my aperture library is 300 g and works slow

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my aperture library is 300 g and works slow

Hi guys,

I just merged my photo libraries and would like to work with Aperture and iPhoto, BUT it is on an external hard drive (USB 2 ports or firewire, both are really slow with such a library). The rest of the hardware is not older than 2010 and there is 8G RAM (not really in fact but I don't think it is as a big factor since the processor is really at ease for other tasks in the meanwhile while Aperture is struggling and the hard-drive seems to be working hard).

Is there some way to work with such a large library without the slowness, or I should just go to thunderbolt ?

Best regards,

Moon67.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Mar 21, 2014 2:44 AM

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Answer 1

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Najinsky

Level 3

670 points

Mar 21, 2014 3:18 AM in response to moon67

There may or may not be an issue, It depends on how long ago you did the merge and how long Aperture has had to perform the one-off background processes that need to run as a result of the merge.

Along with some internal processing, these processes will include some or all of the following (depending on your settings):

Generate thumbnails

Generate Previews

Face Detection

Location Lookup

So it is quite normal for Aperture to be working the processor and hard drive at full speed while it performs these activities. It means reading in the full images, processing any edit, writing out thumbnails and previews, and updating the internal database and data files, all of which is happening over an external drive.

While these background processes are running, if you try to use Aperture it will feel very sluggish as you compete with these processes for system resource and the hard drive.

But once theses processes have run their course and completed, things should settle down and return to normal.

Running off an external hard drive will never be an optimal experience but many find it perfectly useable with a fast drive and bus (USB 3 / FW800 / TB / eSATA).

Andy

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Answer 2

Mar 21, 2014 6:34 AM in response to moon67

moon67 wrote:

there is 8G RAM (not really in fact

I don't know what you mean here. Andy's excellent reply covers hard drives. IME, you will experience significantly better performance with 8 GB of RAM compared to 4 GB.

I have found that USB-3 works well for external drives, at significantly lower cost than Thunderbolt. (USB can't be daisy-chained, however.)

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