Page 1 of 3 123 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 26

Thread: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

  1. #1
    bob carnie's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario,
    Posts
    4,939

    Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    I bought a Drobo unit a year or so ago, and started bringing alias folders to my desktop from work stored on the Drobo .

    I have noticed that a year later the Drobo is filling up with data and this seems to translate to slower timelines such as saving files, some adjustments, and moving files around.

    I have considered that the Mac Pro I am using is getting slower with age, or am I opening up myself to slower times by working on files directly from the Drobo than now is getting full.
    Would loading daily working files to a smaller clean hardrive and working from that speed things Up?

    or do you think that it may be time for a new Mac. I try to keep my desktop very clean and my Macs main drive does not have any files stored on it.

    Any help would be appreciated... I should know this stuff but frankly I am in new territory with the number of images I have on my server.

  2. #2
    Jac@stafford.net's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
    Location
    Winona, Minnesota
    Posts
    5,413

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    Quote Originally Posted by bob carnie View Post
    I have noticed that a year later the Drobo is filling up with data and this seems to translate to slower timelines such as saving files, some adjustments, and moving files around.

    I have considered that the Mac Pro I am using is getting slower with age, or am I opening up myself to slower times by working on files directly from the Drobo than now is getting full.
    Would loading daily working files to a smaller clean hardrive and working from that speed things Up?

    or do you think that it may be time for a new Mac. I try to keep my desktop very clean and my Macs main drive does not have any files stored on it.
    I have never known of a Mac that gets slow because of age. Poor performance usually comes from disc issues, or running out of RAM. If you haven't changed to having more programs open, then RAM is probably not your issue.

    How full is the Drobo? How are Photoshop's scratch discs set up? Is one or more on the Drobo? Can you move your aliases to a folder below the desktop?

    Have you purged your Mac's logs and caches?

  3. #3
    2 Bit Hack
    Join Date
    Feb 2014
    Posts
    940

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    As a general rule I have a work drive. This is normally where the operating system is located as well. The temp space/page file are also located on that disk. The idea is to not transfer large amounts of data between drives and workspaces while in edit. As Jac said a system slowing down normally is due to dwindling resources. In the case of Windows it is also a matter of stability caused by added drivers and background software. Any drive reaching capacity will slow the OS. I find that when the OS drive reaches about 20 gb it starts to slow down.

    I recently bought a half terabyte solid state drive as the primary OS and workspace drive. It seems to have cleared up many issues, one of which was drive noise being picked up by an open mic. Read and write times are quicker and it is quieter. Now, the reinstallation of a clean OS is probably responsible for much of that.

    I have separate drives for storage of photos and music. But I do not work off these drives. When a project is finished it get transferred to its respective spot..........off the main OS drive. If it is really finished, it is burned to something else and stored.
    Regards

    Marty

  4. #4

    Join Date
    Sep 2003
    Location
    Hudson Valley, NY
    Posts
    1,692

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    Your best performance will come from using an internal or eSATA drive. You can use that while working on your image until editing is complete, then move it to the Drobo.

    Modern SATA drives transfer data at a theoretic speed of 6 Gbps.

    A Drobo connected via ethernet would be limited by ethernet @ 1 GBPS, but more likely the processor of the Drobo. Also, if the Drobo is more than 80% full, you will see degradation in write times.

  5. #5

    Join Date
    Sep 2003
    Location
    Hudson Valley, NY
    Posts
    1,692

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    Quote Originally Posted by Jmarmck View Post
    As a general rule I have a work drive. This is normally where the operating system is located as well. The temp space/page file are also located on that disk. The idea is to not transfer large amounts of data between drives and workspaces while in edit. As Jac said a system slowing down normally is due to dwindling resources. In the case of Windows it is also a matter of stability caused by added drivers and background software. Any drive reaching capacity will slow the OS. I find that when the OS drive reaches about 20 gb it starts to slow down.

    I recently bought a half terabyte solid state drive as the primary OS and workspace drive. It seems to have cleared up many issues, one of which was drive noise being picked up by an open mic. Read and write times are quicker and it is quieter. Now, the reinstallation of a clean OS is probably responsible for much of that.

    I have separate drives for storage of photos and music. But I do not work off these drives. When a project is finished it get transferred to its respective spot..........off the main OS drive. If it is really finished, it is burned to something else and stored.

    I prefer keeping my Photoshop scratch drive on a separate drive than the OS. The OS has it's own swap file and you don't want Photoshop and the OS competing for resources while doing swaps. It may not matter much with an SSD. But with traditional drives I always add an extra internal 80GB hard drive that is dedicated to the Photoshop scratch file. Of course none of this matters if you have enough RAM where Photoshop does not need to swap. Another thing that happens is sometimes you get an orphan Photoshop swap file that eats up a ton of hard drive space (and thereby slowing everything down if the drive is filling up). These are easy to find and delete if the swap file in on a dedicated drive.

    The slowness of saving files would be due to the Drobo, as well as moving files around if that means moving files between the Drobo and other drives.
    The slowness of adjustments is more likely a matter of filling up the RAM and Photoshop having to swap. Pointing the Photoshop scratch file to a drive other than the OS drive (but not the Drobo) might very well help that.

  6. #6
    bob carnie's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario,
    Posts
    4,939

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    I should add , I am not seeing slowness with adjustments in PS. I am seeing most of the slowness in moving files around.


    I have been moving huge amounts of files around on my Drobo to organize my life lately . The Drobo is a 14 tb mirrored drive , and yes I have a lot on it right now .

    I have 2300 large size files of current personal work average 200mb. this took awhile to scan , actually a few years and I am trying to organize it for film making and printing.
    It took me quite a bit of time over the weekend to move things around.

  7. #7

    Join Date
    Sep 2003
    Location
    Hudson Valley, NY
    Posts
    1,692

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    If your Drobo is more than 80% full, it will slow down - it will have to fragment files it saves into available sectors scattered all over the RAID array. When you exceed 90% it will begin to slow down even more and even more quickly.

  8. #8
    bob carnie's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario,
    Posts
    4,939

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    I am beginning to think this is the cause.

    Now a new server is in order... any thing bigger than the Drobo I am using you can suggest Greg? I actually am getting panicked about this as what the hell would I do if the current Drobo goes kaput?

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg Miller View Post
    If your Drobo is more than 80% full, it will slow down - it will have to fragment files it save it in available sectors scattered all over the RAID array. When you exceed 90% it will begin to slow down even more and even more quickly.

  9. #9

    Join Date
    Sep 2003
    Location
    Hudson Valley, NY
    Posts
    1,692

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    Quote Originally Posted by bob carnie View Post
    I am beginning to think this is the cause.

    Now a new server is in order... any thing bigger than the Drobo I am using you can suggest Greg? I actually am getting panicked about this as what the hell would I do if the current Drobo goes kaput?
    I'm a big fan of Synology NAS products. You can get a 24 Bay NAS: https://www.synology.com/en-us/produ...erview/DS2413+ (they also have them with fewer bays).
    That would last you for a while.

    I like to create several 2 or 3 TB partitions within the RAID array. Synology has a built in backup process so you can attach 2TB or 3TB USB drives and backup data to them automatically and take some off-site.

  10. #10
    bob carnie's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario,
    Posts
    4,939

    Re: Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

    Ok I will look into this and I may have a few more questions for you... thanks a bunch

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg Miller View Post
    I'm a big fan of Synology NAS products. You can get a 24 Bay NAS: https://www.synology.com/en-us/produ...erview/DS2413+ (they also have them with fewer bays).
    That would last you for a while.

    I like to create several 2 or 3 TB partitions within the RAID array. Synology has a built in backup process so you can attach 2TB or 3TB USB drives and backup data to them automatically and take some off-site.

Similar Threads

  1. Clyde Butcher's Photo Shop DVD
    By John Brady in forum Digital Processing
    Replies: 16
    Last Post: 20-Jan-2011, 14:21
  2. Latest version of photo shop
    By ignatiusjk in forum Digital Hardware
    Replies: 6
    Last Post: 26-Nov-2009, 08:06
  3. Photo shop question
    By ignatiusjk in forum Digital Hardware
    Replies: 21
    Last Post: 20-Jun-2008, 17:56
  4. Drobo data storage
    By darr in forum Digital Hardware
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 22-Feb-2008, 10:00

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •