News from The Steve's address at MacWorld

well, even if I have my pics on the internal drive it's still about the same. My scans are 102Mb each and my raw files around 30.

 

It's been a while since I looked at internal HD vs external 800 FW speed tests, but I do not think a huge difference exists, so you still might be disk limited.

One way you could tell would be to set up a RAM disk with 4 GB or so, and time the thumbnail generation of 100ish photos from it vs your hard drive. A significant improvement would be due to the faster storage access.

 

on mine i have a ext that does fire or USB 2... USB2 is supposed to be 480 kbps and firewire is at 400, but the firewire interface works faster. sooo...

 

Nope Columbus Ohio

 

Dave, My Gott you know how long this has been going on!! I paid more that 3500 for a Apple II with a language card, two floppies and printer (64k, yes more that 48k!!!!!) in 79. My 128k Mac with printer and modem was almost as much. So what is new power goes up prices go down or stay the same. The way of technology. My PowerBook is now 4 years old and way out of date, but I predicted that a new lap top would have the Intel processors, and was right, sort of. I did not know anything about the present iMac at the time. It also need a cooler processor.

 

Yep USB2 the poor man's FireWire.

 

Man, thought I went back a ways with Apple, got me beat. I only remember the second
mac , a Classic, running system 6 and 7. Presently have four Macs in house.

I keep getting my powerbook upgraded under Applecare, three new laptops so far. The original price was $2600 + a gig of ram back then was high dollar too. The new cost down to $1999. If the Applecare runs out I will spring for a new one. By then any bugs will be worked out of intel and maybe a new OS added.

This release is tempting.....

 

not sure if this is relevant or not but I believe my external FW800 drive is set up as RAID. I think it's 2 250 drives although it states it's a 500GB drive. I think I can live with the 3 sec delay when generating thumbnails out of thousands of pictures. When they are all generated everything else is pretty quick.

 

If I remember my RAID terminology correctly -- you may be set up as a striped RAID -- or not. But you certainly are not mirrored.

A mirrored RAID would give you backup, as well as 2X data transfer rates, at the cost of 1/2 of your total data storage. Since HD storage is sooo cheap, buying twice as much is not a big deal. I consider it a very smart way to go.

True geeks, or people depressed by watching their spiffy computers wait for a hard drive, would set a 4 HD RAID off two separate controllers. 100 MBytes/sec sustained transfer rates are about ballpark with cheap IDE drives with this sort of config.

Are you familiar with Barefeats.com ? They have easy-to-understand and use articles on upgrades that maximize performance -- sometimes at surprisingly little investment in time and money.

 

With that many images to manage, I'd have three or four externals to use if needed. I don't use firewire, preferring USB 2.0 regardless of any claims that firewire is faster. I'd also look in to tweaking the display settings to see if that would help. It's also possible that some other program is eating in to available resources.

 

hehehe...ancient Mac stories... when i read them cant help but remember conversations with my Dad. they always started out with

when i was your age, i walked 8 miles in 3 feet of snow to...

my first Mac was also a Apple IIe. got upgrade memory to 128k and dual disk drive. actually got about 35 of them. purchased them for $5 at the Olympia City School District auction back about 1988 i think. taped to the inside cover was an old price list. i do remember that that memory upgrade was an additional $700. but the dual 5¼" floppy drive was about $2200!@@!

 

I got a "backpack 20 Meg hard drive" for my Fat Mac. You removed screws from the back and screwed it on and plugged it into the SUCCI port. That was huge 20 Meg. You could do anything with 20 Meg!!