After I got Photoshop CS5 I was a bit disappointed at how long it was taking for HDR photos to process when using the new CS5 HDR Pro Module. I know that CS5 is now a 64bit application and therefore capable of addressing more than 2GB of memory . I decided to ask my Twitter follower their opinion about this. Should I get more memory or a faster hard drive (SSD) Some people said, get more memory it will make a difference when using CS5, others said I should really go to a faster hard drive. I currently have a 7200 RPM 320GB hard drive on my mid 2009 uni-body 13″ 2.53GHz Macbook Pro.

Well since I am in the process of getting an Other World Computing (OWC) an Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD 200GB SATA 3.0G/s Solid-State Drive for review I figured I would also get more memory now and see what difference that made. I had a big fat gift certificate from Amazon, so I decided to use it on 8GB of Crucial memory, for a whooping $388.99 U.S.

Results

Below are the before and after  test results of my Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM versus, 8GB of RAM. As you will see the results are underwhelming at best for the money. These are real world results, your milage may vary: and if it does let me know.

As you can see the boot time between the two is a bit better from a cold start, but the actual time form the login screen until to all the icons on my desktop to stop bouncing, is actually worse with 8GB of RAM. I can’t explain this, but I was frankly disappointed with this first result.

This test measures the time it took to start up some of my most used applications. The biggest bang for the buck was in the 12.2 second improvement on the start time of Photoshop CS5. I attribute this dramatic improvement to the fact that CS5 is running in 64bit mode, and because of that, it is able to use the multi core processor, and access most of my 8GB of RAM. This is very beneficial to me, and made me feel better after the disappointing boot tests.

This test took 3 HDR photos chosen in Lightroom 2, and then imported them to the CS5 HDR Pro Module. The time shown is how long it took for the entire process from the moment I press “Merge to HDR in Photoshop,” to the moment the CS5 HDR Modules finished loading. Although I gained 31.3 seconds by using 8GB or RAM, I was not impressed. This same operations took just 43.3 seconds on my 2007 2X2.66GHZ Dual Core Intel Xeon MacPro with 8GB of RAM (I know Apples and Oranges).

Is spending $389 on 8GB of RAM worth it? In this case I’d say …not so far. Perhaps when I add the SSD drive to the system I’ll seem much more dramatic results. Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that  until more applications can access RAM, I could have spent the money in better ways. Let me know your thoughts and experiences by writing a comment.

I have been waiting for the iPad Camera Connection Kit to arrive, since one of the main things I want to use my iPad for is to view pictures and store pictures in the field.  Here are a few thought and tests on this addition to my iPad.

• iPad Camera Connection Kit had no trouble recognizing the Canon G11 RAW or JPG file formats. As soon as I plugged in the card, I was prompted by the iPad to select “all” or simply select which pictures I wanted to upload.
• iPad Camera Connection Kit recognized the Nikon D700 USB connection ,and had no trouble uploading NEF (Nikon RAW) files. These files were instantly available for me to view on the iPad.
• Once I plugged the iPad to iTunes, the pictures transferred to iPhoto in the format (RAW or JPG) which I had originally used. Since I’m not an iPhoto user I wish I could choose Light Room as a place to upload the photos. Currently the choice in the photo tab of the iPad are, iMovie, Aperture, or the Picture folder.  However using Phone View from eCamm.com I found that I could navigate to the Disk/DCIM folder on the iPad and I could see the 100IMPRT folder where the RAW files are stored. at that point I could have just copied these into a local directory and then to  Adobe Light Room.
• At the suggestion of @fishbones on Twitter, I tried to see if I could plug my Sandisk Extreme USB 2.0 3in1 Card Reader . When I did this the iPad did see the photos, but when I tried to upload the photos to the iPad it gave me the following error. “Accessory Unavailable The attached accessory uses too much power”. My conclusion is that even though this card reader did not work, others may . 
  
• I also tried to upload some video from an SD card that had been used by my Canon HFS100 video camera. Again the iPad did not like this device and gave the “This accessory is not supported by the iPpad.” I would imagine that some developers may be able to tap into this hardware with independent apps in the future.
• I attached a USB drive formatted both in FAT and OSX formats. The iPad Camera Connection Kit did not recognize the format. In the card I had a Pages document, a Keynote Document and a PDF.
• Twitter follower @tchaten wanted me to see if it would recognize audio files in an SD card. It did not, but I suspect that applications may be able to make this function in the future.
• Of course I tried to plug this into the iPhone 3gs and it gave the error “This accessory is not supported by the iPhone.”

It’s no secret if you are a listener or reader of my blog or Twitter that I am a crazy person when it come to storage, back ups etc. One of my routines is to mark any new hard drives that I buy with the date of purchase (using a black marker). I do this because depending on the drive .I know that they tend to go bad in three to five years.

I’ve had my MacPro since March of 2007 ,and soon after I bought that MacPro I got three hard drives to fill up all four drive bays. I had set a calendar reminder on the day that I bought them to remind me in three years to check if those drives were still good. That reminder came up last Friday.

Well I had not replaced any of the three drives , so I used this neat utility called SMART Utility by Volitans Software. The software was $25 and I downloaded the trial version which lets you open the application a total of four (4) times before having to buy it.

The first time I opened this software it told me that all three of  the aforementioned hard drives were “failing.” Now, can I be 100% sure they were going to fail today, or next month? No, but that is all I needed to see. You see, even though 100% of the data on these three drives is backed up in at least two other places, I don’t like downtime. I hate downtime.

So I immediately opened up SMART Utility and paid the $25.00 to the developer. Why? Well it’s the right thing to do. This developer just saved me at least four hours of downtime, countless frustration and me having to tweet about how sad I was because my hard drives failed.

Next step, I already had a 150GB Western Digital Velociraptor in a drawer (drive one), and I bought two Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB  Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, with 32 MB Cache (drives two and three). As you read this I’m in the process of cloning the MacPro drives to the new ones. I also just marked today’s date (Using a black marker) on them. Lastly, I set up a calendar date of 4/19/2013 reminding me to check if my drives are still good. Sure they will likely be in a replacement computer by then, but an once of prevention goes a long way to saving frustration when it comes to hard drive failure.

In my anxiousness to get my iPad grew, I bought the iPad version of this great application right away.

Since then, I found out that I did not need to do that. So, please read this article from Agile Software that explains it all. I’m sure the application will rock, as all products by Agile generally do.

I don’t blame Agile, but I would hate to see you spend extra cash. If you also bought both versions, Contact app store support for a refund.

Paul Kent and his team at IDG has pulled off what many thought would be the impossible a successful Macworld Expo 2010. So many peopled feared that Macworld Expo without Apple was dead.

I’m here to tell you that the Macworld Expo is alive and well. I had a fantastic time at  the Macworld Expo. Not only did I have the fantastic social interactions with friends and colleagues that I treasure, but I got plenty of business done.

As a press pass holder I was able to get 25 interviews with vendors that I’ll be able to share with you in the next weeks. This would simply not have been possible without Apple not being there , and therefore giving me more time to interview the developers and vendors that you want to hear about.

Congratulations Paul, you are a class act , and have put on a class show. See you next year. Here are Paul Kent’s thoughts on what’s next for Macworld Expo

The web comic PC Weenies has been a long time friend of the show and Krishna is a talented and prolific cartoonist and commentator. I usually do a guest apperance on the PC Weenies web page at least once a year. Also Krishna is in the process right now of updating all of the art work and design colors of this web page.

Todays cartoon is an event I remember oh so well and captures some of the hype that is building up around the alleged Apple Table

Here is a sneak peak at todays PC Wennies. Please click here to see whole cartoon

As you all know I’m a part of the Friends In Tech network and we have done holiday audio dramas in the past. This year we have A Geek Christmas Story a fun a very geeky take off on the movie A Christmas Story (affectionately known at my house as “You’ll poke your eye out).

I hope you enjoy the audio. Why are you still reading this, go listen now.

When I got the call about a week ago from Mark Fuccio Sr. Director Products & Markets about some new products that Drobo was about to announce, I must say I was not too surprised. In my book they have been consistently setting the bar higher for themselves when it comes to backup storage, and beyond raid solutions. For full disclosure purposes I need to say that Drobo has been an advertiser on the show in the past, however currently I have not financial agreement with Drobo.

Data Robotics yesterday announced the new  Drobo S and Drobo Elite models to take the already highly successful Drobos to the next step. These new models give us more storage, faster performance, and even more security.

The new Drobo S kicks it up up a notch and introduces a solution for the Small Office \ Home Office (SoHo) market as well as creative professionals. With more storage capacity and faster speeds this will be a great solutions for anyone wants a faster Drobo then past consumer\prosumer offerings

To me the big deal about the Drobo S is eSATA connectivity. This will provide faster speeds and give even more flexibly for those who want more than just a FireWire 800 ports and a USB 2.0 port. In addition the Drobo S has another trick up it’s hard drive sleeve. There is an additional drive bay making that a total of five (5) versus the consumer model which offers four (4). This will give you up to 10TB of storage (if you use five 2TB drives).

In my discussion with  Mark we spoke about what this speed bump means. Data Robotics claims that the Drobo S is 50 percent faster than the current four drive Drobo, while offering 90 percent of the performance of the Drobo Pro. I don’t have a Drobo S review unit to test right now, but I did just get a Drobo Pro review unit which I will review on the podcast in December.

If the claim that the Drobo S will offer 90 percent of the performance a Drobo Pro is true, then the Drobo S should be a screamer.  According to  Data Robotics they say averages of about 80 megabytes per second with the Drobo S . Can you say wow?

One of the features discussed in my press briefing was the “Data scrubbing” feature. This enables the drive to read every block of data and repair any data corruption it finds. This self-healing magic is just what a small business owner or a creative professional needs to ensure that their data is safe. If that’s not enough for you, the Drobo S also adds dual drive redundancy. This means that if two drives fail, you’re still covered.

Data Robotics announced another product yesterday for the small or middle size business that is bound to shake things up in IT budgets for 2010. The Drobo Elite, provides multi-host support with LUN affinity for consolidating storage across multiple servers.

They have added an additional dual gigabit ethernet ports which will provide additional reliability and throughput. The new Drobo Elite also works with multiple workstations, enabling the use of Drobo at the same time.

The Drobo Elite has a faster processor than the Drobo Pro, and offers an eight drive capacity with single or dual drive redundancy. This means the Drobo Elite can have a storage capacity of up to 16TB.

The Drobo S without drives is priced at $799; but can be bought with five 2TB drives for $1799. The Drobo Elite in its basic configuration sells for $3499; but if you want it ready to work out of the box you can pick it up with 8, 2TB drives, it’s $5899. Here is a link to the full Drobo line of products.

The Drobo brand in my opinion continues to lead the way in making solutions for consumers, creatives and small businesses. They won’t break the bank when compared to their peers in traditional “Raid” or “Sans” solutions, but they do offer up a real alternative for these market segments. . For more information visit Data Robotics.

How to get more inputs and outputs out of your Mac.

I discovered a feature in Mac OS X Snow Leopard that I have a feeling has been there for a while but I just never new about. It’s called aggregate audio.

Your Mac’s built-in audio hardware lets you record a single stereo track or two mono tracks at the same time. But the problem is that if you want to record from two separate audio devices (two USB mics, or two separate sound cards )there is no easy way to do this.

Well while poking around the Utilities \ Audio Midi Setup application on OS X Snow Leopard I found out that yes you can combine audio sources and create an “Aggregate” device. In the example below I took two USB mics (Samson CO1U and a Blue Snow Flake), and I created one aggregate input device out of the two discrete devices.

To get the rest of the story let me send you to the experts at Apple. There is an article called “How to Maximize Your Inputs with Aggregate Audio” by Joe Gore, and a follow up “Recording Your Aggregate Audio Device in GarageBand or Logic Pro”. (from the looks of this article this is not new to Snow Leopard).

Now this is NOT as easy as using software like WireTap Anywhere from Ambrosia (no this is not an ad), but it’s also not $129.00. Give it a try yourself and let me know how it works for you. I will be playing more with this for sure, and maybe we can get Don McAllister  from Screencasts On Line to do a screencast for us.

Example

Some of the Mac Rountable crew got together during Blogworld Expo and Chuck Joiner recorded a vide \ audio of us having fun, and giving thoughts about the conference.

Check it out here