# Better use of money - going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm or 4GB to 8GB



## stayathomedad (Sep 28, 2010)

I'm trying to figure out what upgrade I should do first with my new 2.4 i5 MBP.

Faster hard drive or max out the ram.

What will LR3 like more?


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## Mark Sirota (Sep 28, 2010)

Go for the RAM. Then devote 2-4 GB of it to a RAMdisk, and put your Camera Raw cache there. That's probably the biggest possible improvement, assuming that's a big enough Camera Raw cache for your workflow.


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## stayathomedad (Sep 28, 2010)

I am totally ignorant when it comes to RAMdisk... Would the catalog be moved to memory each time I open up LR? Would I have to save the catalog from memory each time I wanted to exit? It seems a bit dangerous and susceptible to memory issues... meaning if you have a memory error, your working catalog is lost... no???


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 28, 2010)

What do you do most in LR? Library tasks? Develop tasks?


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## ukbrown (Sep 28, 2010)

If it was windows 7, it would be a no brainer, buy the RAM, it will use it for caching and work out what it's best use is. A Mac would hopefully do the same.


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## Graeme Brown (Sep 28, 2010)

What aspect of LR performance do you find slow at the moment on the machine?


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## Mark Sirota (Sep 28, 2010)

If you used a ramdisk for the Camera Raw cache, there would be no difference in your workflow except that it would be faster for image rendering tasks (preview generation, Develop module, export, print). The downside is that whenever you reboot you'd lose the contents of the cache, so working on older files after a reboot would be slower.

Others are right to ask what aspect of LR you want to speed up. Putting the camera raw cache on ramdisk is probably the most noticeable improvement possible, but if that's not the part of the workflow that's important, then other approaches may be better suited.


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## stayathomedad (Sep 28, 2010)

[quote author=Victoria Bampton link=topic=11171.msg75161#msg75161 date=1285656131]
What do you do most in LR? Library tasks? Develop tasks?
[/quote]

Develop


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## stayathomedad (Sep 28, 2010)

[quote author=Graeme Brown link=topic=11171.msg75167#msg75167 date=1285662273]
What aspect of LR performance do you find slow at the moment on the machine?
[/quote]

Develop mode... response to moving sliders, editing, cropping, and everything else one does in develop... I have no issues with any other aspect (importing, exporting, etc) of LR3


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## Mark Sirota (Sep 28, 2010)

Then putting the Camera Raw cache on a ramdisk is your best bet. Someday I need to document how to do that (does anyone know of a writeup that's out there already?)


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## ukbrown (Sep 28, 2010)

So you set up a RAM disk
Tell LR to use that for your cache
Go to develop module
Select a picture, it is read from disk and then written to the cache on the RAM disk
Pick a different picture does the same as above
Go back to first picture and it is read from cache.

Windows 7 does exactly this out the box and most modern OS's will do this, I have just verfied this on my PC, the other plus with letting the OS do it is that your CACHE is always up to date even after a reboot.

I would really let your OS handle the memory you add in.


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## Mark Sirota (Sep 28, 2010)

I understand how operating system caches work. I understand very completely. Just adding RAM alone may help... But not as much as adding RAM and putting the camera raw cache on a RAM disk.

It's not the same thing. The OS cache is still backed by disk if that's where your Camera Raw cache lives. Putting memory behind it instead of disk is still faster. Try it.


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 29, 2010)

[quote author=stayathomedad link=topic=11171.msg75181#msg75181 date=1285689987]
Develop mode... response to moving sliders, editing, cropping, and everything else one does in develop... I have no issues with any other aspect (importing, exporting, etc) of LR3
[/quote]
Ok, related question to Mark's then. Are these photos you've just imported and are working on for the first time, or are you going back to older photos. Because if you're going back to older photos, I might lean towards a bigger hard drive and a larger camera raw cache that can hold more photos, whereas Mark's RAMdisk would get cleared each time you closed it, so you'd only see the benefit of photos that you'd just rendered previews on or viewed in Develop in the current session.


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## ukbrown (Sep 29, 2010)

> Putting memory behind it instead of disk is still faster.



If all your disk read and writes that you make in LR are kept in the OS cache, there will be absolutely no difference in speed, unless the sequence of events I outlined was wrong. Now the "If" that started the previous sentence is not guaranteed in any OS but in Windows 7, looking at perfmon stats whilst in develop mode it does hold true, everything in my simple test was cached automatically. If I had not got empirical evidence to prove it.... Try it, time it, post the results back, shut me up  (Windows 7, 8GB RAM,2GB RAM disk are the parameters)

It's a bit like the SSD question how much improvement do you really get, I did a simple test without SSD's and in develop module a lot of the time they will not make a huge difference (faster on first read only) because of what I outlined above. CPU has a strong role to play in making the develop module faster. Note I would use a RAM disk in XP. Giving the OS extra RAM also makes everything else faster.

Note this is not true of any other windows OS especially XP. Windows 7 actively caches.


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## edgley (Sep 29, 2010)

I would be tempted to look at sticking a faster disk in.
4GB of RAM is a bit for a Mac, depending on how many apps are open at once.
Are you maxing out the RAM already?

The 54'' disks are very slow; first thing I did was stick a 72'' in my MBP and the difference was noticeable, generally speaking. In all my Macs, disks seem to be the only real bottleneck (so long as they have 4GB to start with).
Seeing that a 72'' 32'GB is only £5', its also the cheaper one to try first!
- Have just checked and 4GB of RAM is nearly the same cost.

Although RAM disks can be setup via the command line, here is a utility that will do it for you:
http://www.clarkwood.com/old/rambunctious/


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## sizzlingbadger (Sep 30, 2010)

I would go for the faster disk. You can always close a couple of programs down when using Lightroom to free memory. You can't make the disk faster any other way.


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## ukbrown (Sep 30, 2010)

I think the consensus of opinion is that if you do both of these things you will end up with a faster machine.


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## Graeme Brown (Sep 30, 2010)

Or, as someone pointed out to me on another forum yesterday - if I spent less time on the internet when I should be working my processing would get done faster than any upgrade would allow!

Ain't gonna happen though.


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## hoffsta (Dec 7, 2010)

Graeme Brown said:


> Or, as someone pointed out to me on another forum yesterday - if I spent less time on the internet when I should be working my processing would get done faster than any upgrade would allow!
> 
> Ain't gonna happen though.



Amen Brother!


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