which computer components are most critical for scanning?

[jrhandyman]

Out of curiosity, what is the price of that Dell build?[/QUOTE]

Price is $1299 from Costco

 

[SpikeyJohnson]

O wow that is a great deal. Mine was about $1100 and I already had my video card, 3 hard drives, CD Drive, and monitors. I would definitely jump on that deal. The price is amazing for not having to build it yourself and for such high specs.

 

[bratkinson]

Or....ScanCafe - Photo Scanning, Negative Scanning, Slide Scanning, Video Transfer, Photo Restoration

Derrel - Thank you for that link! I've got close to 2K Ektachrome slides I've been toying with scanning myself...I even have an older NIKON slide scanner with stacker/feeder option, but it's all the cleanup (blow off dust, dust&speckles removal) and post-scan work that I'd really like to avoid. Doing it myself, even with that stacker, was about 2-3 minutes of my computer time after the slide had been scanned in. Re-doing faded Ektachromes to get the colors right can be tricky, and they obviously know how to do it. I'm SOLD!

 

[AlanKlein79 18]

Im the OP and have learned a lot from your answers, such as the scanning isn't what I need to be concerned about but the editing is. I'm going to be using Photoshop Elements to edit. The computer I'm looking at getting is a Dell with the following:

Processor & Memory:*
4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4770 processor 3.4GHz (8M Cache, up to 3.9 GHz)24GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz - *4 DIMMs

Drives:
2TB (7200 RPM) Hard Drive + 256GB Solid State DriveBlu-Ray Drive (Reads BRD, Writes DVD/CD)

Operating System:*
Microsoft® Windows 8.1 (64-bit)

Graphics & Video:
2GB AMD Radeon HD R9 270

My only concern is Windows 8, but thats another topic altogether.

Thanks to all for your advice!

I have exactly the same specs with my Dell XPS 8100 running Win 8.1. No problem. Sounds like you have the same model! Good luck with yours.

 

[AlanKlein79 18]

PS I'm running Lightroom 5 and Photoshop Elements 12 together with no delays. I went with what is probably more than I need. But somehow, with new programs coming out in the future, I always want to have extra speed and storage as I've always found it limited later on. One thing though, Don't forget to get a decent monitor. I did spend a lot a calibratable monitor. (NEC Multisync PA242W with Spectraview II auto-calibrator sensor and software.) Probably more than is necessary but again, I'm looking to keep this monitor a long long time.

 

[jhphotographer]

RAM is certainly going to be a major factor but what most people forget this the speed of the hard drive. I recommend getting a PC with an SSD drive.

 

[JerryLove]

RAM is certainly going to be a major factor but what most people forget this the speed of the hard drive. I recommend getting a PC with an SSD drive.

There is simply zero truth here.

A PSD file of a 20MP RAW is still <150MB with several alteration layers. A small machine has 4,000MB of RAM.
For fun I just opened 5 multi-layered 20MP-from-RAW .psd files simultaneously: and Photoshop is eating 1GB of RAM. That may sound like a lot, but I opened three more (8 simultaneously) and am eating 1.3GB of RAM.

The read/write speed on a *slow* HDD would be something liek 50MB/sec, so you'd be discussing 2-3 seconds load-time on a new image file.

I do, in fact, have an SSD under my programs themselves. It does make them faster to load (though will do nothing for speed once loaded); but the benefit under the picture files is almost nill (and you lose size and money). You'd do far better to run RAID on magnetic media in that instance.

In short: If you can throw 16GB on your PC: Great (there's actual support that machines may *slow* past that point). If you want to build arrays of SSDs, that won't hurt anything but your wallet either. But if you think there's gonna be any real difference... there won't be. Nothing that matters (1sec load times when first opening vs 2sec).

Scanned files may be larger... though I'm not sure if the increased resolution would be useful.

Let's imagine an 8x10 @ 1200dpi @ 24-bit color depth (BTW: this will take a long time for the scanner to scan: the PC is not the point of limitation).
1200^2(resolution) x8(width) x10(height) x24 (depth) / 8 (bits per byte).
1,440,000 x10 x24 / 8
14,400,000 x24 / 8
14,400,000 x 3
43,200,000 bytes
43.2MB

Not a big deal for even low-end modern hardware.

 

[illuminating_light]

SSD's deteriorate over time with every read/write that occurs. it is why they suggest to never defrag them, as this degrades them even quicker. Longevity of these compared to standard HHD's, simply is not enough to justify the small boost of speed you will gain. The standard RMP for HHD's is 5200RPM, you can always upgrade to a 7200 RMP to gain speed, while still maintaining a longer living drive. One can always run optimizing software for the HHD to move most system files and important programs to the faster part of the disk, to ensure maximum performance from it.

 

[Braineack]

from adobe themselves:

Solid-state disks

Installing Photoshop on a solid-state disk (SSD) allows Photoshop to launch fast, probably in less than a second. But that speedier startup is the only time savings you experience. That&#8217;s the only time when much data is read from the SSD.

To gain the greatest benefit from an SSD, use it as the scratch disk. Using it as a scratch disk gives you significant performance improvements if you have images that don&#8217;t fit entirely in RAM. For example, swapping tiles between RAM and an SSD is much faster than swapping between RAM and a hard disk.

If your SSD doesn&#8217;t have much free space (the scratch file grows bigger than can fit on the SSD), add a secondary or tertiary hard disk. (Add it after the SSD.) Make sure that these disks are selected as scratch disks in the Performance pane of Preferences.

Also, SSDs vary widely in performance, much more so than hard disks. Using an earlier, slower drive results in little improvement over a hard disk.

Note: Adding RAM to improve performance is more cost effective than purchasing an SSD. If money is no object, you're maxed out on installed RAM for your computer, you run Photoshop CS5 as a 64-bit application, and you still want to improve performance, consider using a solid-state disk as your scratch disk.

As noted above, an SSD doesn't improve performance if the efficiency indicator is already high. The lower the efficiency indicator, the greater the improvement an SSD offers.

 

[lambertpix]

SSD's deteriorate over time with every read/write that occurs. it is why they suggest to never defrag them, as this degrades them even quicker. Longevity of these compared to standard HHD's, simply is not enough to justify the small boost of speed you will gain. The standard RMP for HHD's is 5200RPM, you can always upgrade to a 7200 RMP to gain speed, while still maintaining a longer living drive. One can always run optimizing software for the HHD to move most system files and important programs to the faster part of the disk, to ensure maximum performance from it.

Depending on what sort of degradation you're talking about, that could be somewhat dated. There are really two kinds of SSD degradation -- one of which is largely solved today. Once upon a time, SSD's used to suffer from write performance degradation as they filled up, because the drive would have to start re-using blocks that had been written once and then marked deleted. With the advent of TRIM support in newer drives and OS's, though, that problem is pretty much licked.

The other kind of degradation comes from deterioration of the NAND itself. If you're concerned about this, you'll probably want to read up on the different types of NAND used in SSD's these days, and the impact on longevity of those drives. Of particular note in that link are the estimated lifespans of drives, ranging from about 12 years for the "cheap" NAND up to 70 years for the pricier stuff. FWIW, the last time I bought an SSD, I opted for a 256GB Samsung 840 with the "cheap" NAND -- shown with an estimated lifespan of around 23 years of continuous use in that article. I consider it likely that I'll be ready for an upgrade by then.

Re: 5200rpm vs. 7200rpm, this is valid, but fading fast as a concern. You'll still see 5400 / 5900rpm drives sold as OEM drives in some cheap-o PC's, but I did a quick, completely informal survey of the first 20 drives on Newegg with a capacity of 3TB+, and I found four listed as 5900rpm and 13 listed as 7200rpm. Three from WD are listed as "InteliPower", which seems to indicate that the speed varies (I don't know if that's quite as useless as showing a shutter speed of "fast-ish", but it's close). These days, then, 7200rpm drives are probably more typical for multi-TB drives. In fact, a lot of the 5900rpm drives are marketed as "green" because their slower motors use less energy and produce less heat -- maybe a benefit if you've got drives in a poorly-ventilated enclosure.

from adobe themselves:

Solid-state disks

Installing Photoshop on a solid-state disk (SSD) allows Photoshop to launch fast, probably in less than a second. But that speedier startup is the only time savings you experience. That’s the only time when much data is read from the SSD.

To gain the greatest benefit from an SSD, use it as the scratch disk. Using it as a scratch disk gives you significant performance improvements if you have images that don’t fit entirely in RAM. For example, swapping tiles between RAM and an SSD is much faster than swapping between RAM and a hard disk.

If your SSD doesn’t have much free space (the scratch file grows bigger than can fit on the SSD), add a secondary or tertiary hard disk. (Add it after the SSD.) Make sure that these disks are selected as scratch disks in the Performance pane of Preferences.

Also, SSDs vary widely in performance, much more so than hard disks. Using an earlier, slower drive results in little improvement over a hard disk.

Note: Adding RAM to improve performance is more cost effective than purchasing an SSD. If money is no object, you're maxed out on installed RAM for your computer, you run Photoshop CS5 as a 64-bit application, and you still want to improve performance, consider using a solid-state disk as your scratch disk.

As noted above, an SSD doesn't improve performance if the efficiency indicator is already high. The lower the efficiency indicator, the greater the improvement an SSD offers.

Just as with photography equipment, better hardware produces better results (all things being equal), but if you don't know how to use the stuff you've got, you can spend a lot of money and not get the results you're looking for. With mainstream chipsets & MB's typically supporting 16-32GB of RAM these days, though, 16GB or so of RAM is a pretty safe mainstream setup, IMO.

 

[JerryLove]

Depending on what sort of degradation you're talking about, that could be somewhat dated. There are really two kinds of SSD degradation -- one of which is largely solved today. Once upon a time, SSD's used to suffer from write performance degradation as they filled up, because the drive would have to start re-using blocks that had been written once and then marked deleted. With the advent of TRIM support in newer drives and OS's, though, that problem is pretty much licked.

TRIM's original purpose was to increase longevity by limiting the number of times an individual cell is written.

The other kind of degradation comes from deterioration of the NAND itself. If you're concerned about this, you'll probably want to read up on the different types of NAND used in SSD's these days, and the impact on longevity of those drives. Of particular note in that link are the estimated lifespans of drives, ranging from about 12 years for the "cheap" NAND up to 70 years for the pricier stuff. FWIW, the last time I bought an SSD, I opted for a 256GB Samsung 840 with the "cheap" NAND -- shown with an estimated lifespan of around 23 years of continuous use in that article. I consider it likely that I'll be ready for an upgrade by then.

This is all *heavily* use dependent. A drive in a heavily used video camera will degrade *far* more rapidly than your photo archive.

Re: 5200rpm vs. 7200rpm, this is valid, but fading fast as a concern. You'll still see 5400 / 5900rpm drives sold as OEM drives in some cheap-o PC's, but I did a quick, completely informal survey of the first 20 drives on Newegg with a capacity of 3TB+, and I found four listed as 5900rpm and 13 listed as 7200rpm. Three from WD are listed as "InteliPower", which seems to indicate that the speed varies (I don't know if that's quite as useless as showing a shutter speed of "fast-ish", but it's close). These days, then, 7200rpm drives are probably more typical for multi-TB drives. In fact, a lot of the 5900rpm drives are marketed as "green" because their slower motors use less energy and produce less heat -- maybe a benefit if you've got drives in a poorly-ventilated enclosure.

It's also like looking at MP on a sensor. Deceiving.

Contiguious read-write speed is a function of density * rotation. So a 4TB 5400rpm drive has a higher contiguious read/write speed than a 1TB 7200rpm drive (all else being equal).

Random writes are a function of head speed and rotational speed (all else being equal).

But other things matter. More platters means more head queuing, and better random access speeds. Smaller platters (2.5" vs 3.5") mean higher bit density and so faster continuous read/writes (also: less head travel, so likely better random speeds).

But really none of this matters as there's nothing that's going to be very drive-dependent in scanning photos after the application loads into memory.

Just as with photography equipment, better hardware produces better results (all things being equal), but if you don't know how to use the stuff you've got, you can spend a lot of money and not get the results you're looking for. With mainstream chipsets & MB's typically supporting 16-32GB of RAM these days, though, 16GB or so of RAM is a pretty safe mainstream setup, IMO.

This is absolutely untrue. Upgrading to a 2kw power supply, an array of 4 linked professional (say : ATI Fire) video cards, 250GB of ECC RAM, and an array of Enterprise SSDs will bring absolutely nothing to the table once the application is loaded. The hardware is already faster than the scanner.

(*The video cards may result in edits being a fraction of a second faster as this is likely hardware accellerated. It's a big deal in video transcoding, but not so much in photos)