Best strategy for using external drive to speed up painfully slow mac mini

I have Intel core duo, and LaCie external drive. Many programmes are almost unusably slow. Like Adobe Photoshop, Garageband, Logic Express, SecondLife etc... (would have been nice if apple had told me the 'improved spec' would mean so many programmes would no longer work!)
I am looking for the best way to utilise the external drive. I have now set up to boot from the LaCie, but it is no better. Id like to know whats best to do with the two drives. Would one be best kept as clear as possible? And should that be the bootup drive? Originally, the idea was to increase storage and backup. Now it is anything at all, that will make this computer faster. My old G4 PowerMac is actually faster and more reliable!
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)
powerMac G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

There is no way to improve on the graphics card in your mini - it's built into the logic board and can't be bypassed. However, while that may be a disappointment, it has to be said that by and large the graphics system in the mini is actually very capable, and is probably not the cause of the problem.
What IS the primary issue I suspect is the 512Mb RAM, which on a Core Solo running applications such as Photoshop is so woefully inadequate that it would be a surprise if your old G4 wasn't somewhat faster!
The problem is that Photoshop (the version you have) is not Intel-native, so while it runs, it requires Rosetta. Thus you have a RAM-hungry operating system, a RAM hungry application and a RAM-hungry translation package, all running at the same time. To add to that, since the software is not Intel-native, it has to be translated on-the-fly so considerable CPU time is needed to devote to that process in addition to all the other things the system needs to do in order to run.
Thus your external drive would not help much when used as a boot drive because even though it is likely to be somewhat faster than the internal, the limited RAM of the system will be forcing so many 'paging' actions (writing and reading memory blocks to the hard drive) that any speed gains will be rather heavily masked.
Most of the performance problems you experience can be resolved by upgrading RAM to 2Gb, simply because that will allow MacOS, Rosetta and your software a lot more room to breathe and significantly reduce the paging activity of the system such that then booting from the external will show notable improvements in responsiveness.
Alternatively, you may find that there are Intel-native alternatives to your software which may be available at reasonable cost and provide the features you need. Good examples are such things as GraphicConverter, which is shareware and does much of what Photoshop can do, and NeoOffice, which is open source and free, which is a good alternative to MS Office. These would run without Rosetta and provide you with much improved performance as a consequence.

Similar Messages

Strategy for 2nd External Drive & Backup?

Hello All,
My IT guy at work just passed through my office and said, "you should be ghosting that thing." He was referring to my 1 Terrabyte hard drive that holds all of the footage I have recordered and transferred from my camera. I have now filled half of my LaCie 1TB external drive, and would like to prepare for the future.
So, advice is welcome, but I'll float a balloon of an idea. I propose purchasing a 2TB LaCie, so I have room to grow, as well as back up existing footage.
What do you think?
Thanks.
DG

Get a drive housing that supports removable drives. Granite Digital and Caldigit make such devices.
Back up to a drive then take it out an put it in a static resistant bag in a secure place. You can grow in an unlimited manner for much less than purchasing full housed drives.
x

Best strategy for using ACR7 in LR4 with CS5?

Although all my cameras are supported by ACR6, I would like to use the new process 2012 of ACR7. I would like to try LR4 (giving ACR7) but don't really want the expense of upgrading from CS5 to CS6 since I don't need any of the CS6 new facilities. But I would like to try the file organisation facilities of LR4 instead of Bridge (as well as having ACR7 of course).
I read that PSD files exported from LR4/ACR7 are not compatible with CS5. Is this correct? If so, is there a way around this, so that I can do final tweaks in CS5 to a 16bit file processed and output by LR4/ACR7?
Thanks for any advice you can offer.

As far as I've heard, you should get PS CS6 if you plan to use LR4. Full stop.
But, I did hear that there is a 'release candidate' version of ACR6.7 you can get from here: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2012/03/adobe-camera-raw-6-7-and-dng-converter-6-7 -available-on-adobe-labs.html. This wont show up if you try 'Auto Update' for whatever reasons. Hasn't for me, at least!
There have been no complaints with the compatibility of the ACR6.7 RC with LR4 and PS CS5.

HT1229 what is the best method for using a iphoto with an external hard drive for greater capacity?

what is the best method for using a iphoto with an external hard drive for greater capacity?

Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)
And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto
And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive
LN

Is it OK to use USB 2.0 connection for Glyph external drive and Mac Pro as project drive?

Is it OK to use a USB 2.0 connection for Glyph external drive and Mac Pro as project drive? I was told by Sweetwater tech support to use Firewire, but both the FW400 and FW800 connections crash my audio interface software mixer (Presonus' "Universal Control" software).
Both Firewire connections also create a 10 second hang for each Command-Save that I do.
USB 2.0 for the external drive seems to be working so far, but is there some reason I should be wary of using this as my go-to project drive? In other words, I am imagining that there was probably some definite reason that the tech support guy mentioned not to use it. But maybe not. It's a brand new Glyph. In any event, it's nice to have the 10 second hang eliminated, and I was just looking for some advice, since digging into the Presonus software issue could take some time.

If you have a mac pro, why not stick the external HDD inside via one of your many SATA cables & have it run 9 times faster than your USB?
Or stick a HDD CADDY in your mac pro, so you can slot in a full sized 3TB HDD for recording, and when you are done, pull it out & slip it in an external enclosure if you need to take it places?

Previously windows used external drive to be used in mac (and windows)

i´ve just bought a macbook and planned to use a couple of external drives i previously used on my pc with time machine and whatnot. only it seems they are write-protected in mac os, so they can´t be used as back-up drives. do i have to format them again using mac, or do it in windows, or is there a way around this? and can it be done so both mac and windows recognizes it as writable?
thanks

Dave Sawyer wrote:
They're probably formatted NTFS, which Mac OS X can read but not write. There are third-party NTFS drivers, one open-source and one commercial, but you can just reformat the drive as FAT32 (MS-DOS format in Disk Utility) and it will work just fine with both your Mac and Windows systems.
If the OPs intent is to use it with Time Machine, the external drive needs to be formatted HFS+ (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) via Disk Utility. I believe there is a Windows app that permits viewing of HFS+ drives. Since you have a 'couple' of external HDDs, it's probably best to use a dedicated HDD just for TM backups.

Best strategy for migrating GL 6 DW CS4?

First I gotta say that -- as decade-long user of several Adobe products -- Adobe has really screwed over long-time users of Adobe Golive. After a week of messing around with something that should be a slam dunk (considering the substatial amount of $ I've paid to Adobe over the years for multiple copies of GoLive 5, 6 and CS2), I can tell you Adobe's GL > DW migration utility ONLY works for sites created FROM SCRATCH in GL CS2 (they must have the web-content, web-data folder structure). This means that Adobe's migration utility only works for maybe 10% - 15% of the GoLive sites out there, and about 10% - 15% of Adobe's loyal GoLive customers, and it particularly screws over Adobe's longtime GoLive customers. Sweet! ( (Just like Adobe screwed over users of PhotoStyler -- which was a better image editor than PhotoShop, BTW.) Obviously, I would walk away from Adobe and make sure I never ever paid them another cent, but the Republican-Democrat "free market economy" has made sure I don't have that option.
So I've gotta make Dreamweaver work, which means I've gotta migrate several large sites (the biggest has 5,000 static pages and is about 2 gigs in size) from GoLive 6 (or GoLive CS2 with the older folder structure) to Dreamweaver CS4.
Which brings me to my question -- what's the best strategy for doing ths? Adobe's migration utility is a bad joke, so here's the alternative, real world plan I've come up with. I'd apreciate any suggestions or comments...
1) create copies of all my GL components in the content folders for my GL site (not in the GoLIve components folder)
2) replace the content of all GoLive compnents (in the GoLive components folder) with unque character strings, so that instead of a header with images and text, my old header would look something like xxxyyyzzz9
3) create a new folder called astoni in the root of my hard drive. Copy all my GoLIve web site content (HTML, images, SWF, etc.) into astoni in exactly the structure it was in with GL
4) create a new Dreamweaver site by defining astoni as the local location for my site, astoni\images as the location for images, etc.
5) use Dreamweaver and open the newly defined astoni site. Then open each of the GoLive components I copied into a content level folder in astoni, and drag each into the Dreamweaver Assets/Library pane, in order to create library items just like my old GoLive components
6) use Dreamweaver to Search & Replace out the unique text strings like xxxyyyzzz9 with the content of my new DW library items
7) refresh site view to make all the links hook up...
Thanks for your help. Hope this discussion helps others too...

Instead of ragging on people who are familiar with DW and Site Development, you should be gracious and accept the practical advice you've been given. A "best strategy" would be to read some tutorials and learn how to work with HTML, CSS and server-side technologies. Without some basic code skills, you're going to find DW an uphill, if not impossible battle.
Frankly, I don't have free time to hand-hold someone through the excruciating process of migrating a 5,000 page static site from GoLive to DW. And I doubt anyone else in this forum has either. We're not Adobe employees. We don't get paid to participate here. We are all product users JUST LIKE YOU.
I'm sorry you're frustrated. I'm also sorry for your clients. But the problem you have now isn't Adobe's fault. It's yours for not keeping up with server-side technologies or handing-off these huge static sites to more capable web developers. I'm not saying you need to buy anyone's books, but they are good resources for people willing to learn new things.
That said, maybe you should stick with GoLive. The software doesn't have an expiration date on it and will continue working long into the future. If you're happy using GL, keep using it to maintain your legacy sites. At the same time learn X/HTML, CSS & PHP or ASP. Use DW CS4 for the creation of new projects.
FREE Tutorial Links:
HTML & CSS Tutorials - http://w3schools.com/
From Tables to CSS Web Design Part 1 -
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/table_to_css_pt1.html
From Tables to CSS Web Design Part 2 -
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/table_to_css_pt2.html
Taking a Fireworks (or Photoshop) comp to a CSS based layout in DW
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/web_standards_layouts_pt1.html
Creating your first website in DW CS4 -
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/first_cs4_website_pt1.html
Guidance on when to use DW Templates, Library Items and SSIs -
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/ssi_lbi_template.html
Best of luck,
Nancy O.
Alt-Web Design & Publishing
Web | Graphics | Print | Media Specialists
www.alt-web.com/
www.twitter.com/altweb
www.alt-web.blogspot.com

Best strategy for buring dual layer DVD

I've got a project that won't fit on a single layer DVD, so I've got it set up for dual layer and "best quality" which results in a 7.38GB disk image. However, iDVD 8 warned me when burning the disk images that some utilities may not be able to burn a reliable dual layer disk copy and to use iDVD instead, does this include Disk Utility?
I always use Disk Utility to make copies, iDVD took almost 7 hours to burn the disk image, I can't afford to wait that long for each copy. So what's the best strategy for burning dual layer DVDs?

subsequent copies burn in far less time immediately after the first provide you don't quit iDvd
If you know ahead of time you'll need more than a few copies, I'd recommend burning from a disc image to the desktop and reducing the burn speed (4x or lower) I prefer to use Roxio Toast myself. But others have had success with Apple's Disc Utilities as well.

Best strategy for variable aggregate custom component in dataTable

Hey group, I've got a question.
I'd like to write a custom component to display a series of editable Things in a datatable, but the structure of each Thing will vary depending on what type of Thing it is. So, some Things will display radio button groups (with each radio button selecting a small set of additional input elements, so we have a vertical array radio buttons and beside each radio button, a small number of additional input elements), some will display text-entry fields, and so on.
I'm wondering what the best strategy for tackling this sort of thing is. I'm sort of thinking I'll need to do something like dynamically add to the component tree in my custom component's encodeBegin(), and purge the extra (sub-) components in encodeEnd().
Decoding will be a bit of a challenge, maybe.
Or do I simply instantiate (via constructor calls, not createComponent()) the components I want and explicitly call their encode*() and decode() methods, without adding them to the view tree?
To add to the fun of all this, I'm only just learning Faces (having gone through the Dudney book, Mastering JSF, and writing some simpler custom components) and I don't have experience with anything other than plain vanilla JSP. (No EJB, no Struts, no Tapestry, no spiffy VisualDevStudioWysiwyg++ [bah humbug, I'm an emacs user]). I'm using JSP 2.0, JSF 1.1_01, JBoss 4.0.1 and JDK 1.4.2. No, I won't upgrade to 1.5 (yet).
Any hints, pointers to good sample code? I've looked at some of the sample code that came with the RI and I've tried to navigate the JSF Blueprints stuff, but I haven't really found anything on aggregating components into a custom component. Did I miss something obvious?
If this isn't a good question, please let me know how I can sharpen it up a bit.
Thanks.
John.

Hi,
We're doing something very similar. I had a look at the Tomahawk Date component, and it seems to dynamically created InputText components in the encodeEnd(). However, it doesn't decode this directly (it only expects a single textual value). I expect you may have to check the request yourself in decode().
Other ideas would be appreciated, though - I'm still new to JSF.

Best practice for use of spatial operators

Hi All,
I'm trying to build a .NET toolkit to interact with Oracles spatial operators. The most common use of this toolkit will be to find results which are within a given geometry - for example select parish boundaries within a county.
Our boundary data is high detail, commonly containing upwards of 50'000 vertices for a county sized polygon.
I've currently been experimenting with queries such as:
select
from
uk_ward a,
uk_county b
where
UPPER(b.name) = 'DORSET COUNTY' and
sdo_relate(a.geoloc, b.geoloc, 'mask=coveredby+inside') = 'TRUE';
However the speed is unacceptable, especially as most of the implementations of the toolkit will be web based. The query above takes around a minute to return.
Any comments or thoughts on the best practice for use of Oracle spatial in this way will be warmly welcomed. I'm looking for a solution which is as quick and efficient as possible.

Thanks again for the reply... the query currently takes just under 90 seconds to return. Here are the results from the execution plan ran in sql*:
Elapsed: 00:01:24.81
Execution Plan
Plan hash value: 598052089
| Id | Operation | Name | Rows | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time |
| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 156 | 46956 | 76 (0)| 00:00:01 |
| 1 | NESTED LOOPS | | 156 | 46956 | 76 (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 2 | TABLE ACCESS FULL | UK_COUNTY | 2 | 262 | 5 (0)| 00:00:01 |
| 3 | TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| UK_WARD | 75 | 12750 | 76 (0)| 00:00:01 |
|* 4 | DOMAIN INDEX | UK_WARD_SX | | | | |
Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
2 - filter(UPPER("B"."NAME")='DORSET COUNTY')
4 - access("MDSYS"."SDO_INT2_RELATE"("A"."GEOLOC","B"."GEOLOC",'mask=coveredby+i
nside')='TRUE')
Statistics
20431 recursive calls
60 db block gets
22432 consistent gets
1156 physical reads
0 redo size
2998369 bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
1158 bytes received via SQL*Net from client
17 SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
452 sorts (memory)
0 sorts (disk)
125 rows processed
The wards table has 7545 rows, the county table has 207.
We are currently on release 10.2.0.3.
All i want to do with this is generate results which fall in a particular geometry. Most of my testing has been successful i just seem to run into issues when querying against a county sized polygon - i guess due to the amount of vertices.
Also looking through the forums now for tuning topics...

Using external drive in conjunction with music on my internal hard drive

ok i, like many others, have way too much music haha. i have a 250 GB external drive with all my music on there. This is working great but i'm tired of plugging the hard drive in, using firewire, and then having to eject it when i'm ready to leave. what i want to do is keep a small amount of music on my computer to listen to. I'd like to still be able to plug the hard drive in and listen to the remainder of my music through itunes. but i'm unsure of how to do this.
my library will be the music that is on my internal drive........so is there a way to set up an alternate library for my external drive? kinda like a playlist or new folder........any help is much appreciated. hope this all makes sense.....if not i'll try and reexplain.

also sorry if this is a reposted question.....i tried to search around the discussions and couldn't find the answer to my specific situation....actually didn't even see anyone trying to do what i'm talkin about.......again thanks for any help

What's best strategy for dealing with 40+ hours of footage

We have been editing a documentary with 45+ hours of footage and presently have captured roughly 230 gb. Needless to say it's a lot of files. What's the best strategy for dealing with so much captured footage? It's almost impossible to remember it all and labeling it while logging it seems inadequate as it difficult to actually read comments in dozens and dozens of folders.
Just looking for suggestions on how to deal with this problem for this and future projects.
G5 Dual Core 2.3 Mac OS X (10.4.6) 2.5 g ram, 2 internal sata 2 250gb

Ditto, ditto, ditto on all of the previous posts. I've done four long form documentaries.
First I listen to all the the sound bytes and digitize only the ones that I think I will need. I will take in much more than I use, but I like to transcribe bytes from the non-linear timeline. It's easier for me.
I had so many interviews in the last doc that I gave each interviewee a bin. You must decide how you want to organize the sound bytes. Do you want a bin for each interviewee or do you want to do it by subject. That will depend on you documentary and subject matter.
I then have b-roll bins. Sometime I base them on location and sometimes I base them on subject matter. This last time I based them on location because I would have a good idea of what was in each bin by remembering where and when it was shot.
Perhaps, you weren't at the shoot and do not have this advantage. It's crucial that you organize you b-roll bins in a way that makes sense to you.
I then have music bins and bins for my voice over.
Many folks recommend that you work in small sequences and nest. This is a good idea for long form stuff. That way you don't get lost in the timeline.
I also make a "used" bin. Once I've used a shot I pull it out of the bin and put it "away" That keeps me from repeatedly looking at footage that I've already used.
The previous posts are right. If you've digitized 45 hours of footage you've put in too much. It's time to start deleting some media. Remember that when you hit the edit suite, you should be one the downhill slide. You should have a script and a clear idea of where you're going.
I don't have enough fingers to count the number of times that I've had producers walk into my edit suite with a bunch of raw tape and tell me that that "want to make something cool." They generally have no idea where they're going and end up wondering why the process is so hard.
Refine your story and base your clip selections on that story.
Good luck
Dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Best size for SSD boot drive?

Hi,
I am looking to replace my optical drive from my iMac 27" with an SSD to be used as a boot drive and to hold my applications for faster loading etc..
I was wandering what would be the best size for a boot drive so that I dont overspend as SSD's are expenive.
Thanks for any help in advance.

The best size is the size you need to store OS X and your apps without getting the SSD full. For example, if OS X and your apps take less than 100 GB, you should consider a 128 GB SSD, and if they take 150 GB, go for a 256 GB SSD.
You can buy the SSD at OWC to guarantee the compatibility > http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/

Using external drive

I've got a MacBook Pro using OS Lion. I keep a lot of podcasts on my hard drive, and I'd like to store them on my external drive to save space on my mac HD. Is there an easy way to do this, or do I just have to copy them onto the external drive and delete them from the Mac drive?

Create a Folder on your External Drive... Open iTunes on your Mac... Drag & Drop the Podcasts to your External Drive...
Test that the Podcast on the External Drive opens and plays...
(I usually use Quicktime for playing these Podcasts)

Using external drive with store

Hi,
I have run out of room on my computer for my itunes library, so I am now storing it on an external hard drive. The problem is, now that I am trying to order tv shows from the store, it seems to be taking A LOT longer (estimated download time = 9 hours!!!) Is there anyway to keep most of my files on the external hard drive, but when downloading, download first to my laptop, then transfer to external drive later.
Also, unrelated, when I sync my ipod in this situation, will it know to look to the external hard drive's information?
Thank you.

All my songs, movies, music videos and TV shows are stored on an external hard drive. And my Mac mini and MBP are accessing these contents.
The external hardrive is hooked up to my Mac mini. My MBP is accessing the external hard drive wirelessly. If I download from iTunes on my MBP, it goes straight to the external hard drive wirelessly.
I only have an iPod shuffle. If I wanna sync it with any of the two Macs I have, it will pull the files from the external hard drive. Of course, it will be so much slower doing with the MBP.
Anyhow, the trick is to set the iTunes Music folder location at Preferences... > Advanced > General tab
If you forget to mount your external hard drive when you launch iTunes, iTunes will set the iTunes Music folder location to default which is in your Home > Music folder. All you have to do is to reselect the iTunes Music folder location to your external hard drive.
If you have not done it before, you could get iTunes to copy all your stuff to the desired location on your external hard drive.
Hope this helps.

Best strategy for using external drive to speed up painfully slow mac mini

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