Hard Drive Setup Suggestions??

Hello all,

I am looking for a way to maximize performance and backups on my machine. I Have Mac Pro tower. I use Aperture, PSCS5 and the Nik plugin suite.

I currently have an Intel SSD bood drive in Bay 1 a 2TB drive in Bay 2 for Time Machine a 1TB Drive in Bay 3 where my Aperture Library lives and Bay 4 is another 1TB drive that clones Bay 3.

I then have 2 2TB Firewire 800 drives that clone Bay 4 and Bay 2.

I am thinking about having some kind of RAID 0 setup for my Aperture Library with Bays 3 & 4 but I want to know if this would be ideal and how I would back up those two RAID drives to a single external drive.

Any tips would be appreciated. I just want to be able to increase performance while in Aperture and PS while still having a solid backup of everything in the event something goes wrong with a drive.

Cheers

Aperture library onto the SSD. Don't bother with RAID, SSD is much much faster than raided spinning disks. You could get another SSD for images but the gain is apparently not that large.

Yip, what Tim Said.

I've moved my Lightroom catalog and previews to an SSD and it makes a huge difference.
Photoshop and Premier also use it as a scratch/cache

The images themselves are still stored on a 2TB drive that is mirrored in the machine with two external back ups.

Wouldn't I have to have a pretty big SSD for that? My boot drive I think is only 120GB

My Aperture library is 340GB.

Does the Aperture Library contain the actual image files, or is it a database reference for the files stored else where?

A quick google suggests Aperture stores the image files in the library. That's going to make it tough to get good performance, unless you can have multiple libraries. The key is to get your caches onto an SSD, you'll have to google to work out how to do that, or ask on an apple forum.

Also start putting away money for a new Mac Pro. The 2013 models will likely have native USB 3, thunderbolt, SATA 6GB controllers, SSDs and/or fusion drives and maybe more goodies. It will be interesting to see what Apple does with CPUs in the new Pros.

MCAsan wrote in post #15366300
Also start putting away money for a new Mac Pro. The 2013 models will likely have native USB 3, thunderbolt, SATA 6GB controllers, SSDs and/or fusion drives and maybe more goodies. It will be interesting to see what Apple does with CPUs in the new Pros.

I gave up waiting. I had a Mac Pro 1,1 wich was the first Mac Pro after the G5. I used it for several years and it was great. I got the genius idea to sell it and get a new 27" iMac about 2 years ago. I hated it every day. After getting sick of waiting for a new Mac Pro I bought one earlier this year.

tim wrote in post #15365254
A quick google suggests Aperture stores the image files in the library. That's going to make it tough to get good performance, unless you can have multiple libraries. The key is to get your caches onto an SSD, you'll have to google to work out how to do that, or ask on an apple forum.

You can set up Aperture to be either managed where it stores the images in the library (which I prefer) or referenced. (Like Lightroom) That is the biggest thing I dont like about LR though. I prefer to have all images managed. I have heard too many stories from LR uses losing images and things going missing. I also dont like the "module" setup in LR.

Managed images mean a big library that will grow over time, and you can't easily get images out. Referenced images mean you can back up images separately, use different pieces of software, do anything you want. Using referenced images you can get better performance cheaper too, otherwise you're going to need a 1TB SSD.

As long as you don't move your images you're fine. With LR exporting XMP files to live in the same directory as the images means you have a backup of settings too, so you can just move them with no problems.