Out of curiosity, I decided to see if reading and writing the images with RAM Disk would save me time. Within a few minutes, I'd downloaded the freeware app Esperance DV, set up a disk image, and copied over the images to be processed from my hard drive. The increase in speed was amazing. A project that I expected would tie up my iBook for the entire day took a few hours, and I even ran it in the background while I listened to music and used Safari. Obviously, there is some risk involved when writing files to a temporary media, but if you have a slow hard drive, it may be a risk worth taking.
[robg adds: Results will be best on slower machines, obviously. I tested two small batch image processes, one on the Dual G5 and the other on my 1.33GHz G4 PowerBook. On the Dual G5, there was basically no time difference between the hard drive and the RAM disk. But on the PowerBook, the task was about three seconds quicker from the RAM disk, for a process that only took 30 seconds to begin with. Esperance DV is a nifty little free application, too -- you can have it place Safari web and icon caches on the RAM disk, as well as xCode builds.]

