In a quest to speed up camera previews while shooting tethered with a Nikon D3 I replaced the 5400 rpm hard drive in a mac book pro with a OWC 120 gig ssd. Figuring the write speed of incoming files to the hard drive would be a key factor.
The MBP is a 2.2 core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram (only upgradable to 4gb) so I wanted to try out the ssd to see if it is the best bang for the buck as opposed to purchasing new laptops with more ram capacity. Typically it takes 5-8 seconds for the raw image to appear on screen using Lightroom 3 or Nikon Camera Control Pro 2 depending on 12 bit vs. 14 bit, and compressed vs. uncompressed.
After the new ssd and system and software install, there is no appreciable increase in the speed of the image preview. It still takes 5-8 seconds depending on file size. On the other hand, shooting to an iMac 2.8 quad i7 w/12 mb ram and a 7200 rmp HD takes 3-5 seconds. Shooting to another slightly older iMac 2.8 core 2 duo with 4 gigs of ram and an unknown hard drive produces the same 3-5 seconds result. So it's not the usb 2 bottleneck or the hard drive, it's the amount of ram and the processor.
Looks like we may be purchasing some new laptops.
