How to speed up jpg viewing/rendering???

[willow2]

I have a secondary hard drive that contains thousands of digital photos. One thing I've never been clear on, is what hardware component(s), are responsible for the rendering and/or viewing process.

Many of my photos are quite large & there is a lag when scrolling thru them. There's also quite a bit of time in displaying a folder view with thumbnails. I've already got an i7-920 & 6gb's of memory. So the only pieces left that I can think of are the video card & hard drive. I'm not a gamer, but how much can a video card help out with this process? (I currently have an HD 4670 w/1gb & my current viewer is FastStone's Image Viewer.)

Would a faster video card or RAID 0 help?

 

[LittleNemoNES]

You will likely need a fast HDD BUT why not break up the photos into sub folders? At least by year or 1/2 years

 

[dguy6789]

The hard drive is the issue here. If you want things to be significantly faster, put all of your images onto a fast solid state drive.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Once he opens the file, I'd think it'd load in to memory and the hard drive would be taken out of the equation. This might sound stupid, but OP, after you scroll through the photo, does the lag go away? After you scroll through all of the photo, there will be lag, but after you scroll through, if you go back around the picture is the lag still there? I was thinking maybe just the visable part loads or something, so once you move around the whole picture everything would be in the video card's memory. Probably a long shot, but I thought I've seen something like this before. If that is the case though, it might be the program you're using to view the picture more than the hardware.

 

[Kuzi]

You need a faster HD/SSD and more RAM

 

[willow2]

Great feedback, thanks.

So it sounds like I can rule out the video card. I do have a 60gb SSD boot drive, and it is incredibly fast. I really can't afford a large capacity SSD at this time. I just bought a 2nd Samsung F3 500gb drive. So I think I'll set up a RAID 0 array & see if that helps.

 

[dguy6789]

Raid 0 doesn't improve seek time of a bunch of really small files(which is what you want to improve), it just improves data transfer speeds.

An SSD is the only real solution to the problem, but I agree to not buying one right now, their cost vs capacity is not made up for by how much faster they are at this point in time.

 

[willow2]

Raid 0 doesn't improve seek time of a bunch of really small files(which is what you want to improve), it just improves data transfer speeds.

I've been researching RAID 0 this morning, & everything I'm reading agrees. Guess I'll send the 2nd 500gb drive back & wait until larger SSD's for storage become more affordable.

 

[soccerballtux]

Easiest solution would be to google for a registry change that increases the size of the thumbnail cache in RAM. Change it to something like 100MB. That _should_ help.