Upgrades for Photography Workflow

[MattSepeta]

Upgrades with Photography in mind---

I was considering getting a new iMac after my hard drive failed, but went and replaced the HD with a SSD on a whim. Now I am simply trying to optimize my entire system with the end goal being a faster photography workflow using mainly Aperture 3 and some occasional Photoshop CS4.

Questions-

- Will going from 4GB to 6GB give me a noticeable speed boost while using aperture?
- I plan on buying a new hard drive as my current one is already 2/3 full. I currently have my aperture 3 library on a 1.5TB usb2.0 hard drive will moving the library to a FW800 hard drive increase speed in aperture?

Thanks!

 

[MattSepeta]

Really? No one can tell me how big a difference 2GB of RAM or going from USB to FW800 will make in Aperture 3?

seriously?

 

[cupcakes2000]

Really? No one can tell me how big a difference 2GB of RAM or going from USB to FW800 will make in Aperture 3?

seriously?

Well, 4 to 8 gb made a hell of a difference for me in all my photo apps on my i5 mbp.

I don't know about the hard disk from experience, but it seems kinda obvious that it would be faster doesn't it?

Perhaps you haven't had any replies cos they are pretty obvious answers?

 

[416049]

It's better to stay 4 I think because of the dual channel support which is benevolent in aperture.

and going to FireWire 800 from USB will give you a speed boost because unlike USB FireWire transfers at a constant speed of 80mb/s vs 42 mb/s USB

 

[cupcakes2000]

It's better to stay 4 I think because of the dual channel support which is benevolent in aperture.

and going to FireWire 800 from USB will give you a speed boost because unlike USB FireWire transfers at a constant speed of 80mb/s vs 42 mb/s USB

Not sure whether the dual channel makes more difference than the extra ram though.

I upgraded my 2006 white macbook from 2x1gb (matched pair) to 1x1gband 1x2gb giving a total of 3gb, obviously unmatched.

For Aperture 3 it was noticeably faster.

 

[MattSepeta]

It's better to stay 4 I think because of the dual channel support which is benevolent in aperture.

and going to FireWire 800 from USB will give you a speed boost because unlike USB FireWire transfers at a constant speed of 80mb/s vs 42 mb/s USB

Thanks. This is the kind of answer I was looking for. Now I know what to research

 

[cupcakes2000]

Thanks. This is the kind of answer I was looking for. Now I know what to research

And how I responded to that, with a little actual proof that this doesn't make a noticeable difference, isn't the kind of answer you were looking for?

 

[Scuby]

I don't find most things in Aperture use much memory - i've just finished a lot of editing within Aperture (exposure, contrast, levels, rotate, etc) on some big RAW photos and it peaks around 2.5GB memory usage. However, i decided to upgrade my iMac from 4GB to 8GB mainly for the external editing - i do a lot of big panorama merging, and some HDR and focus stacking, and trying to run those with Aperture open very quickly started using the swap file as memory ran out. So that sort of thing is now much smoother. Good way to see what you need is to watch memory usage in Activity Monitor, and see if it starts to use the swap file (and how much).

My Aperture library is on my internal disk, so not experienced running Aperture off a firewire disk, but the difference doing backups between a USB2 and a FW800 disk is huge - and can't see any reason you wouldn't notice a similar benefit in Aperture.

 

[Designer Dale]

My setup is the late '08 Penyrn MBP at 2.5 GH. I went with the 4GB ram when I got it. I have upgraded the HD to a 500GB Seagate running at 7200 rpm. The HD upgrade really kicked the computer into overdrive. The update of A3 has cut some of the lag times in half, but it could always run faster. If I had a maxxed out Pro I still would want more. Get as much ram as you can afford. If you don't need it right away, you will in the future. I'm looking at 6 or 8GB from OWC.

I also have a backup disk - the MyBook Studio - for Time Machine and the old drive from my laptop (250 GB/5400 rpm) as an A3 Vault. The first is on FW 800 and the second is on USB2. Considerable speed difference.

Dale