In recent months I hardly use Photoshop anymore, as I hand any serious post-production to a professional retoucher, who knows what he is doing, contrary to me. If I work on files, it's been done 95% in Lightroom.

As I promoted my oldish 2ghz, 3GB, 24" Imac to serve me as a tethering machine i am in the market for a new mac. I do have good screens, so I rather go for a mac pro.

As Lightroom was really slow on my Imac I am really trying to chose this one for best LR performance. I don't intend to use this machine for very long time, usually I am upgrading my computers every 2 years.

How about that: single quad 2,93, 8GB, maybe SS drive to boot, two 1TB drives raid 0?

I really like to idea of very short program start-up times, therefore the SSD, the raid 0 thing I am just babbeling, I have no clue.

You have only one option if you want the fastest Mac. A MacPro with internal RAID and lots of RAM.

I have an original MacPro 8-core with 12 GB ram, WD Velcoraptor 320GB boot and applications drive, Seagate 1TB drive for my User folder and 2 x Seagate 1TB drives in RAID 0 configuration for my photos, LR catalog, iPhoto data and videos files. I upgraded the video card from the stock ATI 1500 to ATI Radeon HD3870.

I have an external SanDigital 5 bay eSata tower connected to my MacPro with a HighPoint eSata port multiplier card. I use 2 x Seagate 750 drives with a 100GB partition for PS scratch and the 2nd partition for temporary storage and backup. In the remaining 3 bays, I use extra slide out trays for JBOD backups that I rotate offsite.

This set up has served me well.

Check out the excellent resource provided on Lloyd Chamber's web site that you can get to with this link: http://macperformanceguide.com/

My other Macs include a new 15" MacBook Pro and a 20" iMac for my kids. The MacPro kills them all in the performance category.

Good luck.

Bud