Maximizing speed, what to do?

F
Posted By
fivefourteen
Aug 4, 2005
Views
214
Replies
3
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Closed
Hi All,

I work with large still photographs 600-800Mbyte files. I have 1Gb of ram right now. Thinking about getting 1 or 2 more gbyte of ram. I am guessing that I will need around 3 gigabyte of RAM. I plan to do one layer mask and purge as often as possible. Do you think 3 gigabyte is enough?

OR

should I invest in the hard drive instead since RAM will be exhausted pretty quickly and it will need a fast scratch disk.

Thanks,

Khoi
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ND
Norm Dresner
Aug 4, 2005
"fivefourteen" wrote in message
Hi All,

I work with large still photographs 600-800Mbyte files. I have 1Gb of ram right now. Thinking about getting 1 or 2 more gbyte of ram. I am guessing that I will need around 3 gigabyte of RAM. I plan to do one layer mask and purge as often as possible. Do you think 3 gigabyte is enough?

OR

should I invest in the hard drive instead since RAM will be exhausted pretty quickly and it will need a fast scratch disk.

Thanks,

Khoi

If your files are 600-800MB each, your 1GB of RAM isn’t adequate for holding two images at one time and any operation that produces a new image/layer from the existing one will need to scroll to the Widows page file (or the Photoshop scratch file) immediately. 3 GB of RAM would give you enough for 3-4 images (or layers) and that should speed up your processing. That said, there’s also nothing like having a fast hard disk to load images from and you can’t get anything much faster than SCSI — normal IDE drives don’t give you that kind of speed. But before you start to completely renovate your system, ask yourself if the CPU processor and motherboard are adequate to the task.

Norm
FN
Fresh_n00b
Aug 5, 2005
<snip>
That said, there’s also nothing like having a fast hard disk to load images from and you can’t get anything much faster than SCSI — normal IDE drives don’t give you that kind of speed. But before you start to completely renovate your system, ask yourself if the CPU processor and motherboard are adequate to the task.

Norm
</snip>

no completely true
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=65
74 gig Western Digital Raptor in SATA will keep up and in some instances beat SCSI and at half the cost.
Just saying
N
noone
Aug 5, 2005
In article ,
says…
Hi All,

I work with large still photographs 600-800Mbyte files. I have 1Gb of ram right now. Thinking about getting 1 or 2 more gbyte of ram. I am guessing that I will need around 3 gigabyte of RAM. I plan to do one layer mask and purge as often as possible. Do you think 3 gigabyte is enough?

OR

should I invest in the hard drive instead since RAM will be exhausted pretty quickly and it will need a fast scratch disk.

Thanks,

Khoi

The biggest bottlenecks in a PS system are:

1. IO – fast drives and plenty of them are the best answer. I use SCSI RAID0, but hear for good sources that SATA HDDs are just as fast, and less expensive. With PS CS(1 & 2), there is no limit to the amount of Scratch Disk space that can be used. Keep the OS and program files on separate physical drive(s) from the Scratch Disk.

2. RAM – the more, the better, up to what the OS can access. Beyond that limit, one might add a RAMdisk with some good results, but I have not had more RAM than the OS could address in many years, so I’m not speaking for current experience here.

3. Processor Speed – I’ve found that physical dual-processors really help PS along, more so than raw processor speed. Much has been said, speculated, tested and reported, on MT or dual-core. I have one machine with MT and leave it on, but don’t do any "heavy lifting" on that machine.

Good luck, and let us know what works best for you,
Hunt

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