M.2 performance speeds

[randallh54833452]

A little background - I'm a real estate photographer that runs approx. 1100 images through a Photoshop process each day.  I won't bore you with the process, but I tweek about 1100 24 meg RAW files and convert them to jpegs.  The process runs automatically in Adobe Camera RAW.

The entire process, using a Solid State Sata Drive, takes about 90 minutes.

I have recently purchased a Samsung M.2 drive with the potential for 32 gb/sec (as opposed to the 6 gb/sec Sata SSD).  The thought is that I can cut my processing time from 90 minutes to, say, 15 or 20 minutes.

My question is, is this possible, or is there some inherent speed limit in the Adobe products that will keep me from achieving these speeds?

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Without knowing anything about the actual system, nobody can tell you much. That said, it is unlikely you will see any further speed gains. Clearly even in your current scenario the actual processing is the bottleneck, not the storage. Even so, those 32 GBit/s are a theoretical value which you may not even achieve due to limitations on your PCI bus like your bandwidth hungry graphics card. You may also still choke it when reading and writing to and from the same drive. Really impossible to know without further really detailed info down to the actual motherboard specs, but I'd consider 15 or 20 minutes for 1100 Raw images illusory, anyway. You expect your images to open, process and be saved in one second or less? Impossible even on the most beefed out system. You know, it's not just opening the files, but ACR and otehr code needs to be loaded, GPU acceleration initialised, buffers schuffled around in memory. Perhaps you can trim it down to 60 or 70 minutes, but your current scenario sounds pretty solid already. 6 seconds per image isn't that much, come to think of it...

Mylenium

[Trevor.Dennis]

I'll add a 'me too' to what Mylenium has told you.  Try an experiment running your RAW processing action/process on some files already loaded to RAM.  Time it and multiply by 1100.  I doubt you'll get much change out of 90 minutes.  Especially if already using an SSD.

What operating system are you using?  If Windows 10, take a look at Resource Monitor and check drive activity while processing your RAW files.  Unless the relevant drive activity is maxed out, you'll not see any difference with faster drives.  I'd still like to have an M.2 drive though

I've invited Mike Irish to this thread.  He'd possibly be able to advise you better as he has a speed demon system.

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Mike%201%20Irish

[D Fosse]

Generally, raw processing is much more CPU-limited than "straight" pixel editing, which is mostly about shuffling big data sets around.

Parametric editing computes each adjustment from the raw data - it goes back to scratch every time.

This is easy to see for yourself if you have Lightroom - just try to Export a large batch while watching what goes on. CPU tends to remain in the 50% to 90% range, only briefly interrupted by read/write operations, while memory usage is stable at a fairly low level.