After last month’s foray into the wonderful world of SSD’s via my newly super-powered Macbook Pro, I decided it was time to take my main tower PC to the next level. It wasn’t an easy decision at first, but it soon became a lot easier when two of the four drives in my RAID0 Photoshop swap array went down (for more on RAID, see my earlier post on the subject). I also had a very large format project beginning the next day and was dreading slogging through it with plain old HDDs. So I had two choices:
1. Go the (much) cheaper route — around $300 — and replace the drives in the array with two new ones of the same, ye olden tymes HDD variety.
2. Take the plunge and buy SSD’s at around $400 a pop.
I’ve made the mistake in the past of skimping and then regretting it later and I am finally starting to learn my lesson on that one. After all, computers are the central element in my professional life and how I make my living. With that in mind it’s easier to justify the large expenditure, as long as the performance gain is substantial enough. And was it ever. I’ve fallen for performance gimmicks and hype here and there in the past and have been disappointed time and again. This wasn’t one of those times.
When I built this particular machine I decided to go big with the processor and got what was at the time a the state-of-the-art Intel Q9650 Core 2 Duo Extreme. I didn’t really skimp on the rest of the components either, it’s definitely a solid rig. Still, I always felt it wasn’t living up to it’s full potential, especially considering the coin I dropped on it originally. Lately, when things are moving slow or just not acting right, I’ve caught myself considering building a new machine. Considering how recently I built the thing and how much it cost, this is just ridiculous. This was supposed to last me a while and be — to a certain degree — future-proof (which, in the computer world, means about 3-4 years). So it sort of came down to spending the $2500 to build a new tower or spending $1200 to make the existing one faster. In light of my experiences with the SSD and my Macbook Pro, I came to the conclusion that the best course of action was to replace the old HDD’s with SSD’s.
I ended up settling on a three drive configuration: One dedicated drive for the OS (Windows 7 RTM 7600 — which has been working out amazingly well) and two drives for the RAID0 array. The Windows drive is clocking in at around 245MB/s (over six times as fast as the average I/O on my old HDD) with a .1ms seek time (which is off the charts fast). The RAID array with just two drives is running around 480MB/s which is significantly faster than the four HDDs I had in there before.
All the numbers are great but there’s a lot more to the story than just raw I/O performance. The drives have removed the one big bottleneck that was left in my system, allowing all of the other components to reach their full potential. The performance increases I’ve seen go far beyond what you might expect from just a faster disk drive. It’s like a whole new computing experience, I feel more able to experiment and a lot more confident about overall stability. I almost feel like the computer used to choke on big data read/writes and would just finally crash. With the new drives it just rips through anything and never really hits that tipping point where things lock up. This new found stability could also be due to the fact that I installed the final RTM version of Windows 7 when I put in the new drives. I had been using the beta, which although very stable in it’s own right, didn’t quite compare to what I am experiencing now.
The bottom line is that SSDs are the real deal. Yes, they’re still expensive, but if you work with computers and very large files, you owe it to yourself and your workflow to look into what they have to offer. If your rig is feeling sluggish, getting a SSD to perk it up might actually turn out be a bargain when compared to the price of a new machine. Of course, a more pragmatic person might wait another year or so until the numbers come down, but I didn’t really have that luxury this time around. I’ll be posting the detailed data next week once I get a chance to do some more tests. The next step is to split that Windows drive and install OS X. If only they made Sonar for Mac I’d make the switch.
Color Management: A Field Guide
Whether you are designing for print or for the web, making the leap from what you see on your computer screen to the outside world can be a tricky process, fraught with unpredictable changes and unexpected results. The web is full of information regarding color management and sifting through it can be very overwhelming. Contradictory opinions abound and it can be difficult to find reliable sources of information.
Over the last few months, Scott and I have been researching this topic extensively. With the addition of the new Epson 9900 to the studio, we wanted to be sure that our printer workflow was optimized and producing a consistent output. With the help of Kirk Economos of Meridian Cyber Solutions, we have implemented a color management system that works for us. Below we have tried to aggregate this knowledge into a simple and useful guide, designed to help you ensure your studio is set up correctly. It is not intended to be the end-all article on color management by any means — but it’s a good place to start if color management isn’t something you have previously implemented or considered.
Ghostly 10 Year Chicago 8/21/09 - Purchase poster at studio.iso50.com
I’ll be playing the Ghostly 10 Year show at The Empty Bottle in Chicago this Friday, August 21st. Should be a great night and if all goes to plan I might have a special guest join me for some songs.
GHOSTLY 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY: CHICAGO
The Empty Bottle
1035 N Western Ave
Chicago, IL United States View Map
Live Performances by:
* Tycho / ISO50
* Kill Memory Crash
* Solvent
* Dark Party
* Mike Servito
August 21, 2009
9 PM 21
$15 ADV / $20 Door
Jackson presents The Ghostly 10-Year in Chicago
As Ghostly International hits the 10-year mark, we’re throwing a series of pretty-big-deal parties in select location across the globe. Having torn the roofs off Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Miami’s Winter Music Conference, and Detroit’s Movement festival, we now aim our music cannons at Chicago. The evening’s bill includes music/design phenomenon Tycho, melodic electro legend Solvent, local industrial legends Kill Memory Crash, and Eliot Lipp’s Dark Party. A DJ set from Mike Servito rounds out a night of truly outstanding music.
I came across Dutch photographer GoWithTheFlowEnzo’s work (not sure of his real name, only says “Robin” on the page) the other day and I’m really enjoying the color and style. According to the EXIF data he used a Canon EOS 450D for most of the shots. The crazy part is that he took a couple of them with a little Canon IXUS. See if you can spot which ones without looking at the EXIF.
If you follow the blog you’ll know that I’ve touched on the subject of SSDs before. A quick primer for the uninitiated: an SSD (solid state drive) is a storage device that uses solid state memory (As in no moving parts, other examples include RAM and flash memory) and so it can access data much faster than the mechanical head/platter drives most people use now and with no moving parts, data loss due to mechanical failure is a thing of the past. The promise of SSD is huge and as they become commonplace they will no doubt revolutionize the way we work (think Photoshop swap disks that read and write @ 1400MB/s or computers that boot in 5 seconds). Because I work with such large raster files, swap disk performance in particular is a very big issue for me so I keep a close eye on the SSD market, waiting for the moment when the price to performance ratio hits the sweet spot. Right now most SSD technology is still on the pricey side and there are a few technical issues that are still being sorted out (write endurance supposedly being one of them) so I haven’t jumped in just yet. But as things change I will continue to post updates on the SSD situation.
For the first installment I thought I’d post on the very interesting OCZ Z-Drive. It’s insanely expensive right now, but as we all know, those prices drop pretty fast as the tech matures (remember $800 DVD writers?). The Z-Drive is basically 4 SSD drives in a RAID 0 array on a PCI-Express card. This is a novel concept; by using the PCI-Express bus OCZ has sidestepped the bottleneck of the SATA controllers allowing huge throughput in both directions. Boasting 700MB/s write speeds, the Z-Drive is certainly no slouch, but considering the price (they start at $1500!!) I’m holding out for more. I think the magic number for me would be 1000MB/s for around $500. This would make a perfect solution for Photoshop swap disks and other applications that require massive read/write throughput (video render disks etc.) and while it doesn’t make sense for me right now, it’s great to see this emerging technology headed in the right direction.
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I saw Maya Lin speak this past Tuesday as part of the City Arts & Lecture series. The event was in part sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences and was a conversation between Maya and the Academy’s Ryan Wyatt, Director of Science Visualization. They walked through many of Maya’s projects, old and new, and discussed her approach to art and science. Much of the work that was shown (some of which is pictured above) I was not familiar with. As I am from Washington DC, I have always been aware of her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I was very much impressed with the way her work has evolved since then. (She was only 20 years old when she designed it.)
Science plays a major role in the work she is doing now. She is very intellectual in her approach and conducts a massive amount of research for each project. For example, her first of two pieces for the Academy of Science, entitled Where the Land Meets the Sea, was based on data from a US Geological Study mapping the topology of the San Francisco Bay. As with her Systematic Landscapes, she takes great care to humanize this data and give it new depth and life. The piece looks like a drawing, floating in space above the terrace, and she describes this melding of art and science as a “way to visualize our world in an effort to more fully understand it.”
Maya has a tremendous passion and curiosity for the world around her. She surrounds herself with mountains of research and works tirelessly to translate cold hard facts into more accessible and relatable pieces of art. Some of this stems from what she calls a “child like curiosity” to just see what it will look like, but there is also a very political aspect to her work. She wants to make people aware of the environment they take for granted, and she said a few times, “If we can’t see it, we pollute it.” Through constant collaboration with scientists, Maya is trying to help us see what we’re missing.
The work pictured above is: Systematic Landscapes (2), Topologies, and Wave Field, all of which can be seen on her website. All are very experiential, something she laments is lost in the stillness of a photograph. Better to visit in person if you can.
So I stumbled onto the deleteyourself blog the other day (same guy who runs Photololz) and in turn found his Flickr. There were some nice shots up there but what really struck me in particular was the vivid clarity and tone of the photos. So I took a look at the EXIF data and sure enough, they were all shot with a Canon 5D MKII. As you may well know, I have been trying to decide whether to stick with Nikon for my next camera or make the leap to Canon. I think that decision is becoming much clearer now; after seeing what Tim Navis did with the EOS 30D and now this, Canon is way out in front for me. Of course, he’s also using the $1500 Canon EF 16-35mm, but I suppose a camera like the 5D deserves only the best. At any rate, these shots drive home how good the 5D is at transforming otherwise mundane scenes into exquisitely detailed compositions of incredible depth and tonal range.
On a side note, that second pic looks like it was taken right around the same place I took this one, flying into Phuket Airport. I effected the hell out of mine, so it’s hard to compare the two, but I assure you that even in it’s raw form, mine was never anywhere near this detailed and dynamic. I’m not sure how much post processing he is doing with these, I’d love to know how much Photoshop had to do with the end results. Whatever the case may be, Photoshop can’t just synthesize out of thin air the kind of clarity and depth found in these shots; I would bet there’s just some simple color balancing going on. I’m also really liking the vignetting in a lot of these, can anyone out there with a similar rig testify as to whether that is a natural artifact of that particular lens or something he did in post?
