I’ve always been leery of the conventional wisdom that multiple drives substantially improve Photoshop performance. This is articularly true if you have enough memory installed that the scratch disk is not accessed much in the first place.
But you can experiment on a desktop system with Photoshop installed, and multiple drives, and reconfigure the scratch disk to be on the C drive. See if your normal workflow is faster or not.
Another thought – if you get a notebook that has the option of 4 gig of memory. Even though Photoshop may or may not be able to directly use the additional 2 gig, you can configure the extra 2 gig as a ram drive, and use that as your scratch disk.
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
Don’t do a RAM disk with Photoshop – you’ll slow it down.
Leftover memory will be used for disk cacheing by the OS.
Evan, the hair on your legs is not really a Photoshop issue, unless you need to remove it. If that’s the case, I suggest you post in the Feature Requests area of the forums.
There are plenty of other laptops that have the ability to accommodate 2 hard disk drives, typically by hot-swapping with the optical drive. I got a new Dell at work that can have the DVD/CDR drive swapped out for a hard disk.
I don’t think it is necessary at all for a notebook to have two internal hard discs. One fast hard disc in a notebook is good enough.
I have a Dell Inspiron 6000d notebook with just one hard drive and it handles Photoshop chores just fine. However, this disc is a more expensive Hitachi 60GB 7200rpm drive with 8MB of cache. It’s not the typical, run of the mill 4500rpm-5400rpm type of drive you usually see installed, even in high end notebooks. The only other hard disc I need for this is an external Firewire drive for ghosting my OS and saving large amounts of data.
This model also has the newer "sonoma" chipset and a 128MB ATI X300 graphics card (not enough card to play DoomIII in high quality, but much better than an integrated graphics chip for general purpose graphics work).
Portability and long battery life were must have items in my choice of notebook. With the optional 9-cell battery, I can get up to 6 hours of battery life with my notebook. This laptop weighs around 7 pounds.
Those huge notebooks sold by Alienware and others are not practical for any real mobile computing use. They’re way to heavy and don’t get squat for battery life. They’re only good for LAN parties in someone’s house with a nearby AC outlet. In other words, they’re a desktop computer for someone without a desk.
Now, if you’re getting into issues like video editing, then laptop use is going to be more of a challenge. In that area it really pays to have additional hard discs and even full RAID setups.
alienware boxes have a good rep., but they’re expensive.
My criteria in buying any kit and especially laptops is:
how much does it cost!?
BTW saw a nice search engine site – for hard disk drives. It listed the bang per buck as in cost/disk capacity
It seemed helpful
Does anyone have a difinitive answer to this – if I get 2gb of ram, how often will I see the advantages of 2 HDs?
Does anyone have a difinitive answer to this – if I get 2gb of ram, how often will I see the advantages of 2 HDs?
What you have to consider is the fact Photoshop opens up a temporary file on the scratch disk each and every time – even when you open a small file. You are going to be working on pretty big files from your 17mp camera – especially if you edit in 16bit mode and start using multiple layers.
2gb of ram might seem a lot, but bear in mind Photoshop will only have little over half of this. You can’t go allocating much more than 55 – 60% of the ram to PS otherwise you’d not leave enough available for Bridge, and for your filters and plug-ins to work in. Also you don’t want to have the OS paging out to virtual memory too often either!
Definative answer? Hey that’s too much of a responsibility!
All I will say is this: A laptop will always be slower than a desktop computer. I would personally not use one as my main PS workstation. If you must, then get a second HD – and as much memory as you can fit/afford.
If your laptop is to be a second computer for use in the field, just go for more memory on the basis that extra HD will weigh as much as an extra lens.
Your call.
Chris.
Lets shift gears then. Lets say I have learned from this thread that I need to make a different plan. Lets assume that I will get a desktop that will be used only as a PS workstation – nothing else. I don’t plan on doing my major work now anyway. I will likely spend a year focussing on taking photos and improving my photoshop abilities. Then 12-18 months from now – I will buy a top photo-ready monitor and the afforementioned desktop that will work fast and efficiently.
Then if we go that route, now I want a laptop that I can use for just basic PS work (still powerful enough that it doesn’t slow me down a ton) and that I can start to really learn PS’s power. I currently run PS CS on my desktop which is a P4 2.2 with 1 GB of RAM. I think that this is fast enough for this "basic PS work."
Will a Pentium M 2.0 Ghz laptop with 1 GB of RAM run almost as well? What about 2 GB of RAM? I have heard so many people say "don’t get a centrino if you are going to run photoshop" – can anyone tell me if this is true or if I should expect the same ability as I get out of my 2 year old desktop as described.
Thanks again.
