Andor iQ USER GUIDE

Andor iQ USER GUIDE

1.5 Andor ImageDisk Technology

ImageDisk is Andor

’s image-oriented virtual memory system, which is optimized for the capture and treatment of large image sequences. In Andor iQ the ImageDisk is either shared or held in a separate folder for each Window

’s User and is located on a

Drive specified by the (Local or System) Administrator during system configuration.

In this way users’ data are isolated from each other, leading to improved security and performance. When you first run iQ, a directory called ImageDisk will be created on the root of specified hard drive. The ImageDisk is non-volatile and so images will be retained between logon sessions.

In general you will obtain best performance if you use physically separate disks for

ImageDisk and the operating system (Windows). For optimum overall performance, please refer to Section 2.3.6. Data is managed by Andor iQ

’s Image manager, which allows you to treat multi-dimensional image data as a single data object, similar to a movie clip. Thus you can capture, review, save to disk in TIFF or multi-

TIF file format and analyze large image sequences with great ease and at high speed.

On a more technical level ImageDisk provides a virtual memory system, which cooperates with Windows’ own virtual memory system. Windows’ system is optimized for general computing, so when it comes to images its performance is slow and unpredictable. ImageDisk interrogates Windows prior to virtual memory operations

(disk swaps) and ensures that for image operations it maintains free system memory by swapping frames in and out of RAM depending on usage. This ensures that access times are optimized and provides the best performance with the large blocks of data created with multi-dimensional images

16 © Andor Technology