Quite expensive storage.
  • Alphane MoonOPMEnglish
    3•5 days ago

    I really wish they we still had Optane drives for OS partitions.

    I have storage in a 3 level hierarchy.

    Fastest SSD (currently PCI-E 4.0) for OS and applications Slower SSD (currently PCI-E 3.0) for music, photos, tertiary application (retro stuff) and side projects. You’d be surprised how some high resolution photos work much better on an SSD than a HDD. Multiple HDDs for video content, backups and random archival, low priority side projects.

    I would love to have a 2TB Optane drive for the first (highest) level of the hierarchy.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•5 days ago

      You’d be surprised how some high resolution photos work much better on an SSD than a HDD.

      Depending upon how “high”, that’s partly understandable. If you have a format that breaks the thing up into tiles, that’s gonna involve at least some seeking.

      I was looking at high-resolution images a while back, and was kind of surprised to find that most existing image formats and image software really don’t deal very well with very high-resolution images, the sort where you’d have a huge image that you could zoom in and out of.

      As best I can tell, the only real single-file image format used much for very-high-resolution images is “pyramidal TIFF”, a variant of TIFF aimed at this. That internally contains tiles.

      Also, the only image viewers capable of dealing with very-high-resolution images that I could find appear to be web-based – that is, one carves up the image into tiles at different resolution ahead of time, and then one can pan around in a browser and have the server serve up those tiles. I wasn’t able to find non-client-server software capable of viewing and panning smoothly into and out of very large images, which surprised me.

      • Alphane MoonOPMEnglish
        3•5 days ago

        A collection of ~8000x6000 JPEG images, which is not that high of a resolution, can be slow with an HDD depending on how quickly you click on the next image. The user experience of browsing such a collection is far better on an SSD (even a PCI-E 3.0 SSD).

        Never heard of the pyramidal TIFF format, but it sounds like a smart solution.

        I use Faststone Image Viewer. It has two modes. A super minimalist viewer mode (no additional UI by default in view mode) and a more complex library type mode. It supports anything I throw at it, the issue is browsing a high resolution collection.

          • Alphane MoonOPMEnglish
            1•5 days ago

            120 gigapixel image

            Not that high of a resolution.

            Viewing is not an issue, it’s the UX. Try quickly moving through several hundred 8000x6000 images on an HDD drive and a SDD drive (say you’re searching for specific detail in a scene); I always notice the difference.

            My UFS NAND phone actually does a better job than desktop if it’s via HDD access. NAS access also sucks even on WiFi 6 (albeit accessing a HDD).