pc/workflow advice

dhracer

dhracer

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Edit My Images
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I'm getting fed up of my current pc taking forever to edit photos so I'm looking to upgrade and/or fix how I'm working.

A bit of background:
I currently have an i3 (might be i5 but I doubt it) laptop with 8gb ram. I run linux and then a win7 virtual machine which I give 4gb of the ram to. I keep the photos on the local disk and then transfer them a across to a nas when I'm done with them.

I have a 5dii, and always shoot in raw. I tend to deal with batches of about 7gb. I use Photoshop elements

My problems:
Editing one photo at a time is slow, thumbnail generation takes forever. When I'm finished editing Photoshop is crap at moving the files over (it seems to associate the moved files with the wrong folders) so I normally do this manually and reconnect afterwards which is tedious.

So I was thinking of how best to solve the problems and I think a new pc and way of working is needed.

1) new pc: budget <£600
i7-3770 (the locked version, can't be bothered overclocking anymore) or should I get an i5 instead and save some cash?
Asus p8z77
16Gb ram
128Gb ssd for os & apps
1Tb hdd (raid)
No graphics, psu & optical drives reuse from my old amd x2 4800 tower.

That should be plenty quick enough for years to come?

2) workflow

How do you deal with so much data? Should I be converting to jpg when I'm done? What is the least painful way to archive say 6months at a time?

Thanks in advance
 
Firstly, run Windows if you want to run LR. Who knows what the VM is doing in getting your calls to the graphics hardware up on screen.

Secondly, the machine you mention is good. Go for i5 and overclock. It's a case of chaning one or two things in the BIOS these days. It's easy.

Thirdly, workflow. Let LR handle everything. Only export to JPEG when you want to view stuff elsewhere. Otherwise keep everything in LR.

Simples.
 
why not buy an ssd for the laptop and do a clean install win7 on it?

should move things along nicely.
 
Thanks for the replies.

Just confirmed the laptop is an i3-380m would an SSD make this usable?

Why not raid? I would have thought with up to 1tb of pics of the the machine this would be sensible insurance? Or are you suggesting if I switch to LR I'll be able to use the NAS as the only drive? (won't editing a remote file be really slow?)
 
Raid isn't a backup strategy (well, it is, but it's an eggs all in one basket strategy).

i3-380m - the i5 will be significantly quicker. Define "useable"?

I'm also an i7 owner (laptop and desktop). In a laptop an i7 is preferred as it's (generally) 4 cores, on the desktop the i5/i7 are more evenly balanced.
 
I've had one hdd failure in 15years and was able to recover the data with ease using Linux tools. Given files would stay in that machine for a relatively short period I'm happy to risk it esp as I'll have acceptable jpegs on the Web of my favourites. Deleting by accident etc, nothing but care will prevent that. What to you do instead?? Manual backups are tedious and I'm likely to forget if I have to do it frequently.

Anyway, by usable I'd like to be able to flick through say 200raw files quickly delete the ones that aren't up to scratch perform some quick touch up work on the remainder (cropping, wb - ie. Basic stuff) and maybe some more in depth work on one or two. With my current system it takes me most of an evening to get them off the camera and delete the ones I'm not happy with - I'd say 5 seconds to preview each pic.
 
If you are using RAID1 as a backup strategy, IMHO you are better having 2 disks and copying between them rather than letting the software deal with it.

There are 1001 ways of doing that, depending on your requirements.

Personally, I have copies on 2 different machines - just in case...
 
dhracer said:
I've had one hdd failure in 15years and was able to recover the data with ease using Linux tools. Given files would stay in that machine for a relatively short period I'm happy to risk it esp as I'll have acceptable jpegs on the Web of my favourites. Deleting by accident etc, nothing but care will prevent that. What to you do instead?? Manual backups are tedious and I'm likely to forget if I have to do it frequently. .
Click to expand...

i guess when you deal with storage every day and when youve seen raid controllers fail and nuke all drives i guess you get a little more paranoid about data retention..

use a program like allway sync for example that sits in the background.
 
I would have thought a bit of software would be worse than raid1? Given the failure rate of the controller is relatively unlikely and you would be expecting a strange failure mode to wipe the drives I'm still struggling to see why it's a bad idea.

The failure rate is comparable to that of the motherboard, which could also in theory destroy the drives if you go the software route.

I'm not thinking of this as a backup solution, more as insurance for the 6 possible months a photo might live on the machine before it is moved to external storage for keeping. The uptime of the computer is likely to be significantly less than 1500hrs in that period
 
It's all about how you value your photos.

Apart from ourselves, nothing is more certain than a hard-drive going kaput though.
 
Yeah I guess, I just think of it of cost vs risk. tbh I'm more relaxed about the 6months on the machine than the x number of years offline - DVDs, blu-ray & CD are rubbish, an external HDD will fail eventually and I can't shell out for a tape drive so one way or another you'll lose something!
 
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