Interesting Approach to Referenced Masters

Question

With the usual caveat that your mileage may vary, would like to share the results of an experiment in using referenced masters.
My son in law is a very talented photographer who, for family reasons, prefers to edit on a laptop (17" MacBookPro) rather than a desk top set up.
He has upgraded to a 500 GB HD, but is running out of room. Time to relocate some masters to be sure that the has lots of space on his HD for system ops, caching, etc.
He has his old HD, now mounted in a cheap USB 2.0 case. I pointed out to him that as masters are write once/read many, and not even used that often in normal Aperture operations, putting the masters on the HD would probably incur very little loss of speed, and, with enough RAM, even that would be a one time only pause when loading.
So he moved a project or two and all was well. The difference in loading time was barely noticeable.
Then he got clever, and noted that he had a Time Capsule. What would happen if he hung the USB HD off of the Time Capsule so that:
-- It did not clutter up his lap or desk and,
-- The masters would still be accusable anywhere in the house.
The short answer was that there was no noticeable drop in performance. I was surprised.
For the record, the files in question are Nikon D90 NEF. Part of this effort is to clear up space on the existing HD to make ready for the arrival of a D800. Obviously, the D800 NEF will be larger, but I doubt that there will be much performance change as we are still talking about a very linear read of an unfragmented file.
Some small evidence that the time to load a RAW master into memory may be limited as much by bus speed and rendering speed as it is by HD performance. Clearly, HD read/write is very important for updating the versions/previews/etc., but probably the least important consideration for where you place your masters.
Offered for your consideration. Would be hearing the experiences of others.
DiploStrat

Answer 1

Kirby,
He doesn't do much/any brushing; most of his heavy editing is with the NIK suite.
As I understand Aperture, brushing will hammer the GPU and the Version file, but it ignores the Master, once it is loaded. This all makes sense. I also run Aperture 3 on a 2006 MBP with 2 GB of RAM and a 240 GB SSD. I can brush, edit, etc. but when working at full res with so little RAM there are definite pauses, some as long as 30 seconds, in the work flow. The short answer here is that even a fast SSD can't catch up to a real shortage of RAM and an older generation of GPU, only two cores, etc.
If you have enough RAM to get the entire Master into RAM and keep it there without it paging out, then the fact that the Master was initially on a slow drive should have no impact on your working speed.
Léonie,
This was all done under Snow Leopard. Most interesting links. Leaving aside all of the screaming and shouting, it seems silly that Lion should actively shut off this feature. Indeed, given all of Apple's push for iClouds, etc., you would think that this is exactly the kind of "bonus" feature that they would be touting. Referenced Masters require a bit of extra work on the part of the user, keeping track of whether the drive is direct connected, or networked shouldn't be that much extra. If anything, and given that Aperture can challenge even the healthiest Macs in a way that Lightroom doesn't seem to, the fact that you can sometimes gain speed by putting your Masters on slower hardware is actually a plus.
There is a small possibility that this is related to the idea that Aperture is a single user, not a collaborative system. But then, if I were releasing Aperture 4 tomorrow, I would come up with a multi-user version. There is a small, but vocal group of Aperture users who really want/need a multi-user, or at least a multi-computer workflow. Couple that with iCloud and the potential for newsies, sports shooters, and others, are amazing.
DiploStrat