I went from a PIII 500MHz to a 1.2GHz Athlon recently and file load times
(16-bit 44MB scans, uncompressed PS file format) went from around 7s to 3s.
A set of nasty PS operations on the same file (RGB->CMYK->LAB->RGB,
Dust'n'Scratches, Auto Levels) went from 105s down to 46s. This test ran
entirely in RAM (I had 640MB of RAM for the PIII, but only 512MB for the
Athlon).
Very worthwhile. I hate to think how many moons would pass waiting for a
PIII-500 to process ICE and GEM...
7200 drives kill 5400 drives as soon as lots of random disk access occurs
(i.e. not reading or writing a single file). This is valuable if you are
trying to scan (using say Nikon Scan or Vuescan) while also editing in PS.
And browsing the web. And writing emails. And playing Quake, if you're
really dextrous.
A friend just bought some cute little Promise IDE ATA 100 controller for his
PC. Win 2K sees it as a SCSI device. Despite the fact he has a PII-450
(groan, PS really doesn't like that generation of Pentium) files on his
system load very quickly now, around 4s for that file I mentioned above (it
was 6-7s). OK, some of it is W2K, but it seems to me that a separate
controller will make your life just that little bit sweeter.
Jawed
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk]On Behalf Of Dana Trout
> Sent: 28 July 2001 20:49
> To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> Subject: Re: filmscanners: Scanning and memory limits in Windows
>
>
> I find that little of the time spent is due to the disk drive, which is
> the reason for my comment that a 7200 rpm drive, even though it is 33%
> faster than a 5400 rpm drive, will not necessarily reduce load times by
> a like percentage.
>
> As for my times being slow, you're right: I was quoting the performace
> of my "junker" computer which is used only for scanning -- it's a 466
> Celeron with 512MB RAM but Intel's woefully undersized L2 cache.
> However, the times you quote make me wonder if you are loading
> LZW-compressed TIFFs. If so, it is *definitely* time for me to upgrade
> the scanner computer!
>
> Thanks for your comments,
> --Dana
> ----------
> From: geoff murray <geoffmurray@primus.com.au>
> To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> Subject: Re: filmscanners: Scanning and memory limits in Windows
> Date: Saturday, July 28, 2001 6:15 AM
>
> Hi Dana,
> Gee your times seem very slow. I tried loading a 56mb file
> from
> my scratch disk and it took 3.6 seconds. A 169mb file took 17 seconds.
> This
> on a Win 98SE machine with a 1Ghz Athlon and 512mb of PC133 ram and two
> 7200rpm hard drives. Scratch partition is not on the hard drive which
> has
> PS6. 7200 rpm drives made a significant difference to overall speed.
>
> Geoff Murray
> www.geoffmurray.com
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dana Trout" <dana@troutcom.com>
> To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
> Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2001 7:40 AM
> Subject: RE: filmscanners: Scanning and memory limits in Windows
>
>
> > A 25% faster drive won't necessarily get you 25% faster load/store
> > times. PhotoShop seems to be inordinately slow in dealing with
> > compressed TIFFs -- I got curious so I set up a cache large enough to
> > hold the whole file (53MB). The first time I loaded it into PhotoShop
> > it took 61 seconds (reading from the disk). I then closed the file
> and
> > reloaded it into PhotoShop (this time from the cache -- the disk
> light
> > never even blinked) and it took 55 seconds. And I'm reasonably sure
> > that a RAM cache is *much* faster than a 7200 rpm drive!
> >
> > BTW, Ed's VueScan takes less than 30 seconds to read the same file.
> > --Dana
> > ----------
> > From: Rob Geraghty <harper@wordweb.com>
> > To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> > Subject: filmscanners: RE: filmscanners: Scanning and memory limits
> in
> > Windows
> > Date: Friday, July 27, 2001 12:22 AM
> >
> > < snip >
> >
> > On the other hand I'm reasonably sure the main
> > bottleneck in my PC when dealing with large scans is the 5400RPM IDE
> > drive.
> > A 7200RPM drive would speed up loading and saving files by at least
> > 25%.
> > Two 7200rpm drives in a RAID array should be significantly better
> > still.
> > Loading and saving files is the no.1 timewaster for me when working
> > with
> > film scans on my PC.
> >
> > Rob
> >
> >
> > Rob Geraghty harper@wordweb.com
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
