After editing a couple of sets of photos on my new mac, I've got some first impressions.
My old setup was a 6 year old 24" iMac, with a 360G spinny drive and 6G of memory. The setup is an I7 quadcore mac mini with 4G of ram, and a 1TB fusion drive. The display is a 27" thunderbolt display. I haven't yet had a chance to colormunki it. In both cases, my raw files are on a linux box, running AFP (also samba, but am using AFP with the macs), over a 1G ethernet. The system is noticably faster. Previews used to take long enough to load to be annoying, even those rendered 1:1. Particularly ln develop mode. They aren't instantaneous yet, but it is a big improvement. It turns out that the 27" display isn't noticably taller, just wider. This gives me a bit more room on the sides for menus and such. My second display is a Dell u2312hm in vertical format. I'd prefer something with less of a wide aspect ratio in vertical format so it worked better on horizontal photos as well. I plan on upgrading the memmory in the mini sometime next week. If I go with OWC, I could get parallels for $30, to the combination might be worthwhile. I think that I will want to go for a pure SSD for things like my lightroom catalogs, and quite possibly initial editing of my photos. My workflow now would be to load a set into, for example, 2013b. When I'm pretty much done with that set, I'll move it to 1309. I.e. start with it filed by year, then long term storage of the raws by month. I could easily change that to starting out with the working files in SSD, then move them to the directory for the month on network spinny. I was initially going to put the second drive inside the mini, but I could probably do as well with it on thunderbolt or FW800. Likewise, I want to set up another big drive for my raw files. I've got the linux box set up as RAID 5, for a reasonable level of redundancy. I could go with less redundancy on the files closer to the computer. I do have copies of all my raw files stored on other disks, but not in a conveniently accessed manner. Unfortunately, money is proving to be a finite resource. I am going to need to explore thunderbolt storage options. Unfortunately they are not nearly as inexpensive as usb 3 or firewire. Conclusions: I'm quite happy with my setup. It seems to have sufficient performance and flexibility. You can always get more performance for your dollar out of a computer by waiting a bit longer to buy one, so it's just not worth stressing over whether you cauld have gotten another 10% more zip here or there. My biggest annoyance so far with 10.8 is the way that the extra desktops are arranged "linearly" rather than in a 2-d array. It also took me too much research to find out out to add the extra desktops. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com http://red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
