if i edit my mf files in he laptop on location i am always a bit suffering from processing power on location, so i tried to "tune up" my macbookpro 2x2,2ghz and not to upgrade to the new mbp cause the increment of the newer mbp doesnt seems to be worth the upgrade, more so because i hate these reflecting screens.

i upgraded now my internal ram from 4gb to 6gb, which is the ( inofficial ) maximum, i built in a fast 7200/ 500gb drive and - by far most important - i bought a 50Gb SSD flash card memory to put all editing programs and temporary files ( photoshop, lightroom, bridge ) on this. reading speed of the ssd drive is app.10 higher than harddisc, writing speed app. 3 times faster.
the result is incredible. i havent measured it, but subjective photoshop works at least twice as fast than with the normal 4gb internal ram and 5000/320gb hd, the programs ( which are on the flash drive ) open in few seconds ( incl lightroom with large image banks ) and no more problem to let run and work several of this programs together.
these are highly highly recomendated tuning steps, the result is surprising.

How do you use the 50gb SSD drive? through usb to use it as a start up??

Yes Rainer please expalin more as I am corios about this as well.
I have the 17 " MacBook Pro, not the newer versions but the all silver one.
Thanks for any further information

Snook

its a 48gb NAND flash Drive Expresscard which goes in the never used card slot. i moved to it my programs as photoshop, bridge,
lightroom, exposure as well as the image files from lightroom, the scratchdisc for photoshop and the cache for bridge.

further, but less important , i installed a 4gb PC-5300 Memory Module together with a 2gb module ( results in 6 gb ram )
and a fast 500gb Segate 7200rpm 2.5" hd.

the memory and the hd built in here in chicago ( very fast service ) a nice guy called gino, he gave me also the advice to try ssd drives and sold me the card.
http://www.machero.com/


now its the fastest laptop i ever touched or saw .... by far. it even dont slow down noticeable if lightroom converts, photomatix renders hi dynamic files and i work in ps at the same time on multi- layer files. also the programs start now very very quick, even if i start all three adobes together they come up very fast for the hot reading speed of the ssd.

the express cards costs $ 199,-- and i will add ssd cards or drives to all my systems.

holy smokes!! I might call that guy for advice on my towers too...

Other solution would be to use a small external SSD drive. If you want even more speed with raid 0. However you need to use it just with an eSata connection. (USB or FW800 would be to slow) In addition one can use the same drive to transfare data from one's notebook to one's workstation with great speed.

.

I had no idea ExpressCard SSDs were so cheap now. I might have to look into getting one for my MacBook Pro as it's mostly hard drive performance that slows things down for me. (opening applications, paging to disk)

I'd probably want to use it as my boot drive with all my applications on it and just use the internal one for storage, possibly upgrading it to a faster drive as well.

With this approach, would the same "scratch disk" mentality apply here too, in that, if your machine is processing and the data is in scratch, and your machine crashes, then you lose that work, since it's not saved?

What are the downsides of this approach?

Voiding warranty issues?

Thanks.

It is no different to assigning a regular hard disk as the Photoshop scratch disk, just a lot faster. No warranty issues.

My Mac book pro (17" mat) can take 8Mb - and I originally ordered it with 8 so I am expecting to be able to upgrade.

The ssd is faster than the hard disk, but, if you have plenty of memory, don't programs stay in memory once loaded?

What interface standard (not which hole) does the ssd use?

Could I use an eSata drive on my mac (via the "never used" slot)?

What are the actual data transfer rates?

Yes, you can use a eSata drive through that slot. eSata can reach up to 200 MB/s, which depends on the drives you use. One normal harddrive will only give you something between 50-100 a raid 0 more towards 80-150 and SSD drives can use the full power of eSata connections.

This looks like the card to get at the moment:

PhotoFast G-Monster Express Card 54 - 180MB/s read, 100MB/s write

There's an Express Card 34 version too - 120MB/s read, 60 MB/s write

I wrote this back in May and since than Apple came out with a new laptop but only the 17 inch will take a Express card. If you want a 15 inch look for a 2.93 like mine that has the Express slot.

But this is how to Hot Rod a MBP

http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7632

anyone care to share a tuned up Tower config?

Early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 x 3.2, 24G RAM. I have 6 SATA2 drives in my Mac Pro using this device: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/in...Product_ID=158.

I have my OS residing on a striped pair of WD 640G Caviar Black drives. These drives are very fast for 7200 RPM drives and RAID very well, but they do have a slight amount of head seek noise, soft but audible in my Mac Pro -- and they give me a huge, fast desktop. I then have 4 of the WD 640G Caviar Blue drives in RAID-0 mounted in the main bays. These are perhaps a tad slower on random I/O operation than the Blacks, but are virtually silent -- and in a 4-drive RAID-0 they are VERY fast. On that array, I have a thin outer 120G partition (4x30G) for a dedicated uber-fast CS scratch and a large 4x450G (1.8G) partition for working image storage. I then left a small 115G partition at the very end of each drive non-RAID, and use these to store back-up and bootable copies of my OS and other miscellany.

This machine churns quickly even when handling multiple heavy lifting chores concurrently.

Hi,

I have a 17" MacBookPro, 2.33 GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo, 3 GB memory (more is not possible in this machine). I wanted a performance boost too. So I went the route with removing the optical drive and insterting 2 new hard drives, Hitachi 5.400rpm/500GB (http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=OBSXGB-M17). Performance really went up. I have the system on one and the data on the other hard drive and don't fill them more than 50 %. Before I had a 200 GB hard drive and always tried to keep 40 GB of free space there. The system behaved like it were nuts. CS4, Safari and everything crashed the whole time, performance was very poor. Now everything is fine, smooth and fast. Feels like a new computer.

Only downside is that the sleep mode is no longer available. The hard drive in the optical bay is not going to sleep mode and if you try to go to sleep mode the system crashes and don't wake up again. I reinstalled the system twice and could not resolve that issue.

Best,
Johannes

I buy all my Macs from Smalldog.com in Vermont. On their "price list" they show the new 17 MBP with custom config with SSD drives installed. Yes, they're fast, but they're very expensive too. If it was me, though, I'd rather have have everything installed internally, instead something hanging out the side of it, in that Express slot. Seems like asking for something to break or get damaged.

http://www.smalldog.com/SmallDogPriceList.txt

Scroll down to 17 MBP area... Small capacity drives: 128 and 256.

a ecard ssd was one of the things they were talking about years and years ago as the advantage of ecards.
when I read this originally, I thought you were using the SSD to mean a USB thumb drive. those things on my get 17MB/s or something terrible like that when I test my fastests.

Anything you buy configured already will most likely and especially from Apple will not be Intel SSD drives. There are big performance difference between the SSD drives and I would certainly check on what is on board . This stuff is really best to either do it yourself or if it is a custom config. that you know exactly what they are putting in the box. All SSD drives are not created equally. With my two Intels inside the MBP I use the e-sata for a external hard drive that has just current data that is available to me so they are not on the main drives. Than I have the backup using Firewire 800 to a Drobo for storage. The issue is using the 2 SSD drives I really don't use a external scratch because the SSD drives in Raid 0 are actually faster than any scratch drive I could come up with externally. So for me it does not make sense for external drives running Raid 0 since the e-sata is limited to 200mg transfer speeds. Instead I try to keep about 90gb free on the two internal SSD drives so they have room to work. Before investing in SSD drives and such, may want to check there performance and such before buying them . Frankly some really suck bad and not worth installing. This is not a cheap route to take but if you need a rocket for a laptop than this setup works great. The limitation on laptops with any of them is the two cores and not much will get around that. Running C1 which is a core hungry program is the only bottleneck I run into as it is slower than my old MacPro but I am also processing 31mpx files as well. Other than that CS4 runs without any hiccup no matter what I am doing with layers , panos and such. Since it is a more Ram hungry program the 8 gbs of Ram is the key here. Other than that the rest of the system no matter what program flies. But until laptops come in 4 core versions that will be the biggest bottleneck. The one hope is Snow Leopard which is supposed to increase speed as it takes advantage of the graphics card as well. Also said to be less bloated operating system. We will see what that brings in September

jack -do you store your "live" jobs on your desktop then?? did you use the MaxConnect cable to do your raid? was any other raid card needed?

I finally found an email from january:



doesn't help lappies.
What about ibm turbo memory in your lappies?

i always search for simple solutions... so was ment my sharing here.
and its simple and cheap to invest 170 -199$ in an older mbp, stick the card in the express slot, format it and double the speed of that machine at least with photoshop but also lightroom.

no,- gwith, the card doesnt stick out. just 1 millimeter and thats that it can be pressed in a bit it to eject it.

btw. : i use a filemate solidgo expresscard with 48gb, price between 170-200$, 115MB/s reading speed, 65Mb/s writing.
part of the increased speed seems to be that SSD is with many small files ( as the scratch file or camera raw file is ) much faster than the pure numbers tell, cause there is no head to be moved.

of course you can tune the box faster investing several thousand bucks and much energy, but mine works with my over 2 year old laptop and it does it very good. thats the point of what i wrote ...

can you snap a photo of it with your cell phone and post it? I know the card doesn't stick out, but where does the drive live? Outside the card, or inside the card? Is the SSD like a CF flash card? Hard to picture the setup in my mind.

Try this link: http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn261/s...pg?t=1247490978

it sticks out less on a mac than on foto-z`s photo.
yes the drive is inside the card.
why they have built in an usb port in the card ? dont know.


Click to view attachment

Incredible. All that, tucked into that tiny space. Thank you.

I just took delivery of my new Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstation on Friday.

Dell Precision M6400

I chose this unit for a few reasons:

• Quad core processor - Mine has a QX9300 Quad 2.53Ghz
• 16GB RAM support - the laptop has 4 DDR slots instead of two, allowing you to either spec it out with 4x4GB for max capactiy or use 4x2GB for an inexpensive 8GB (~$100). Mine has 8GB
• 100% AdobeRGB Gamut display - It uses an RGB LED backlight LCD panel at 1920x1200. Plenty of screen real estate and the color gamut is almost too much. After turning down the brightness to about 30% to get 100 cd/m2 and profiling with an EyeOne XT, the color is pretty much dead-on. Extreme colors like 255 0 0 red are really, really intense (for better or for worse). It is available in both glossy and anti-glare finishes. I chose the anti-glare, which is working out very well so far.
• Graphics card - comes with Nvidia Quadro FX3700M dedicated graphics card with 1GB GDDR3 and 128 ALU cores. This card sucks battery power like it is goind out of style, but full-screen HD content has never been smoother. This allows me to take advantage of CS4 CUDA optimizations, and do full HD video editing in real time.
• Dual HD support with hardware RAID (and optical drive, too) - The BIOS supports RAID 1 or 0 on the hardware level. My machine came with a moderate speed 128GB SSD, but I'm awaiting my two Samsung 256GB SSDs which I will be putting into a RAID 0 for 500GB onborad storage. This Samsung drive uses a brand new controller and gets about 250MB/sec read with 190MB/s write. In RAID 0, should be about 400MB/s read and 350MB/s write. The random write isn't as good as the Intel X-25M (20MB/s) but it isn't bad at 5MB/s. Compared to other SSDs and standard HDDs at about 0.5MB/s, this is still pretty good.
• Expandability - besides the dual HD and slot-load optical drive (up to Blu-Ray burner if desired), I also have full size Display Port, E-Sata, plenety of USB ports, full size Firewire, SD card reader, PC Card slot, and Express54 slot.
• Warranty - Comes with 3 year Next Business Day Onsite. Someone shows up at your home, office, hotel, studio, wherever... to do any repairs or replacements. Much more convenient than driving to the mall and waiting at the Genius Bar. For an extra $169, I upgraded to Complete Care, which covers all accidental damage as well. Nice piece of mind for someone who depends on their machine on the road.

The bad part is the Precision weighs 8.5 lbs and only clocks about 2.5 hours on a full battery charge. So far neither of these things have really bothered me. I'm in love with the speed, silence, amazing LCD screen, and expandability. Also, I'm running Windows 7, which is an absolute joy to use. It is very Mac-like while still retaining the logic of Win XP (don't want to start any OS flame wars here.... I've used both for many years, but just in two days Win 7 is my favorite by far! It is so intuitive and quick).

As far as speed, I ran Lightroom 2.4 64-bit and converted a P45+ 39MP file to a 16-bit TIFF in just over 5 seconds! And, that was with no RAID and the slow (90MB/s) SSD that I have until the fast Samsungs arrive.

This is an amazing piece of hardware and any reservations I had about weight or size or whatever have fallen by the wayside. My plan is to do most of my production on this computer and not have to go back to work on files on the Eizo a second time.

David

This is something Apple needs to be doing is making laptops that just fly. Sounds really nice David. The trick on that box is the quad core with C1. Damn I'm jealous. LOL

Guy,

I just processed a P30+ file in C1 4.8 to 16-bit TIFF in 11 seconds. How does this compare to your 15" MBP? Just curious.

Interestingly, I ran the same file through LR 2.4 and it processed in 4.5 seconds.

In both, my CPU meter was pegged at 100% on all 4 cores.

Thoughts? And remember, these numbers are with my slow SSD. When I get the new drives, I'll run my tests again.


David

18 seconds in Profoto color space you dog. LOL

I need quad cores

On my 2 years old Macbook pro 17", 2.4, 4gb ram and 7200rpm drive it takes 25 sec on prophoto rgb space.

I believe you spent nearly for grands for what seems a great pc.

that must be the reason LR files are not as detailed and clean compared to c1.
too fast to be good.

I do all my raid using the basic OSX software raid tool -- piece of cake easy to set up and works very well for RAID-0 or 1 applications, but it won't do RAID-5. (It will do 0-1 or 1-0 though, and given the low cost of drives right now, that might be a better overall redundancy strategy...) Anyway, I originally stored my "live" jobs on the desktop, but usually only the output folders as ALL of my job raw files get put immediately on the Working Image array since that gets backed up to the DROBO at regular scheduled intervals (my desktop doesn't get backed up to the DROBO, but it could.) Then what I do is convert my raws and write to the dedicated output folder that C1 sets up automatically for each session on the 4-drive array.

I used to write the output folder on the desktop since I figured it would be faster reading from the 4-drive array and writing to the 2-drive desktop array, and why I set it up that way to begin with, but at the end of the day the 4-drive array is so fast when being shared for I/O the difference in speed is essentially insignificant even when processing a couple hundred files -- in the end it just didn't matter that much. So right now, I have a really fast OS array with a HUGE desktop that sits mostly unused other than for occasional temporary storage of large folders. Where it does come in handy is reading and saving a large set of files I'm currently editing in CS while doing batch raw processing in the background since the programs are not competing for I/O on the working array. But in all honesty my total efficiency would be very similar -- and I'd still have plenty of free space -- with just one of the 640's dedicated to the OS and desktop -- and I'll likely reconfigure it that way just as soon as I find a better purpose for that freed up OS drive. Assuming Time Machine gets improved with Snow Leopard (a lot of us think TM should be directly bootable), maybe I'll use it as TM for a full historical OS and desktop file backup . But at least the way it is now, my programs launch really, really quickly .

thx jack

hi rainer,

you can use this card as a usb 'stick' on a laptop without a express slot
(... for file exchange ...)

Greetings
Adina

David,

May I ask what your setup cost?

Sigh....I've been wishing for many years Apple would offer similar.

Regards,
Billy

Do these both fit into the new 17 inch macbook pro, I thought it only had express card 34 slot?

Billy,

I got the laptop refurbished from the Dell Outlet. Aside from the sticker on the bottom that says "refurbished" it looks and acts brand new. Not one fingerprint anywhere and still came with the new warranty. With the "slow" 128GB SSD (Dell calls it a mobility SSD), it cost $2800. Then, I added 2x 256GB Samsung SSDs (Dell calls them performance SSDs) for $469 each. I figured I saved enough on the computer to splurge on the drives. So, in total, it was about $3750.

I think I saw that some are running OS X on it using the Hackintosh method. Maybe you could look into it. But, I will say that Win 7 is really, really nice. I think even a die-hard Mac user would like it.

David

hi adina,

year, i didnt realise that it is an input ,- but it is and so you can use the card also as usb device to transfer the data.

You would need to add a 54 to 34 adapter (if available), and then the card would stick out, of course. However the 54 version is a lot faster than the 34 as you can see.

At some point, a Firewire 800 drive must make more sense. Almost as fast as eSATA and much more space.

i thought so too, but take a look -

http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-Dri...s-Firewire.html

seems like a RAID 0 in eSATA will be much faster than a FW800 external - even if it was a RAID 0

you are wrong guys. the pure reading/writing numbers dont reflect the behavor with many small files.
there is no head to be moved in the ssd drive and this leads to much faster results than the max. writing/reading speeds of regular promise if compared the regular drives.

Could this card could be used for quick and fast back ups at the end of the shoot? is it faster than an eSata or FW800 external drive?

All the times I end the shooting day with a few tenths of thousands euros worth of production costs in my HD. During the shoot or at the end, we always spend quite some time backing up on external raids or a couple of single drives normally FW800. I was wondering if a couple of this cards could be a faste alternative.

Can you put the OS on the SSD Express Card? Will this give faster boot up?
If so, then what about all the music and movies (80 gigs worth} that I have on the internal hard drive
of my MBP- can these be left on the hard drive but still have the OS on the SSD card?
How do you strip out "User" files from the OS so they can be in different places without
affecting your ability to use iTunes?
I use the MBP for location shoots and editing, but also for personal use.
Would love the speed bump the SSD card can provide....

I was referring to the FW800 vs eSata. theres no way SSD could be faster do to no moving parts...

The USB ports on SSD devices is usually EXCLUSIVELY used to update the firmware which in some cases can bring significant performance boosts as many of todays SSD products are shipped to the customer like bananas (half green). So if you want to get them yellow at some point you need to update the firmware.

A word of caution: SSD's are an entirely different thing than harddisks. Harddisk are all somewhat fast. With SSD's you get REALLY fast ones... and EXTREMELY CRAPPY ones. I put a first generation OCZ Core Series 60 GB SSD into my tower. It was fine with one program. I enjoyed that there was no noise and that it didn't require any cooling. But I noticed that as soon as you ran two programs it would get REALLY slow. Windows XP freezes for 2-3 seconds before the screen refreshes and basicly it's worse than working on a 10 year old computer.

Now I have the Intel SSD's which are GREAT. Entirely different game. Sending the computer to standby takes 2 seconds or less. Starting up less than 30 seconds (2 minutes before with traditional harddisks). Most programs take less than a second to start. It's just amazing.

Intel's SSD's are optimized for read operations. So they are fast to show you thumbnails of your pics... browse through files. Very good on many files in parallel. They are a little slower on write operations than some of the competition. Some of the competitors really improved their products by adding caches or built-in RAID 0 (which I wouldn't buy because of the bigger risk of failure). If you want to use SSD REALLY REALLY REALLY don't be a cheapskate. Skip first and second generation products. Go straight to the current models and make sure they do not have the crappy JMicro controllers that cause the "stuttering" and freezes.

so which one is the current best option, in 128gb size and 34mm express slot?

CAn anybody let me know where I can buy the right card that rainer is talking about. when I do a seacrh they come up USB etc.. But I a cannot find the card that rainer is talking about. I have the older 17 Inch and wanted to keep it for a while longer as I like , do not need a newer one ann nd bascially happy with it.
I would how ever like to Pimp it out and the Card sounds great that Rainer speaks of as well as the price!!
Thnaks for any help with this, sounds like a great solution and many places I look do not carry the cards because the newer macintoshes do not have the PC slots.
Thanks for maybe a link or specific model number so I can purchase one on my trip the the USA next week.
When I did a google seacrh for the product rainer mentioned it came up USB sticks only.
Thanks again
Snook