CS3 on New Intel Mac Mini & Leopard?

[neil poulsen]

Is anyone running CS3 Photoshop on an Intel based Mac Mini with Leopard installed? My daughter is considering this system, and we'd like to get some input on how well it handles CS3 PS. It sells for such a reasonable price, it's worth considering.

How well does it run, and what file sizes are you processing? Also, how much RAM do you have installed, or do you think is needed?

Any other input would be appreciated.

[SamReeves]

With the mini, I would max it out to 2GB. That way if the next version of Photoshop needs more resources you won't be up the creek without a paddle.

[Peter Mounier]

The Mac Mini comes with 1Gb of ram, and PS CS3 requires 512 Mb to operate. So that only leaves you with 512Mb for the OS to operate, and very little ram for Photoshop to cache files and History. It would be advisable to run PS only, and not also have other apps open at the same time. You can do pretty well with 2Gb ram if the files you're working on aren't in the 100's of Mb in size. Is your daughter going to be working on files from scanned LF images? If so, I would suggest having at least 4Gb ram, which means that the mini is insufficient.

Peter

[Paul H]

You can get 3GB in the Mini - either 1 x 2GB and 1 x 1GB, or you can put a pair of 2GB DIMMS in (although the system only sees 3GB).

Max the RAM out, then you should be fine.

[Ken Lee]

Remember that you can also purchase a 4 GB USB thumb drive (for not too much money these days) and designate it as the primary scratch disk. It's very helpful to have a dedicated scratch disk, separate from the disk on which the program resides (the hard drive). This allows many operations to be done in parallel.

Placing your actual photos (the files) on another USB drive (like a portable hard drive) will also speed things up, since the I/O can happen in parallel with the other operations.

It is best if you leave the thumb drive empty. Format it for the Mac OS, but don't place any files on it.

My 3-year-old Powerbook does pretty nicely with 2 GB of RAM, and the separate scratch disk.

[neil poulsen]

Remember that you can also purchase a 4 GB USB thumb drive (for not too much money these days) and designate it as the primary scratch disk. It's very helpful to have a dedicated scratch disk, separate from the disk on which the program resides (the hard drive). This allows many operations to be done in parallel. . . .

What a great idea. I'd never heard of that. I'll bet it would be faster than most HD's.

[Doug Dolde]

I remember seeing a study that USB flash drives aren't that fast. In fact they are pretty slow to consider as a scratch disk. Can't remember the source though.

[Henry Ambrose]

A firewire hard drive will be much faster than a usb flash drive.

But before you buy extra parts for a Mini, think about a 20" iMac instead.
The iMac has a much bigger and faster HD, firewire 800, 400 and USB2, separate graphics card (not shared with main memory like the mini) 4GB max RAM and they throw in a big screen. Of course its $500 more but its a lot more capable machine.

The faster and 3 times bigger hard drive and real graphics card are overwhelming improvements over the Mini for PS work.

[neil poulsen]

So much for that theory!

[Enrico Faini]

I don't know about the mac mini, but I'm running CS3 on a macbook air (1.6GHz core2duo w/ 2GB ram) and it can easily handle an 8bit 2400dpi scan of 5x7 transparency (about 600MB)
it's not blazingly fast, but it is ok as long as I don't have a ton of other apps open at the same time

I must however point out that I don't do any heavy photoshop work, but just some very basic adjustments to get the image ready for printing.

if you max out the ram, and are not too concerned if when you apply a filter it takes a few seconds longer to do it, than I believe a macmini should be more than adquate for most work

[clay harmon]

I use a Mac Mini running CS2 as my 'print server'. It has a HP color laserjet and my Epson 7800 hooked up to it. I copy files to the Mac Mini using my network and open them in CS2. I then print to the 7800. I would not advise using it as a primary full-on photoshop editing machine, but it performs just fine in this role as a print server. This also allowed me to keep OS X 10.4 on this machine and upgrade my main computer to 10.5 without having to worry about driver compatibility and so forth.

[Ken Lee]

We are considering a Mac Mini, so while a flash drive may not be the fastest solution, it has a nice ratio of price to performance/availability/portability - like the Mini itself.

[j.e.simmons]

We've switched to Mac minis at work - 2gig memory - and I am not impressed with less intensive programs than photoshop. Everyone says that a lot of programs are still having to emulate PPCs and don't yet take advantage of Intel or Leopard. I just find that the machine hesitates in use and is very annoying.

I use a thumb drive for storing documents and find it fairly slow. I wouldn't think it would work very well for a scratch disc, although perhaps it would be better than having to do everything on one drive. Perhaps having an external firewire drive would work better.

I would fear the mini would not be up to the job
juan

[wclavey]

I wanted to try the "external flash as scratch disk" idea and happen to have a 2 GB flash drive laying here, so I took it to the Mac Mini we use for scanning & Photoshop and plugged it into the USB port. It recognized the drive as a source to read & write files in Photoshop, but when I went into the preferences, the only choices I had for the scratch disk location are the internal disk in the Mac and the LaCie external disk... the flash drive is not a visible choice. Is there something else I need to do?

[Ken Lee]

Is the flash drive formatted for Mac-only ? I believe it needs to be.

After you insert the Thumb Drive, you need to shut down Photoshop and re-start it, so that it will discover the drive.

[Ken Lee]

This site contains a helpful list of recommendations: to buy now or wait, based on Apple's product cycles.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_mini

The site suggests that now is not a good time to buy a Mac Mini, because updates are expected soon.

[wclavey]

Is the flash drive formatted for Mac-only ? I believe it needs to be.

After you insert the Thumb Drive, you need to shut down Photoshop and re-start it, so that it will discover the drive.

Yes, you are absolutely right. I formatted the flash drive for MAC OS Extended file system (instead of FAT32) and Photoshop recognized it right away. Then I went on to do a test.

In the normal configuration, I have the primary scratch disk in Photoshop set to be the 180 GB LaCie external firewire disk. The internal Mac disk is set to be the secondary scratch. Loading a 205.5 MB .tif scan takes about 9 seconds to actually read the .tif file, and the about 16 seconds of watching the little clock spin before the picture of the scan is displayed.

In the test configuration, I made the primary scan the USB 2.0 2 GB flash disk the primary scratch and the LaCie firewire external disk the secondary scratch. The same 205.5 MB scan file reads in the same 9 seconds and then 41 seconds of watching the little clock spin. The traffic indicator on the flash drive goes nuts during this 41 seconds.

While this is not scientific, it is probably a good indicator of the speed (or lack thereof) in these flash drives. I don't know if it is the speed of the memory chip or the speed of the USB 2.0 protocol, but something is slower.

On the other hand, I made this change recently to my configuration which has generally given me a little better throughput. I had the 4990 and the LaCie disk daisy-chained through the same firewire connection. I changed it so that only the LaCie disk is on the firewire and the 4990 now uses the USB 2.0 port. I found that before I made the change, the scanner often would pause while scanning and you could hear a lot of disk-writing activity... the destination for my raw scans is the LaCie disk. After making the switch of the scanner to the USB 2.0 port, the scanner pauses much less often and the total end-to-end time of the scan and image storing is less than it was before. My speculations is that even though the firewire protocol is faster, the high volume of traffic between the scanner and the CPU and the disk and the CPU over the same connection must have been slower in total than using the slower speed protocol for the scanner.

[Ken Lee]

Loading a file from the hard drive, may not give any insights into the performance of a scratch disk. I'm not surprised that the time required to load the file is unaffected by scratch file configuration.

I may be wrong, but scratch disk memory is generally consumed as you add layers, perform adjustments, and navigate back and forth through "history".

You can monitor the size of the scratch file. As you continue to perform adjustments, you will see the remaining memory decline on the scratch disk. If you close the file - or if you perform a purge - you can watch the available memory return.

To monitor the effect of scratch disk performance, it would probably be best to record a series of actions, and compare the elapsed time of different configurations.

[wclavey]

Actually, the time to load the file (not to read the file from the disk [9 seconds] but construct the in-memory array of information that is the picture) took more than twice as long with the flash memory scratch disk... that's what leads me to say that performance will be slower...

Since the only change I made was to switch the scratch disk from the LaCie disk (where the load took 16 seconds) to the flash drive (where the load took 41 seconds), the construction of the image in memory must use the scratch disk and the flash drive must be slower. Otherwise the times would have been the same in both cases.

[Ken Lee]

You're certainly right. Firewire is faster than USB 2.0, and older Macs (like mine) don't even support USB 2.0.

My experience is that using a thumb drive as a separate scratch disk, while not the fastest solution, is faster than using no separate scratch disk at all.

[wclavey]

I agree...

BTW, I looked at your website... I *really* like your landscapes... every time I thik I'm getting close, I see something like yours and realize that I have miles and miles to go.

[Ken Lee]

Thank you for your kind words !