Fastest App Launch Hard Drive?

M

mindbend

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I'm planning for the next tower and I'd like to have my applications launching as quickly as possible. What is the consensus on this?

It seems like some form of RAID would be ideal, but from what I recall, this is not necessarily true for app launching, yes?

Also, what about SAS versus SATA?

15,000 versus 10,000 or 7,200 RPM?

It seems like the easy call would be to make a RAID out of 15,000 drives, but is this really worth it for app launching?

I'm not looking to shave a second or two off launch times, I'm looking to blow it out of the water. I'm sick and tired of CS3 apps taking forever and a day to launch.

So what say ye?
 
Try this:

Load a CS3 app, and time it.
Quit it immediately.
Reload it, and time it again.

During the first load, OS X should cache all those files in RAM, making the second load faster (unless your system is really pressed for RAM, in which case that should be your primary concern). You might be able to get the initial load speed closer to the reload speed with a good HD setup, but I think it will be impossible to exceed that.

FWIW, when testing this with Photoshop on my system, the time drops from 23 seconds to 14 seconds (roughly). I had some other things running in the background that might have skewed things, though.
 
i for one am never really phased by the amount of time a CS3 app takes to launch. it's a heavy app full of millions of lines of code. more importantly though, i only load up my cs3 apps about 15 times a year... if you have enough ram, there's really little need to ever quit apps, only for full system software updates...
 
The thing is that impatience (or productivity ;)) might lead to data loss down the road. 10k and 15k drives are more prone to failure than 7.2k drives because the parts are, obviously, moving faster. A non-mirrored RAID system is also x+1 more likely to fail, given that two, three, four drives are being accessed instead of just one. My personal favorite setup is two 7.2k drives in a RAID 0 with two more drives backing them up.
 
mindbend said:
So it sounds like nobody has an answer. ;)
Click to expand...

Well a Mac user should know the place to check for speed tests is BareFeats. They do nothing more then testing Mac speeds with every conceivable thing a user could add/expand to a Mac. Just take a look at their results and decided what you want.
 
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