[X-Unix] Memory G5 -?

[Thomas Juntunen]

On 12/23/2004 07:50, "CP" <vze2rwkt at verizon.net> wrote:

> PhotoShop CS

Depending on the actual size of the PS files you edit, Photoshop's
bottleneck is usually disk transfer speed.

> Final Cut Pro HD

I haven't used Final Cut, but disk may play a large role during render time.


> 160 GB main drive
> 250 GB 2nd drive
> External case with;
> 160 GB drive
> 120 GB drive
> 80 GB drive
> and a second external 160 GB drive in it's own case.

What sort of drives are these? For a serious image/video station, I'd want a
nice local RAID array. IIRC, Apple uses an OEM version of SoftRAID with
their Xserve/XSAN products.

When I worked for a printing company in the prepress area, back in the OS 9
glory days, every Mac workstation had 100GB of SCSI-3 RAID available. We
bought controllers from Adaptec as I recall, hooked multiple high-RPM SCSI
drives to them and used SoftRAID's commercial product to make level-5
arrays. Each Mac only had 512MB of RAM, but the disk speed made working with
100 to 200MB images a breeze.

Have you assigned Photoshop's scratch partition to an otherwise unused (and
fast) volume? The more PS has to hit the disk, the more a fast, dedicated
scratch volume can help.

(BTW, given that you have .93TB of storage, what is your back-up scheme?)

HTH,
Thomas Juntunen
Network Administrator
CRC Marketing Solutions