Large folders slow to load- photogs and SSD guys help please.

AMCJavelin74 · 02-04-2016, 01:25 PM

On my laptop (currently has a maze of my external Western Digital hard drives wired to it) and desktop (in storage but same symptoms), I run Mint 13. Mint runs great, boots quickly, etc. My only problem is that I have tons of pictures on the HDDs, often of high res with my photography hobby. I open the folder I want, sub folder, etc. until I get to where I have 500 or more pictures from a certain event or shoot. Well, of course the more pictures the slower it loads, especially once 1k files are reached and beyond. I notice some improvement by going by 'list' not 'small picture preview', but for finding a specific picture is a headache without the small previews.

So...
*My computers aren't the latest and greatest. Both have about 2.0-2.5ghz dual core processors, laptop 2gigs of ram, desktop has 4gigs. Desktop has old school fat ribbon for HDD cables, not the newer faster type (that's been out for a few years now, I forget the technical term for this).

I have experimented by copying a large file to my internal HDD, one with about 2500 pictures, and the problem is the same, both laptop and desktop.

How 'worth it' is a SSD for applications like this? *external HDDs use USB inerface. I generally acquire used Windoze PCs and convert them to Linux, so I know my latest and greatest is probably from 2012 or so. Would I get good results with a major hardware update?

Pyrotech72 · 02-04-2016, 09:30 PM

It sounds like your IDE (parallel ATA) internal hard drive isn't your bottleneck, especially if you don't have SATA ports. If you do have SATA ports, and you want to try an SSD, I would suggest a Sandisk Extreme Pro, or alternatively an UltraII. Of course, if you find it doesn't do the trick, you can "take it with you" to newer computer hardware, which is what I think you need. If your budget allows, do multiple internal drives to increase performance further, and of course, plenty of RAM.

What file size and megapixels are you working with?

AMCJavelin74 · 02-20-2016, 11:40 AM

Most pictures are up to 16 megapixel jpegs, 5mb or smaller per image.

Pyrotech72 · 02-21-2016, 08:18 AM

I also have a 16 megapixel camera. I'm going to do some "user experience" comparisons with 1000's of photos between my SSD and an old external USB drive. I expect the USB drive to make me crazy because the SSD reads 12x faster. (40MB/s vs 500MB/s)

Test parameters and results:
The data set is 2017 jpeg files totaling 3.7GB (smallest file 1 MB, largest 5.4MB) with exact copies on a Sandisk Ultra II, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB, and an old WD Passport 320GB. Each partition in the testing has plenty of free space.

The results were not as dramatic as you might think. With the SSD, initial loading of all thumbnails into Dolphin took just under 90 seconds. Only slightly longer with the Barracuda. The WD Passport required about 130 seconds. (Read speeds on benchmarks: 502, 98, and 39MB/s, respectively.) Subsequent loads were much faster (in the 15 second area). I think there's some kind of thumbnail cache file in action here.

Seeing that nearly 13x the bandwidth gave such a small improvement, I'm still thinking newer hardware is what you'll need to speed things up. Things like Core i7 and 16GB or more RAM.

AMCJavelin74 · 03-04-2016, 01:50 PM

Sounds like time for a new build for me

beachboy2 · 03-04-2016, 04:41 PM

AMCJavelin74,

Quote:

Sounds like time for a new build for me.

You are probably right, a self-build desktop PC with some nice new shiny bits is what is needed!

You may get some ideas from these two articles:

https://photographylife.com/the-ulti...tography-needs

http://www.pcworld.com/article/25929...ographers.html

SSD boot/system drive, plus at least two large conventional HDDs, Intel i5 or i7 CPU, plenty of RAM, decent mobo, power supply and case.

Most importantly, have a backup plan.

SSD and single HDD featured here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d-drive-36892/

I am sure other LQ members will be only too pleased to suggest other ways of reducing your cash pile very rapidly!

Pyrotech72 · 03-04-2016, 11:33 PM

Yes, folders with such a Brobdingnagian number of photos is highly processor intensive. Mine is a Core i7-4820k (4 cores). If you want to go all-out, the 8-core i7-5960X is out (for about $1000, speaking of reducing your cash pile). Both are LGA2011, which enables quad-channel RAM. Memtest86 measures my memory bandwidth at about 20000 MB/s.

beachboy2 · 03-05-2016, 11:24 AM