Hi guys,
I haven't done any testing yet myself, but I was curious to know if any of you might have had some experience in this area. I was basically wondering which setup would be the fastest to work with, for Aperture 3 - and I'm only talking about how fast Aperture 3 reacts, processing, adjustments etc.
1) Managed Library on the internal 7200rpm drive (in my mid-2010 i7 MBP)
2) Referenced Library, keeping the library on the internal drive but Masters on an external FW800 drive.
In pure transfer speeds (not Aperture related), I'm guessing the internal drive would be faster, right? But since we're just talking about one 15-20mb RAW file each time - and then a lot of small read/writes to do adjustments, perhaps the two-drive setup (option #2) is fastest?
Klaus,
It’s a great question. Total read/write speed depends on the speed of the drive, how many drive there are (is it a RAID?), the cache, and the interface. I don’t know if there’s any speed difference to working with managed vs referenced; I don’t think I ever even thought about it before.
If you want to test your drives to see what’s fastest, download AJA’s disk speed test at aja.com/ajashare/AJA_System_Test_v601.zip and run the same tests on all your drives. (XBench is another utility that’s a bit easier to use but not as comprehensive).
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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How full are your hard drives? Aperture works fastest when your hard drives have at least 20-25% free space. When your dives are near capacity, Aperture run substantially slower. My iMac runs faster now that I’ve moved 50GB of masters off my crowded internal drive to an external Firewire 400 drive.