Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: Drew Harty on September 20, 2012, 03:46:35 pm

Title: Speed advantages of SSD in 2012 MacBook Pro
Post by: Drew Harty on September 20, 2012, 03:46:35 pm: Hello,

Since my orginal post, I have purchased two OWC 6G Pro Extreme 240 Gb SSDs and done speed test with various installations.

I purchased a MacBook Pro Ivy Bridge, (mid 2012) with 16 GB RAM and will be setting it up for photo editing to use on a four month cross-county photographic project. I will be shooting around 16 Gb of images daily, editing selected images every couple days, and storing master files and edited files as they accumulate on HDs. I am looking for advice on using SSD drives and HDs to speed up transferring, editing, and archiving of files.

I tested my MacBook Pro with the standard 500 Gb stand alone HHD drive, with the OWC Pro Extreme SSD as a system drive and the 500 Gb HDD as a second drive for files in the optical bay, and with two OWC Pro Extreme SSDs as system and file drives. I wanted to see how these drive arrangements would effect speeds for opening and saving files and general operation of Photoshop CS6, importing and exporting from Capture One, and copying files.

Here is what I tested:

Computer Start up Time: HDD 37 sec, SSD/HDD 12 sec, SSD/SSD 12 sec

Capture one Import: HHD 26 min 4 sec, SSD/HHD 4 min 14 sec, SSD/SSD 2 min 31 sec
(366 files [24.5 Gb] that were copied to computer before importing)

Capture One Export into Photoshop: HDD 16 sec, SSD/HHD 13 sec, SSD/SSD 12 sec
(single 60 Mb file with curve, highlight, shadow, and color correction)

Photoshop open 760 Mb file with 7 layers: HDD 12 sec, SSD/HDD 8.5 sec, SSD/SSD 8.5 sec
Photoshop save in background 800 Mb file with 8 layers: HHD 55 sec, SSD/HDD 46 sec, SSD/SSD 41 sec

Read 8 Gb files from USB CF card reader: SSD/HDD 4 min 14 sec, SSD/SSD 3 min 50 sec
Copy 8 Gb of files: HDD to SSD 1 min 29 sec, SSD to SSD 34 sec

I tried editing with one 760 MB file open in Photoshop, then with 3 - 760 Mb files open and did not notice much difference between the SSD/HHD or SSD/SSD drive installations (System SSD drive was scratch drive). The 16 Gb of RAM probably mitigated the differences. The second SSD drive did make a difference importing files into Capture One and copying files, which will be a benefit for me when having to daily copy master and edited files out to multiple HHDs connected through the Thunderbolt port.

Drew Harty
Title: Re: Speed advantages of SSD in 2012 MacBook Pro
Post by: elolaugesen on September 21, 2012, 03:18:52 am: I assume you meant Megabyte files not gigabyte files. if not then the files will not fit on the SSD and you would be swapping/paging into memory all the time.

cheers elo
Title: Re: Speed advantages of SSD in 2012 MacBook Pro
Post by: lfeagan on September 21, 2012, 04:18:12 am: Quote from: elolaugesen on September 21, 2012, 03:18:52 am
I assume you meant Megabyte files not gigabyte files. if not then the files will not fit on the SSD and you would be swapping/paging into memory all the time.

cheers elo

Or perhaps he was using bits instead of bytes. Generally lower-case 'b' is for bits and upper-case 'B' is for bytes. Though I suspect you are correct that the metric prefix giga should have been mega.

Thanks for the nice numbers. I found them useful.
Title: Re: Speed advantages of SSD in 2012 MacBook Pro
Post by: francois on September 21, 2012, 05:29:52 am: Thanks for reporting. It's always interesting to get numbers from "normal" users.
Title: Re: Speed advantages of SSD in 2012 MacBook Pro
Post by: Drew Harty on September 21, 2012, 09:14:41 am: Yes, silly mistake. Thanks for pointing it out. 760 Mb file, but importing 24.5 Gb of files into Capture One.