Hard drive speed test

[dave milbut]

I've been thinking of posting something similar for a couple of days. In addition to a hard drive test, can anyone recommend some overall system performance tests using PS?

[Nathaniel Victor]

I've heard about PSbench, but haven't tried it.

<http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Cafe/4363/download.html>

[Enrique Ivern]

If you want a comparison chart, Sandra has that.

There's a nice program called CDCheck (free) that you can use to check if your backups are ok.
It additionally posts the actual speed at which it is working, so you can have an idea of what is happening with your own files. For example, I could see clearly that files on my disks were running faster in a raid configuration.

[Michael B. Field]

Sisoft Sandra is a very good benchmarking program that will give tons of information, benchmark drives and ram and give comparisons to other systems and even suggest options to speed things up. Shareware and pro.

[Pierre Courtejoie]

Beware, some benchmarks are biased : they run several times a peculiar function that will benefit more one platform than the other. I've been wondering about a relaible Photoshop Benchmark, since Chris says that PS bench is not...
maybe using real-life actions sets, like Mathias' Digital deluxe toolbox on a given image?

Of course, there are different users (web guys, Photo ones, etc... so it is difficult to satisfy everyone...

[Pierre Courtejoie]

Also, there is no integrated test for hard drives speed in Photoshop.

The definitive place for hard drives benchmarking and reliability is Storage review. you can get a comparative test of all modern hd's here : <http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html> and you can choose the benchmark used.

But we have also to know if Photoshop needs more STR (sustained transfer rate) or access speed, or if it will benefit from command queuing and reordering (in SCSI hd's and possible to do in SATA but not yet implemented, maybe active somehow on IBM/Hitachi HD's)

As for Photoshop, I think that Daryl Pritchard has also one on his site, <http://jazzdiver.com/photoshop/pc_test.htm> but AFAIK, the results have not been updated for a while (like at PS bench (strange, as it defeats the purpose of a benchmark tool, somehow, to be able to compare current setups with other ones)

At Xbit Labs, they had several test in the past that specifically avoided HD access : <http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/photoshop-platform.html>

<http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/photoshop-dual.html>

<http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/ph-p42800-xp2800.html>

and also other ones using psbench: <http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/opteron-1_15.html>
_____________
there are a lot of test with undisclosed filters, not very useful, but numbers anyways :

<http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=thunderk8&page=8>

<http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html>

in russian, but the numbers are in english : <http://www.lexa.ru/articles/photoshop.html>
we have also to take in account the fact that users don't use Photoshop only like the raw test at Rob Galbraith (sadly not updated for Adobe Camera Raw) <http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-4869-4882>

[Pierre Courtejoie]

Dave, did you find what you needed?