How to get the best (ingest) performance from my old computer

[Gary Clennan]

Hi all.  Very new user here.     I have a 2017 iMac which I will be upgrading next year at some point.  In the meantime, I am looking for basic tips to get the best performance out of the dinosaur I have.  My setup now uses a card reader and external HD (both USB 3) and an older fusion drive in my iMac.  The first small shoot I did (about 100GB) took about 5hrs to ingest.  I left the default settings the same except that I copied the files to my local fusion drive upon ingest.  I also have a 2TB external portable SSD drive which may help but I haven't tried yet...

What would you suggest for a basic workflow?  Perhaps ingest everything temporarily to the SSD and make my initial selects there and then import those selects to Lightroom?  If so, how do I transfer those selects to LR (and the final location on my external HD)?  Just looking to get working on the clear keepers and then I can go back and have a closer look at the others after a day or two.  Thanks for your advice!  Super excited to get using this program!

[ahoward]

In response to the support ticket that you opened I had suggested that you try to copy the same data from the same source to the same destination using Finder instead of Photo Mechanic to compare the data transfer rate. What was the result of your test? Even if Finder copies the data twice as fast as Photo Mechanic is taking to Ingest, we're still talking about speeds less than the USB 2 spec, which would suggest some issue outside of Photo Mechanic. Can you also let us know which build of Photo Mechanic you are running?

[Gary Clennan]

In response to the support ticket that you opened I had suggested that you try to copy the same data from the same source to the same destination using Finder instead of Photo Mechanic to compare the data transfer rate. What was the result of your test? Even if Finder copies the data twice as fast as Photo Mechanic is taking to Ingest, we're still talking about speeds less than the USB 2 spec, which would suggest some issue outside of Photo Mechanic. Can you also let us know which build of Photo Mechanic you are running?

Thank you so much!  Finally did some transfer rate testing today and am now even more confused.    It seems like the opposite now where transferring through Finder is slower than an ingest.  PM Ver is 2024.8 and Build 7765 FYI.  Here are my quick results:

Test 1.  3GB of data.  Transferring direct from card reader to the internal Mac HD - 2min 11s.  Using ingest to same destination took 22s.

Test 2.  1GB of data.  Transferring direct from card reader to the internal Mac HD - 30s.  Using ingest to same destination took 13s.

Test 3.  1GB of data.  Transferring direct from card reader to the external SSD - 11s.  Using ingest to same destination took 13s.

Any suggestions.  I'm not too computer savy.

Thanks!

[ahoward]

So, if the disks were not ejected between tests, subsequent tests may get an unfair advantage, as the system may cache data that it has already accessed in order to speed up future similar operations, so Photo Mechanic may be benefitting from that. .

That being said, let's consider the data transfer from the card reader to Macintosh HD, where you said 1GB of data took 30 seconds. That is roughly 30MB/sec. USB 2 maximum speed is 60MB/sec (which is rarely actually achieved in practice), while the earliest USB 3 devices were capable of ~600MB/sec, and newer USB 3 hardware can achieve speeds even faster than that. This makes me wonder if the connection with the card reader is dropping down to USB 2 for some reason. Is the card reader's plugged in to a hub of adapter of some kind? Do you have any other cables to test?

[Gary Clennan]

Thank you!  The disks were not ejected between tests with the first 3GB data set.  They were for the 1GB data test.  I looked at the specs and I am pretty sure the 2017 iMac I use has USB 3 ports.  It is a newer CF Express card reader and I recall buying a good one with the fastest transfer speed at the time.  The card reader is plugged directly into the back of the iMac.  Will look for another cable but don't think I have one.  Thanks.

[Bob]

You could download either AJA System Test lite, or Black Magic Disk Speed Test (both free). They both allow you to easily measure the read/write speed of a card. You can then sub out one thing at a time (cable, reader) to spot any bottlenecks. You would be surprised how often I have found a cable is doing 10% or worse compared to another.

[Gary Clennan]

You could download either AJA System Test lite, or Black Magic Disk Speed Test (both free). They both allow you to easily measure the read/write speed of a card. You can then sub out one thing at a time (cable, reader) to spot any bottlenecks. You would be surprised how often I have found a cable is doing 10% or worse compared to another.

Thanks Bob.