Initial set up of Photoshop and Lightroom on Macbook Pro 15" with Mavericks

[Praki]

Hello:

I had been using a 24" iMac with Photoshop CS5 in the generic configuration i.e. load the DVD and choose all the defaults and hit continue. Now I have a brand new 15" Macbook Pro with the 512 Gb SSD and 16 Gig Ram with two external 1 TB USB 3 connectible drives (OWC Mercury Elite pro housing) and one 1 TB portable - passport type. The drives are hybrid Toshibas with a 8 Gig NAND flash cache in front of the spinning drives.  The OS is Mavericks. The printer is an Epson 3880. I am becoming more experienced and would like to progress beyond the default set up as my files are becoming larger.

Ideally, I would like to use the Macbook as a portable for looking at images at the shooting locations and back it up on the passport but when I get back to my base, I would like to import the images onto the two disk array for detailed processing in LR and PS still using the Macbook pro i.e. the Macbook is the only processing capability I have until I get another desktop in a year or more.

So I have been reading on this forum as well as in Jeff Schewe's Digital Negative and Digital Print on ways of setting up LR and Photoshop. While I understand, some of the logic and want to do it, guidance on the specific steps to set up the scratch disk (I can get another SSD say of 512 Gig) and how to set up the two disks (partitioning and Raid 1 for example) and how to load LR and PS ... other than default configuration is what I am looking for. Can somebody point me to a reference or give me pointers on how to do this? Though new to Mavericks, I am familiar with Snow Leopard. I have signed up for Apple Store lessons on Mavericks.

Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Praki.

[jerryrock]

Just wondering why you are not using the Thunderbolt ports for fast storage? The Photoshop scratch disk should equal the speed of your internal drive. Since it is PCI SSD, you will create a bottle neck by using your external USB connected drives for a scratch disk. In your case, it would be better to leave the Photoshop scratch disk on the internal drive. Both Aperture and Lightroom would benefit having their libraries stored on a faster drive.

Investing in Thunderbolt2 peripherals would help keep your new MacBook Pro current and up to speed.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/PCIe_Chassis/Mercury_Helios_Accelsior_E2/

USB 3.0 5GB/sec max transfer rate
Thunderbolt 10GB/sec
Thunderbolt2 20GB/sec

Of course actual speeds will be much slower than the maximum transfer rates and are dependent on the media SSD (SATA, PCI ) Hard Drives are dependent on individual speeds. Running external drives in RAID configuration increases their transfer rates tremendously but RAID has it's drawbacks. RAID 0 gives you the fastest transfer rates but a drive failure will result in data loss, RAID 5 gives you the benefits of RAID 0 with the advantage of being able to recover the information should one drive fail. It has the disadvantage of losing the total capacity of one of the drives in the RAID array. (4 x 2TB = 8TB RAID 0) (4 x 2TB = 6TB RAID 5). An external RAID device with its own RAID controller built in will be more efficient than using software RAID built in OSX.

I am running a 3TB Seagate Backup Plus drive (Thunderbolt 1) on my Thunderbolt2 equipped 2013 MacPro transfer rates are about 195MB/sec
The Apple PCI SSD gives me transfer rates of about 1,061MB/sec
Promise Pegasus2 R4 (Thunderbolt 2)  (4 x 2TB Toshiba HD) Running in RAID 5 produces transfer rates of 657MB/sec

*Scores were computed using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

[Praki]

Hi Jerry:
Thanks for the response. Your suggestions make a lot of sense. That is something I want to build up to.... mostly due to financial constraints i.e. the money has been spent on the macbook and the two 1 TB external drives. I am hoping that the prices will come down a bit also for Thun. peripherals. Something like what you suggest will be my 12 - 18 month goal. For right now I will go without a scratch disk and do RAID 1 with another 1 TB disk as a backup disk. I found the methods in the Adobe set up web site (http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-performance-photoshop-cs4-cs5.html#main_Memory_Usage) as well as the raid settings for Mavericks ... (http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/ss/raidmirror_2.htm). I'll post on how that does in the future.
Thanks.