Where's the bottle neck

[trebor_navilluso]

Ok, I'm a photog not a computer expert. Hopefully someone can guide me here.

 

My work flow is finally being slowed by the limits of my computer. Downloading images from cards is fairly quick

and painless. But backing up from my HD to an external HD and burning CD's both take about 40 minutes per 4 gig

card which is starting to become a problem.

 

I can't justify a fork lift upgrade on the whole system, so I need to hone in on which component is the biggest

offender. Here's the specs.

 

No name computer with AMD dual core (simpron I think) 1.6ghz x 1.6 ghz. 2 gig ram, HD 340MB (probably 4200 or

5400 speed max, DVD burns at 16X. The external HD is a USBII 160GB 5400 transfer rate of 12-480 MBps. That

spec kills me is it 12 or is it 480?

 

I nearly always shoot 4 gig cf cards and fill them because they fit onto DVDs so well. So what would you

recomend to speed things up? Newer faster CD and external HD, or is the bottle neck more likely on the

Motherboard/CPU's, Ram.

 

Your thoughts are appreciated.

[wogears]

What speed transfer on the HD? UDMA or SATA? Sounds like that's the problem.

[ellis_vener_photography]

USB 2 is the most obvious bottleneck.

[WJT]

You can improve your throughput to the external HD by geting an eSATA card and replacing the USBII HD with a good eSATA drive. The burning to the DVD will always be a bottleneck compared to the HD. Regards.

[trebor_navilluso]

Les:

 

Don't know the xfer speed but it is an SATA controller.

 

Walter: I'll look into that, and a faster optical.

 

Thanks all.

[rivi]

That is the USB-connection. <p>

 

The disk can do both USB 1.2 and USB 2. The former has 12MBps, the latter 480MBps. The trick is that MBps is

Mega<b>bit</b> per second. 4gigabyte are about 32000Megabit (about 4000 times 8). That's 2666 secs for USB1.2

(indeed about 40 mins), while with USB2 it would take about one minute only. <p>

 

What is the bottleneck is the port. Either the port itself is 1.2 intrinsic (reason: old computer), or the OS

cannot adress it as 2.0 and downgrades it to 1.2 (you may need a driver for windows, or another OS. In my own

comp I have no such problem with linux, but windows <em>always</em> fails to use the USB ports in fast mode)<p>

 

Dsclaimer: I ignore the 1024 vs. 1000 defintion of the prefixes in digital vs. decimal, but for an estimate

that's just fine.

[rivi]

For the DVD, 4GB is a full DVD which is also labelled 120min.At 16x this should burn in less than ten mins. Unless, of course, you burn it not from the internal HD, but from the USB HD. Then again the bottleneck is the USB-port.

 

In case its an old comp (to find that out you'll need to have a look into the motherboars specs, of which the USB port is part), you can get USB PCI-card providing 2.0 functionality. If its windows not being able to adress the port, it sould at least give you pop-up telling you that "This device can perform faster".

[rivi]

PS: It's USB 1.1, not 1.2

[skylan_hill]

Although I cant say exactly, my suspicions would be:

1) slow USB; you may be running your USB2 hard-drive from a USB1.0 port.

2) slow hard-drive RPM speed and transfer rate.

3) hard-drive and DVD burner on the same IDE interface.

 

Why I think each:

1) transferring data over USB 2 should be talked about in gigs/minute, not in megs/minute; after looking up transfer rates for USB, the reason they quote "12-480 MBps" is due to the USB speeds it supports: Low-speed is 1.5 Mb/s, Full-speed is 12 Mb/s, Hi-Speed is 480 Mb/s. That's theoretical maximum.

 

2) Transfer to your external HD and writing to DVD is slow. This could point to two different problems: slow USB and slow HD; or slow USB, and HD & DVD drives on same cable, with the potential of a slow HD.

 

3) If you have slow USB, and you have a fast HD, then you would still have slow DVD burns if they are on the same cable.

 

To fix each, I would:

1) get add-on USB port card ($50~)

2) upgrade hard-drive to newest-whiz-bang ($100-300~)

3) check that hard-drive and DVD burner are not on same cable and move each to seperate IDE cables (channels) (couple minutes of time, slightly technical).

 

There's somewhere to start.

 

Fast hard-drives usually speed up everything you'd be doing--think 7200 or 10,000 RPM.

 

http://www.sisoftware.net/ has a benchmark program that could show where you are slow.

 

-- SH

[chris_werner]

5400 rpm hard drives are slooooow. Look into 7200 or 10800 ($$$) for a real performance increase - the 10800 do cost bucks, but you'll see a big difference as well. I won't even use a 5400 rpm in a laptop. Upping the speed of the connection won't often do you any good with a slow rpm drive.

 

Before you buy anything, though, check the disk fragmentation - even if you store nothing on the main drive, it will still fragment quickly and that affects the speed of everything.

 

USB 2 shouldn't be your bottleneck, or at least it doesn't compute for me that it results in the slow times you are seeing - I agree with Skylan that it could be that you only have USB 1.1 on the machine - that would explain the rates. But it would be unusual to have only USB 1.1 on a machine that is new enough to have a dual core processor. You should be able to just upgrade the card if that is the problem.

 

So, my order would be 1. Defragment (both internal and external drives), 2. Check/upgrade the USB ports on the computer, 3. New hard drives.

[r_johnston]

There may be some things you can do to speed up the system, for a reasonable cost.

 

1, If you load a lot of images from a card, to the HD, then copy to DVD, and delete them...

 

This causes a lot of fragmentation on the drive, if it has not first been defragged.

I use "Diskeeper" to defrag the drives, as it does it automatically in the background or whenever you set it

to the job. This means it is _always_ defragged, so it does not have to search all over the drive to find pieces

of the image to copy to the DVD.

 

2. When you delete files or folders of any kind from the drive, it leaves a LOT of entries in the registry,

which are no longer valid. When you delete a program you do not want, many times it leaves registry entries and

files behind. This slows down all operation, as each cycle the system is going through invalid registry entries.

When I cleaned my registry, it removed 2397 invalid entries the first time. My computer than ran like it did

when new. If you also do a lot of surfing, websites leave a lot of little files on the system which add to the

problem. Not to mention spyware, etc.

 

I'm using Uniblue to clean the system, which is the best of many programs Ive tried to keep the registry

cleaned out, and .tmp or

other junk files off the HD. . . It also has an excellent spyware checker which finds spyware Norton and others

do not find.... My DVD only is a much slower burner, but it does not take 40 minutes to burn a DVD with Roxio

which I burn them with.

 

It can also help to speed up your work, if the operating system and programs are on one drive, and your data or

images are on a separate drive. This helps keep the system drive from getting so fragmented, so programs work

faster.

 

Another thing I did to speed things up, was increase my memory from 2 to 4 gigs... With more memory programs do

not have to keep swapping things out to the cache on the drive.

 

If you use Lightroom to process images with, you can also have it write them to the DVD. I write my DVD's at

night after Im finished with all other things on the computer. If you run other programs which write to the

drive, while you write a DVD, it slows it down. Mine are burned while I watch TV, or read, etc, and so I'm not

sitting there waiting for it to finish.

[bob_osullivan]

Wow! Lot's of good feedback here. And everyone seems to have a peice of the puzzle. The veridict? It seems that XP cannot support USB II at least not consistently, even with SP3. Also, it cannot consistently support dual core with AMDs. Yes there were some maintenance issues but I think the IRQ conflicts were more limiting.

 

In the end it would have taken some hours, an OS upgrade $200 and some misc hardware (more ram) to get this thing almost working. So, it was cheaper to replace the box and do a forlklift upgrade. I got a tri core AMD Phenom, 1/2 gig HD, 4 GB ram ATI graphics $500 box. SCREAMS now!

 

Thanks again for everyone's help.