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HD for scratch drive--size??

Jeff O'Neil

New member
Well I have the new Mac Pro and she's a beauty!

Some problems with the 30 inch display and an odd random pixelation event occuring where it looks like a "show hot spots" in a raw convertor. I've taken screen grabs but it's not the video card it's on the display as the anomaly doesn't show up iin the screen grabs, so I took some pictures of it and my store is currentlyy shoowing them to apple to figure out what the heck it is. Either way they'll either swap out the video card /and or the diplay so I'm not concerned. It oddly goes away if I make any sort of channge in the dsiplay settings. A minor hiccup in this new Mac world I've entered.

here's my actual question. (sorry new computer had to share!)

I'd like to add a scratch disk for PS CS3 and eventually 3. I'm not sure if lightroom uses a scratch disk but it would be for that as well. How large should the scratch disk be? I can get an 80 gig Seagate quite inexpensively and I'm wondering if that is large enough?

I'm adding two other drives (Seagate 320 or 400) for archive storage and files in progresss to keep all the photo work off the main hard drive. I will most likely ghost the Main OS drive as well.

Thanks in advance for your input..it's always appreciated.

Jeff
 
I'd like to add a scratch disk for PS CS3 and eventually 3. I'm not sure if lightroom uses a scratch disk but it would be for that as well. How large should the scratch disk be? I can get an 80 gig Seagate quite inexpensively and I'm wondering if that is large enough?

I'm adding two other drives (Seagate 320 or 400) for archive storage and files in progresss to keep all the photo work off the main hard drive. I will most likely ghost the Main OS drive as well.

Thanks in advance for your input..it's always appreciated.

Hi Jeff,

I hope you enjoy the new box.

As to Scratch Disk for PS, any size will do. A 10 GB hard drive would be large enough unless you are dealing with stitching medium format scans or high resolution large format scans.

Hence I would suggest a 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor as the speed of the drive matters more than size for swapping out data. Another one for your OS X swap file might be helpful too. But with the Mac Pros large memory capacity buying more RAM (6-8 GB total) would not hurt and will likely make more difference. Albeit, fast disks cost less money.

Using a RAID for your Scratch Disk would boost performance even more. Albeit, RAID involves more moving parts to fail and it costs more.

By the way the link above goes to a reputable Stateside e-tailer that apparently does not ship outside the USA (I live in the USA so it is a non-issue for me).

enjoy your day,

Sean
 
Using a RAID for your Scratch Disk would boost performance even more. Albeit, RAID involves more moving parts to fail and it costs more.

I should qualify that to say using RAID 0, 3, 4, 5, 6, or an exotic variant with a good controller will boost performance. RAID 1 will not do anything for performance.

enjoy,

Sean
 

Jeff O'Neil

New member
I don't think I rreally need a Raid setup at this point.

My concern was how big should a scratch drive or perhaps partition be?

I'm now thinking just partion off 20 gigs of space on my new "working photo" drive and add more memory as I can afford it. Right now I have 3 gig RAM. Sounds like I need to get up into the 6 gig or higher range.

I did not think I would need that much RAM. With the new intel cpus I guess the programs run a little slow until they have re-released for the new machines.

I think you can tell I'm not a computer guru by any sytretch!

Jefff O'Neil
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jeff,

Photoshop loves memory and a clean scratch drive. Raptor, as Sean advises, is the first drive I'd choose! Avoid firewire, if possible, if there's anything else on that bus.

SATA is a great idea; fast and inexpensive.

This is your drive:

Western Digital Raptor WD360ADFD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM at ~$105 approximately.

Don't bother with RAID to start. However, you can add that later, (as per advice above) with another 36.7 GB Raptor!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Just another tidbit!

For Aperture, you need the very best Graphics card to get the fastest speed! A lot of the calculations are sent to the card!

Asher
 
I'm now thinking just partition off 20 gigs of space on my new "working photo" drive and add more memory as I can afford it.

Do not partition you drive that way as it will likely hurt performance by increasing the amount of seeking your drive head must do. This also increases physical wear and tear on the drive which will shorten its life.

Right now I have 3 gig RAM. Sounds like I need to get up into the 6 gig or higher range.

I did not think I would need that much RAM. With the new intel cpus I guess the programs run a little slow until they have re-released for the new machines.

What the 6 GB point does is it allows you to get rid of the PS Scratch File and PS will simply use the OS'es disk caching mechanism which means smaller writes to disk (200 MB- 2 GB) get cached to RAM which is much faster than writing to disk.

For day to day use and smaller files (<100 MB) 3 GB of RAM is plenty.

enjoy your day,

Sean
 
Western Digital Raptor WD360ADFD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM at ~$105 approximately.


Be aware OEM drives while cheaper do not include cables (a SATA cable is about $2 USD), screws, or mounting brackets. OEM drives also have lesser warranties if they have one at all.

Not all drive enclosures require cabling.

enjoy your day,

Sean
 

John Sheehy

New member
Do not partition you drive that way as it will likely hurt performance by increasing the amount of seeking your drive head must do. This also increases physical wear and tear on the drive which will shorten its life.

What the 6 GB point does is it allows you to get rid of the PS Scratch File and PS will simply use the OS'es disk caching mechanism which means smaller writes to disk (200 MB- 2 GB) get cached to RAM which is much faster than writing to disk.

Sean

Are you assuming that PS uses the cache or do you know this for a fact? PS, in general, bypasses OS performance features. It disables swapping of its RAM pages, and disables the file cache for all image file reads and writes, I know. Never checked to see if it disables caching with the scratchfile. Are you saying that above a certain amount of RAM photoshop changes the way it operates, or that the file cache is simply more useful with large amounts of RAM?
 
Are you assuming that PS uses the cache or do you know this for a fact? PS, in general, bypasses OS performance features. It disables swapping of its RAM pages, and disables the file cache for all image file reads and writes, I know. Never checked to see if it disables caching with the scratchfile. Are you saying that above a certain amount of RAM photoshop changes the way it operates, or that the file cache is simply more useful with large amounts of RAM?

Yes, it is a fact and yes with large amounts of RAM PS changes its Scratch Disk Behavior. To quote:

[FONT=Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]If you have more than 4 GB (to 6 GB (Windows) or 8 GB (Mac OS)), the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data. Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop, is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can s[/FONT][FONT=Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]peed performance of Photoshop.
- http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=320005
[/FONT]​
I have spent some time reading the tech docs and testing them. Sadly, with an Athlon 64 CPU none of the variations speed up processing (larger tiles just seen to waste RAM for brushes with the memory controller embedded in the CPU).

enjoy your day,

Sean
 

Jeff O'Neil

New member
Do not partition you drive that way as it will likely hurt performance by increasing the amount of seeking your drive head must do. This also increases physical wear and tear on the drive which will shorten its life.



What the 6 GB point does is it allows you to get rid of the PS Scratch File and PS will simply use the OS'es disk caching mechanism which means smaller writes to disk (200 MB- 2 GB) get cached to RAM which is much faster than writing to disk.

For day to day use and smaller files (<100 MB) 3 GB of RAM is plenty.

enjoy your day,

Sean

Thanks Sean.

This is all a bit confusing top say the least. The switch over to Mac is a real learning curve.

Based on the info so far I'll opt for 2 drives. One for upload and temp storage while working on the files and an archive drive. As a matter of routine I have always made DVD copies of the original RAW photo's as a backup so I think I'm covered in that respect.

Later I'll add another 2-3 gigs of ram when money becomes available.

I've taken the video card that comes with the basic configuration for the 2.66 dual Pro. Is it worth it to consider bumping up the video card as well?

I have to temper this all with one fact. The machine will be used primarily for my main income source which is audio recording. I am a voiceover artist with Radio and TV clients all over North America. This machine will take the place of a dedicated audio workstation and a office/photo computer.

I'm not making the audio switch over until the current TV ratings period is over. No sense in trying to learn a new program during my busiest time of year!

Keeping all that in mind makes my decisions a but more complex. Although the extra RAM certainly will help the audio program as well.

Hey it's all fun! I love learning new stuff on the fly. Keeps the mind acctive.

Jeff
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Jeff,

Congrats on your speed demon! you are so lucky buying now. As usualy, my buying any Mac seems to precipitate apple decidng to release a much faster one 2 months later! So I have dual G5 and you the Mac Pro. It would be a lie to say I'm not rather envious!

There's no need to change the video card except if you want to go faster in Aperture. The provided Graphics Cards for the Mac are generally not a bottleneck in processing data in Photoshop. For 3D rendering and games it matters a lot.

For sound, BTW, it's the Protools box that does the work and that you just have to buy if you are at the high end of audio work and need sophisticated editing.

In CS2 and CS3, AFAIK, the Cache limit is 3 GB (or is it 3.5GB) that PS allows in OSX Tiger and the future Leopard in the OS X environment is able to allot RAM on the fly, a what you allocate under PS.. There's a report of this on Barefeats.com.

Rob Art at Barefeats.com said:
Wow! Can you believe it? What happened? Tiger. That's what happened. Photoshop CS2, though it supports up to 3.5GB of memory cache, actually turns over cache management to Mac OS X. Using Activity Monitor, we observed the OS grabbing up to 7GB of memory to use as cache for Photoshop CS2, the only user application running on our G5/2.5GHz Power Mac with 8GB of memory.

With CS, if you tell it to use 100MB of memory for caching, that's all it uses. Anything over that gets written to the scratch disk. Hence the long times for opening and rotating. With CS2 (+ Tiger), the OS "ignores" the 100MB setting and uses as much memory as is available to cache the photoshop file and scratch area. Very cool. That's the way Photoshop and the OS should have been working together all along!

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you run Photoshop CS2 under the "Panther" version of OS X (10.3.x), you will NOT see the "automagic" caching we observed. You need both Tiger and CS2 to get the speed leap we measured.
Read the entire Barefeats report here .

Asher
 

Chuck Fry

New member
Be aware OEM drives while cheaper do not include cables (a SATA cable is about $2 USD), screws, or mounting brackets. OEM drives also have lesser warranties if they have one at all.

This is not an issue with the Mac Pro. The drive brackets come with the system and the drives slide right into their mating connectors.

Reputable manufacturers have the same warranty terms for their OEM drives as for retail units. This is one of the reasons I've been a Seagate booster, they have the best warranty in the business.

There is no reason not to buy an OEM drive to use in a Mac Pro.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Chuck

That's perfectly true, 5 year warranty!

However, they will not recover data from your drive nor return it and in many cases, (I don't know about Hitachi) they can give you a refurbished drive as a replacement if they so choose!

SATA drives just slide in to the Mac towers. So easy!

For external SATA you can get cards and the latest oens have ones that with one cable will give you 5 drives. With 4 cables you get 20 drives!

Awesome RAID!!!

Asher
 

Jeff O'Neil

New member
Thanks Asher Great info!

I will be using the protools digi2 rack mount.

All my recording while not complex must be broadcast standard or better. In many cases I have better equipment than my stations. But thats one of the reasons why they hire me because they can't get that sound in their own studios.

Jeff
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
For that, a single G5 processor is great even with 10 or more tracks, so you must be performance-happy even with all the midi and effects you could muster.

I hope you have a nice wide screen!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I'd also suggest you have a portable firewire 400/800 USB-2 drive so you can simply take it with you to other studios if need be and just plug in. This applies to both images and sound/music tracks.

You do not want to be moving your large drives and it's faster than burning a DVD which may or may not play in someone else's system.

Asher
 

Jeff O'Neil

New member
Actually for what I do I never have to archive my audio files. and as for tracks..I use only one! The only musical instrument I can play is a stereo! I record dry voice tracks only. It's overkill to some extent but the clients feel so much better knowing you spent all that money!

I'm either recording live via ISDN or the files are recorded here in my studio, converted to MP3 or wav format and uploaded to the stations folder on my ftp site.

Once they have it I can erase the file. Although I do keep them for about a month since they often inadvertantly delete files!

A lot of what I do is date specific. IE: News Topicals that run prior to newscasts. They won't use the material again after that day. It's only generic promo's or proof of performance news promos that run for an extended time. Other than that it's usually client promotions or tags for shows like Oprah etc.

Jeff
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Don't you have to replace words or change things needing cut and paste or timing where you need several lines?

I'd think you have one original track and several test tracks?

Wouldn't is be bad if one of your disks crashed with the stuff lost before broadcast? I guess it has never happened to you but it might.....hope not!

Asher
 

Jeff O'Neil

New member
Actually no. With audio it's easier to re read if need be. Most of the material I do in no longer than 60 seconds max. If I make a mistake I just pick up from where I left off and then edit out the error.

It's very much like text edting!

I've HD's go but I always have a ghosted drive ready to pop in with the full operating system and programs pre installed so I'm back up and running within minutes. Not sure how I'll handle that on the new Mac!

Jeff
 

Jeff O'Neil

New member
Yes...I supply the voicework for tv stations, radio, voice commercials and narrations.

Been at this for about 30 years now.

Jeff
 

Chuck Fry

New member
I've HD's go but I always have a ghosted drive ready to pop in with the full operating system and programs pre installed so I'm back up and running within minutes. Not sure how I'll handle that on the new Mac!

There's a great shareware program called SuperDuper! that will do this. The drive cloning feature is available for free. I also use it for backing up to a RAID array on a schedule - this requires a paid license.
 

Stan Jirman

New member
Sorry for joining late :)

Only RAID-0 will do something *real* for your performance. Raid-1 will do nothing, and -5 will do nothing or make it worse. This has to do with the problems these complex RAIDs degrade in performance with more than one access at a time, god forbit write access. Since you have more drive slots in the MP than you may really need, you should be able to take two of some old, cheap hard drives and stripe them to RAID-0. That's what I do in my MacPro, anyway: two 250s in a RAID-0 config, one 750 for video storage, and another 250 for the OS and other junk. That will fare better than the best 10k rpm drive. My photo data lives on a FW RAID-5, where speed doesn't matter but redundancy does. Decentralized backup lives on a SATA RAID-0, which in itself doesn't offer any redundancy but is speedy, and the chances that my house burns down *and* the off-site RAID-0 dies is reasonably slim :)
 
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