SSD Benefit In Digital Photo Professional?

[idata]

Greetings Intel forumers,

I had a quick question regarding looking into the X25-M G2 160GB Drive. Although many sites give excellent benchmarks on how great these drives appear, none have really gone into detail regarding specific photo-editing tasks outside of Photoshop.

For anyone that uses and exports from Canon's Digital Photo Professional, I was really wondering how much faster the SSD would be in exporting say, Jpegs from the orginal RAW files from a Canon 5D Mark II.

A typical client of mine generates a data folder of 60-70+ GB and to handle the proofing exports with my current 1TB Western Digital drive (presuming 7,200RPM), it can take almost a day.

I am wondering if I took a batch of the photos and copied them to the SSD, would exporting them go any faster? I know it would be writing to the disk a lot but I figure I could copy batches to and from the SSD to go through a client's set of photos rapidly - well, hopefully more rapidly than letting the HDD grind all night / day.

Thanks for the input.

[idata]

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Ok. I just tried a "batch process" of RAW files from my Canon 20d from Digital Photo Professional to Maximum Quality JPG's in Photoshop. I exported 80 Raw files totalling 811MB to Maximum quality JPGs which were then opened in Photoshop. I'm using a 2Ghz Core2Duo Laptop with 2gb of ram and an internal 100gb 7200 rpm hard drive. It took 23 minutes to convert the Raw files to JPG and open all of them in Photoshop.

I also did the same process but instead of using Digital Photo Professional, I used Photoshop CS3's image processor to convert the RAW files to JPG. That conversion only took 7 minutes. I then opened all the JPG's in Photoshop and it took 9 minutes to open all of them. So, converting this way was significantly faster for me.

I think the most important thing is CPU and RAM for image conversion and opening in Photoshop. I also have a desktop computer with an Intel Q6600 Quad Core processor and 4gb of ram, and a 640gb 7200 rpm hard drive. For instance, opening the same 80 JPG files all at once on the desktop pc with a faster CPU and more RAM does it in 6 minutes instead of 9. So, firstly I would see if your CPU is as fast as you can afford and there should be sufficient RAM (4gb or more) so that the system doesn't need to resort to using the pagefile.

Also, I think it's always a good idea to convert and save to a separate hard drive. For instance, using one hard drive to read all the RAW images, and using another hard drive to write all the JPG's should prove to be faster. The reasoning behind this is that a normal hard drive will waste time if it has to read and write at the same time. So, if the hard drive with the RAW files is just reading and another hard drive is just writing then the performance should be better.

My understanding of the new Intel 160GB G2 SSD is that the biggest benefit is using it as a system/application drive as it is the fastest in 4k random read/write, which is what I plan on using it for. Booting up, loading programs, thumbnails of images, loading image galleries will be much faster than a standard 7200rpm hard drive. However, needing to work with gigabytes of RAW and JPG files might better be served with standard hard drives short stroked in a RAID 0 setup.

My instinct is telling me that the CPU/RAM is what is slowing the system down. Giving the CPU faster access to the data from the hard drive can never hurt and the Intel SSD will give you that for sure, but it's the CPU that needs to process the image, and that processing is where I think the bottleneck is happening. If I am wrong and in fact the hard drives are the bottleneck, then yes the SSD or a short stroked RAID 0 array would serve to speed up the process greatly.

If anyone else could chime in on this I'd love a second opinion.

[idata]

Hi Davem,

Thanks very much for the well-thought out reply to my concerns. Actually the interesting thing is I am using my desktop which has similar specs to what you listed - a Q6600 quad core and 4GB of RAM.

Normally I've exported the photos to secondary drives before but the main one I'm using is a 1 TB 7,200 RPM Western Digital which for the most part is fast enough when viewing and editing. I don't have any other drives currently available where I can have enough space free at the moment for both the RAWs and Jpegs but I could try exporting the jpegs as you said onto another physical drive to see if that speeds it up. If I take my main drive (WD Raptor 150 GB, 10,000 RPM) and export to that, I can certainly give you the times once I know.

Maybe it's simply a CPU bottleneck as you said. I can process images from my 10D (similar to your 20D) in a relatively much faster time than the images from my 5D Mark II. It's a speed-up in the processing of the 5D II files that I'm looking for, and so my question regarding Intel SSDs.

Let me repeat your test then here if I may. I will use the same # of 10D files (RAWs from that are about 6MB and I thought the 20D's were about 8MB each)... I can export them to the same drive and then to a faster one and see the time difference as well as opening them all in Photoshop like you did.

Thanks again for the help as it is very much appreciated.

[idata]

Hi Davem,

Ok between taking care of a few things here, I ran some numbers for you to match with your test data. Here's a simple copy/paste of what I put in a document.

(Davem's tests)

Batch from RAW to Jpeg at max quality

Export 80 RAWs (at 811 MB for his 20D)

23 mins to convert as well as open in Photoshop on laptop

6 mins to open in Photoshop but not sure long it took to export on desktop.

Try Photoshop's Image Processor?

Save on same drive and on different drive.

My Tests:

80 5D Mark II RAWs = 1.71 GB

WD Raptor = 10,000 RPM, 150 GB HDD

WD Black (WD250GB) = 7,200 RPM, 250 GB HDD

WD Caviar – 7,200 RPM, 1 TB HDD

Setup:

Primary Drive = WD Raptor

Secondary Drive = WD Black

Or

Primary Drive = WD Caviar

Secondary Drive = WD Black

Only the Raptor and WD Caviar have OS installed. The WD250GB Drive (Black) used to have an OS but became corrupted so won't always boot. Running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit on the Raptor and Windows XP Home Professional 32-bit on the Caviar drive.

Photoshop exports faster with the image processing tool but upon entry with RAW capture does slightly change the image. Even changes image output with same color profile set to both programs. I tried to make sure the color profiles were the same on both drives, but for some reason Photoshop would literally import the RAW with different settings than how it looks for me in DPP. Thus though the tool is useful for fast processing, I'd rather retouch by hand via DPP and work with a true original - not what Photoshop "thinks" is a true original, when I then edit and export...

WD Raptor DPP Export RAW > Jpeg Same Drive = 16m 01sec

WD Raptor DPP Export RAW > Jpeg to WD250GB 7K-RPM Drive = 18m 35sec

WD Caviar DPP Export RAW > Jpeg Same Drive = 15m 45sec

WD Caviar DPP Export RAW > Jpeg to WD250GB 7K-RPM Drive...

[idata]

Hey Real-Link,

Good work!

Looks like a hard drive that could write faster may help. Although, in sequential write speeds the Intel X25M SSD's are not the fastest compared to the competition.

Maybe for this application a 7200 RPM RAID 0 array short stroked would give you the best bang for the buck. The Raptor is a great drive, although an X25M SSD would even be faster for those small file reads and writes especially for an OS. I just ordered a 160GB X25M for that purpose. I'm going to put the OS on the X25M and then copy a max of 4 gigs of RAW photos at a time to it. Then I'll export to JPG to a 7200 RPM Raid 0 array. Therefore I'll be able to read and write at over 200mb/s...Also reading and opening the 4Gigs of photos on the X25M SSD should be extremely fast....

My sequence will be:

4GB Compact Flash Card RAW files in media reader--->Intel X25M RAW File editing, then export JPG---->RAID 0 pair of 7200 RPM Hard drives then send everything--->External Backup