More Mac Questions- SS drives, Epson Printer Compatibility etc...

[hassiman]

I am using a 2006 Intel MacPro with 9GB RAM... I soek on large scan files from my CoolScan 9000 and never have a problem with speed using CS5 and LR3. I would HIGHLY reccomend CalDigit's fine external RAID VM series external drives run in RAID 1 configuration. They interface with FW800/400/ USB 2 and eSATA and are VERY fast. The new VR Mini's will actally run in the fielf via BUS power through FW800. CalDigit pre-tests the boxes before shipping... been using them for years after ending up with a stack of dead WDs and LaCie drives at the university I work at [IT department] I have had numbers of CalDigit external drives running our data for years 24/7 with no problems whatsoever.

I do not work for CalDigit

[gnuyork]

I was running a macbook pro (the first intel model 2007ish?). Large files on that were a waiting game.

Now I also have a wide gamut monitor that I can color calibrate. To me that also make a big improvement, though I did OK with the laptop and a couple of trial and error prints.

[Mike Anderson]

...
I would strongly recommend a RAID-1 configuration for all your working files. This frees up the main drive for applications and stuff that can be readily replaced.
....

That's the approach I took (with a Guardian Maximus). Plug and play on a Mac. I only bother to back up the Guardian drive to another (cheap) external drive, then move that cheap external drive offsite. I, like Leigh, assume I'll be able to reconstruct a system drive containing OS and applications without a backup.

...Mike

[brucemcelya]

Eric,

I think an important point to take from Lloyd's Mac site is: Anything but a macpro is a dead-end mac. All macs are nice, but macpros can be expanded, and their potential time in service is longer than notebooks or i-macs. Per his suggestion, I purchased an '09 macpro 4-core for 1700, put in all the data drives plus backup, memory (getting cheaper every day), and CS5. My screen is an Eizo S1932, a modest graphics unit that is good enough for what I do. All that for a bit more than a new Imac, and you have a good six years of quality expandable graphics computing. Since my file sizes to date are smaller than others, I hope to get eight years out of the '09 macpro, while upgrading drives every few years. As a hedge against obsolescence, I'll get a couple extra video cards now, while cheap and available, to use as spares. Five years from now the card that's in there won't be around, or it will be very expensive. Just a guess. A couple of extra case fans seems a good idea too.

Hyper-tension has gone down measurably since escaping the dark side into the light of unix, but that's another subject. Quite simply, the macpro affords me more time for LF photography.

bruce
http://www.pbase.com/bmcelya/home

[paulr]

The best SSDs now are excellent, and have enough longevity that you just don't have to worry about them wearing out. Right now the top dogs are probably the OWC Mercury drives, but there's a brand new Sandforce controller chip coming out soon, which could things up.

They're still too expensive to use as a data disk. Photoshop CS5 can use all the RAM you throw at it, so in most cases you'll get more performance for your money by upping the RAM than by using a fast scratch disk.

You can get some productivity gains by using an SSD scratch partition in a different sense: the way video and audio people use scratch is to have a fast volum for their active files (as opposed to storage). This lets your regular saves happen faster. Ideally you'd save the file in an uncompressed format (like layered tif), since the compression algorithms in the open/save actions are single threaded and slow. You can save in a compressed format (like PSD) at the end.