my "hot data" is sometimes stored on SSDs. A 480-512GB SSD or two are enough for most WIP and remove any storage bottleneck that you might have.
phil hawkins wrote:
Is this a problem with PCs? I don't think it is...
It is as far as performance goes, but you can mitigate that with proper external drives (SAS or eSATA). Otherwise move lesser used data to the externals and keep the important data internal.
