You might want to consider upgrading your drives, or at least those on which the swapfile and scratch are located, to 10,000 RPM SATA or SCSI drives if you haven’t already. The WD Raptor SE16 SATA drives are not that expensive, and boy are they fast!
In any event, why go from a 4400+ to the FX-60 and not the FX-62? (I know, a few hundred reasons….)
Also, consider whether there is RAM compatible with your MB and processor that is higher speed than what you have.
Hi Michael,
I’ve got two of the 150Gig Raptors now. Here’s the layout:
C – 80 Gig WD drive (no Raptor).
D – 150Gig Raptor (Adobe, other applications).
K – 150Gig Raptor (Currunt photo’s being worked on)
L – 500Gig WD drive (This years photo’s and other stuff). M – 80G WD drive (updates software, camera’s etc…)
two USB drives 500Gig and 600G for backups.
Windows swap is set up as 2048 min 4096 max on each drive (ie… C uses C, D uses D etc…).
Adobe Scratch is set up to use D, K, L, M
The memory is compatiable with the MB the sytem was put together by iBuyPower. The MB is an A8N-E 929 Socket so the FX-62 isn’t an option with this motherboard.
I’m hoping that once Vista is the norm Adobe will rework their memory model to use more memory maybe in CS3?
Thanks,
Joe
Since you have two Raptors, why not set one of them to be used for the Windows pagefile and the other to be used for the primary PS scratch file? For example, K for the pagefile and D for the scratch? If you have sufficient clear space on them, you shouldn’t need to use multiple drives for either pagefile or scratch. That would ensure that the two types of disk usage most likely to slow you down in PS are using your two fastest drives, without any competition between them.
Hi Michael,
My initial thoughts on the Windows pagefile and CS2 scratch was this:
I have 4gig of memory, with 1Gig set aside for the OS via the /3Gig switch, and up to 3 gig then for applications. I didn’t think that
the OS would be paging much and if it did, the C drive would be okay (of course a different drive would be better, perhaps one of the Raptors being the faster drives). However, I thought that my performance would be better served not having either of the Raptors being used for anything other than PS. Ie… I will have Bridge and PS Open. Bridge will be processing say 500 images, building thumbnails etc… The images live on one of the Raptors. PS is running off the other Raptor and will have say 70 images open for cropping, shapening, saving as JPGs saving the JPG’s to a temporary folder on the second Raptor (not the Raptor that Bridge is reading from).
To be honest, the system screams. Most folks I don’t beleive process this many files at a time. I think I’ve done most of what I can to squeeze all I can out of the system with the exeption of a faster processor. Even a 15-20% gain would save me 45 minutes to an hour in total time processing around 3000 images.
My biggest bang will be when PS can use more than 4gig of memory on the OS (Vista) maybe with CS3???
Thanks,
Joe
There’s no need to have the pagefile on multiple drives; I’d pick one and stay with it. If you have recent WD drives with large caches, the C drive alone would be better than multiple drives, but one of the Raptors (ideally not the one with the scratch file) would be better. Also, the Adobe engineers here have recommended setting initial = max = 1.5-2x your RAM, so that would be 6GB initial and max (with 4GB of RAM, no need to go to 2x, I suspect). You might try comparing your current virtual memory setup versus this, which won’t involve more than a quick parameter change and reboot. I’ll bet you get a significant increase.
There is no real need to have the Adobe application on a Raptor, since it’s unlikely that it will be read from disk repeatedly during use — it will be cached in the pagefile if parts of it need to be swapped out. But I don’t think I’d bother uninstalling and reinstalling if you have substantial free space on the D drive for use as scratch.
I just recently transitioned from a Pentium 3 733MHz 768MB system to an Athlon 64 dual core 4600+ with 4MB RAM (haven’t tried /3GB yet), a SATA Raptor C drive, and 2 big WD Caviar drives. What a difference!
Photoshop can use 2.7GB of memory on 64 it XP. But you have to have around 6GB for that to be feasable.
