For laptops, go for an external hard drive - not many models allow you to fit two hard drives, even so it might make your computer too hot to work on. If you're getting a desktop, go for an internal drive.
When that happens, you'll lose all your work - professional disk recovery is insanely expensive. If you can, get an extra for backup purposes. Five 200mb Photoshop files will take 1 GB already.Ī 1TB (1000GB) hard drive should be enough. How much space you need depends on the size of your typical work files. Hard drives are relatively cheap nowadays. Since you'll be installing your OS, if you have a fast SSD, you'll save a lot of time on the booting time, each time. If you have limited funds, I would suggest upgrading the hard drive to SSD over upgrading to more RAM (but get at least 4GB RAM). Hard drive speed is the bottleneck of any system.
Get a cheaper larger external storage, such as the Western Digital External Storage (I use a few of them). If you can afford it, is to get an SSD, maybe 120GB to run your OS and applications and daily work. They are way faster, but also more expensive. They are like RAM but can store permanent data. If the speed are not listed on computers you're buying, ask a salesman, or get the model number of the hard drive and look up on the Internet.īesides those hard drives measured in RPM, there's also the SSD hard drives. Typically desktop computers will come with 7200RPM, laptops with 5400RPM. RPM is how they measure hard drive speed. The OS is also stored on the hard drive, which explains why it takes a while to start up. So it directly affects the speed at which you work, in little ways which can accumulate to huge time wastage. It's much slower than RAM at storing and reading data. Hard drive (or harddisk) is used to store your permanent data, your graphic files, the PSDs, AIs, TIFFs, PDFs, whatever.
Note that RAM is also shared with other software and the operating system (OS). 8GB RAM is recommended in general for graphics work. not too many graphics applications running at the same time. More RAM helps increase the number of undos you can save.ĤGB of RAM should be sufficient for light graphics work, e.g. It slows down because it has to switch to storing that temporary data on screen to the slower hard drive. If you run out of RAM, your computer will slow down. The amount of RAM determines how much art you can put on screen before you save. typing, that something is stored temporary in the RAM before you actually save your file. You don't want to spend too much money on a maxed out computer for power you don't need.Īlright, let's look at the parts and what they mean to artists. Yes, I know you do art but what type? Vector? 3D? Comics? Digital Painting? Animation? Do you need to carry your computer around? What are you going to do on the computer?
This guide is to help you optimize your purchase by recommending what you should get depending on the type of work you create.īy the way, I work for a small newspaper which uses Windows computers in the office but I've a Mac at home. Put simply, it means whatever computer you buy, it should run your software without much problem, unless you're running specialised software, e.g. The general trend nowadays is that processing power is generally exceeding software requirement needs. I'll not be running benchmarks and timing test. Here's artists' guide to buying computers and laptops. And also check out the list of best laptops for artists. This article was updated on 24 March 2015.