Windows computing for photography: learning

If your not interested in gear related stuff, look away now. These are some general ramblings on my computer gear.

I'm going through a learning loop at present on configuring my computer for best performance for photography. I'm learning (or re-learning) some things hitherto unknown to me.

In the past, my computing was mainly based around number crunching or gaming. Each iteration meant faster processor, more RAM, Better graphics card, decent amount of storage. Most of the slow-downs were up at the processing end of the chain. A computer lasted about 5 years, with a mid-life hard drive addition.

Now I'm finding things a lot different. My computer is plenty fast enough, and never seems to run out of memory unless I run huge panoramas, lots of apps or there's a software memory leak. However, I can't get enough storage. I bought a NAS box, which is really good and a great archive solution for me. Even on fast wireless, the speed is acceptable as I'm not doing lots of read-write. I just filled my primary storage, and so went off looking for something else. I'm trying to reduce reliance on in-case storage for my mass-storage, I find that a lot less portable between system upgrades. In-case for working stuff only.

Here's a big learning I've made: don't use regular network storage on a Windows system. I'm trying but it's hopeless. even with every speed tweak I can do without breaking things, I barely get more than broadband speed out of the transfers. It's actually faster transferring from the NAS box back to the network storage than from PC to storage over Ethernet. It's all in Windows network overhead. A royal pain. I can see a gigabit NAS solution in my future. at least the box I bought can be used a USB drive, which does work properly.

Then there's the actual processing end of things. I'm finding I run apps that do a lot of disk read-write, caching, database and the like. That means fast storage solutions, robust to a lot of read-write. That robustness is important: kind of rules out SSD for now. So I'm looking at RAM-based solutions, there's a couple out there. Kind of gets back to the old days of RAM cache configuration.

I've been contemplating running a Windows-over-Linux solution, something like the old Windows 3.1 with separate OS and application layers. I like that model from a conceptual pov. I will not be going Mac. No way, no how - unless prices crash and user control increases dramatically. I know I could run Windows-over-Mac but then I might as well go the whole hog to Linux. Of course, there's plenty of Mac for photographers advice around, not so much for Windows users.

And I want value for money. That's the rub. I don't want to throw cash at this problem. I want bang for the buck. I don't mind shelling out for lots of storage, that's a consequence of lots of files. But I've always disliked the idea that I must get a faster machine because the software or OS no longer supports the old stuff. While hardware seem to get more efficient, programmers seem to get lazier.

So off I go to figure this out. If I learn anything useful, I'll post more. And if you, dear readers, know something, post some comments (no Mac stuff, please).