For those of you who are intrested. I built my own computer last year with a 2.83 quad core 4 gig ram, new mother board with every thing 1333 Mhz but was still dissappointed with the speed. Tried XP64 so I could add RAM but too many things did not work with 64 bit OS.

I was looking at going to 10,000 RPM drives and using RAID when an IT guy told me about Solid State HDs. So I bought one of the faster 128Gig SSD's. Set it up with the OS, all programs and all the current files to work.

RESULTS: Unreal. Photoshop CS3 did load in 16 seconds, now 6 seconds. Photo Mechanic did load in 28 seconds, now 9 seconds. That the little HD light when from staying on solid when working to flashing on beiefly.

Boot time from when the windows logo displays to loading everything including background items is a 1/3 less time. Most loads so fast that you never even see it flash on the screen.

Just so you understand, what changed is the time in reading a writing to the hard drive. An actual processing of and image or what have you may or may not be faster. i.e. the actual of removing noise in Neat Image is only slightly faster. However taking the file into the software and saving is much much faster.

There are suppose to be speed issues with use over time tho the support people say those have been resolved. I'm also told that you do not defrag. Cost, $400 for the 128 Gig I bought.

A little too pricey for me, especially when 7200 RPM eSATA drives are less than $100 per Terabyte (i.e., 32X less expensive per gigabyte).

A 3x speed increase in load time is impressive, but doesn't add up to enough savings to justify the cost for me.

<Chas>

I found that saving and recovering large 200Mb PSD/PDFs were, at best, only 15% faster (probably the same drive).

Be careful that your page/swap file is not on the SSD. Most SSD's will support only a limited number of write/re-write cycles, so the rather intense and frequent writing to the page/swap file could lead to premature SSD failure. With enough RAM most of the page/swap activity will be writing only, so having the file on an actual disk shouldn't slow things down much.

Philhubb,

I've heard that the SSDs are a lot more reliable now than when they first came out. Sounds like they really help move things along. I'd be interested to see your results with this Photoshop benchmark test:
http://www.driverheaven.net/photoshop.php

Nicholas
http://www.copperhillimages.com/index.php?pr=galleries

Nicholas,
I tried to run the test but the actions says it's not with my version of Photoshop. I have CS3 which says it should run.

philhubb wrote:
Nicholas,
I tried to run the test but the actions says it's not with my version of Photoshop. I have CS3 which says it should run.

Don't know why, the page that I linked says it should be compatible.

Nicholas

Be careful that your page/swap file is not on the SSD. Most SSD's will support only a limited number of write/re-write cycles, so the rather intense and frequent writing to the page/swap file could lead to premature SSD failure. With enough RAM most of the page/swap activity will be writing only, so having the file on an actual disk shouldn't slow things down much.

I saw an article on MS blog that actually says page file is the best use for SSDs, because the way how page files are written and read is exactly where the SSDs shine.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

I have additional warning about SSDs. Some of them, or at least the type I have in my computer do not handle concurrent operations very well. If there are multiple programs trying to access the drive, I experience annoying stuttering. It seems to be better in Windows7 than it was in Vista, but it is still present. The SSD vendor (Patriot) said it is normal. So check first if the disk you selected does not exhibit this problem.

By the way, I originally purchased the SSD drive to use in my photo storage device, because my baby daughter destroyed the HD in it by dropping it and I wanted something shock resistant. I tried two different devices and two different SSDs and it did not work. It turns out that some of these SSDs do not implement some communication protocol that is standard in all rotational SATA drives... So again, if you consider using SSD for your photo storage, first check with the vendor to make sure these things will work together.

To get the best out of a SSD you need Windows 7, it's optimised for SSD performance. You can find out more about SSDs at Anandtech. At present I wouldn't trust a SSD with mission critical data as data recovery is nigh impossible. When a cell blows it's gone, at least with a HDD you've still got the platter.

As is often the case, there's a bunch of misinformation here.

- SSDs should be used for your OS and programs, I don't think that anyone is seriously suggesting that they would be an economical place to store your actual photo data - the advantage simply isn't there. The best combo is an SSD for OS/programs and something like a WD Green for your data.

- W7 is optimized for SSD in that: 1) it recognizes SSDs and properly aligns partitions with the SSD cell structure at format time. This can be done (with care) without W7 2) it disables defrag (can be done without W7) 3) it disables Superfetch ("") 4) it supports TRIM, which is background tagging and clearing of no longer required SSD cells.

- SSDs failure mode is on erase or on write, not typically on read. This means that when the controller goes to erase or write to a cell, the verify/parity will fail and it can mark the cell bad and write to different one. Since the random access time is 0 on SSDs, this "fragmentation" doesn't have any effect. Most HDDs go "clunk-clunk-clunk" one time you turn them on and the data is gone. The contention that failure is worse on SSD is incorrect, but they are admittedly more of an unknown than HDDs.

- The limited write cycles on SSD is true, but not worth worrying about. Things like the pagefile are EXACTLY where SSDs should be used to maximize performance. Manufacturer estimates still show the expected life of an SSD for an average user to be 10 years. That 80 or 160GB SSD will be pretty much useless in 10 years anyways - just put the pagefile on there and enjoy the speed. This issue has people going crazy with unreasonable workarounds due to fear, uncertainty and doubt. You're buying an SSD for speed now, not to leave it to your kids in your will.

An SSD is, IMO, the single biggest upgrade one could do to their PC to increase overall system performance.

calemon wrote:

An SSD is, IMO, the single biggest upgrade one could do to their PC to increase overall system performance.



+1

Installing an SSD for my c-drive for Vista x64 and programs has provided - BY FAR - the biggest improvement in overall system performance and responsiveness that I've ever received.

Much more improvement in overall system responsiveness than going single core pentium to dual core AMD, dual core AMD to quad core Q6600, or installing more memory. Sure, Photoshop and Lightroom need horsepower, but for most tasks that you're running on a PC, you are disk-bound not processor-bound and an SSD provides an order of magnitude better responsiveness to disk requests.

My present system is Vista x64 running on a Q6600 with 8GB of memory with an Intel Gen1 80GB SSD. Last week I had an Intel RAID driver problem that forced me back to temporarily running my c-drive on a 7200rpm hard drive, - when running on a dedicated drive for my c-drive files the system drove me nuts as it was soooo sloooooow to respond. Re-imaging the c-drive back to the SSD once again confirmed for me the amazing improvement in overall system performance provided by a quality SSD deployed on the c-drive system files.

SSD's are presently uneconomical for use as a Lightroom preview drive (tried it before using the SSD on c-drive, and it appeared to provide very little performance improvement within Lightroom), or your image files where low $/GB is more important than GB/sec, but an SSD's is a great investment for your c-drive and likely also for your Photoshop scratch files.

...kills the annoying noise of a hard drive actuations for your c-drive too!

I wonder how good an SSD would be for use as an external drive to go with a laptop. I'm hoping that the speedy random access would prevent the usb or firewire interface bogging down like it does with hard drives when they are not transferring data in large chunks. It's a pity that my laptop holds only one drive and at present contains more stuff than any SSD can fit.

- Alan

if you are using USB 2.0, there is no point. the interface is your limiting factor. Firewire 400 is better but still limited by the interface as much as drive speed. FW800 is more drive limited.

Herb...

I've found a really good use for a SSD. I bought a HP 2140 Mini Notebook with a 10" screen. 6 hours battery life, very acceptable performance, and now I have put a 160 g Intel SSD in there. This is now my travel backup system! No more slow Epson P4000, and I don't have to worry about dropping it! Hyperdrive, eat your heart out!

I built a custom PC for PS a couple years ago. Overclocked it from 2.4 GHz to 3.6, tweaked the RAM for fastest access, three HD's with OS, XP swap file, and PS swap file seperated.

NOTHING prepared me for the huge increase in responsiveness of the 2 Intel X25-M SSD's I put in! For anyone who has spent money to overclock, SSD's are a far better investment.

I'd like to also chime in on some misinfo here. In a very heavy use home pc, you should expect no less than 5 years of service, with other estimates going up to 30 years of continuous use. In reality, I expect FAR longer life from my SSD's than my HD's.

Although Win7 will self-optimize for SSD use, you can easily manually optimize XP (as I have done). PC Perspective storage forums and OCZ storage forums have excellent step-by-step guidelines to help any newbie (as I was) do this.

MS itself states that the swap file is PERFECT for SSD use, as it's a large file, seldom written, and often read.

SSD's suffer no rotational or head movement delays, so serve up multiple, stacked read/write requests very fast.

Finally, you get greatly enhances performance in EVERYTHING you do. Faster boot, immediate program response once the desktop shows up, AV scans not slowing down surfing or program use, faster webpage painting, the whole 9 yards. It's a huge deal.

If you are thinking about jumping in, be SURE to read Anandtechs fantastic in-depth reviews.

FYI: Stuttering is not an issue like it was with the first gen SSD's. The reason for stuttering was that the random writes of small 4k blocks had huge latencies of over 1 second. This isw one of the most important specs of an SSD, and the intel is by far the best. Don't try and save money with a cheap first gen SSD, you will be unhappy.
The Anandtech article explains all of this in excrutiating detail

In the Core i7 system I built, I'm using 2 Intel 160 gb SSD's in a raid 0 for OS (Vista Ultimate) and programs, and 2 1TB drives in a raid 1 for data storage. Photoshop opens in under 3 seconds. It's very cool... I HAVE had an interesting time with the Intel raid drivers - I, and many others, have had trouble with the current 8.9 version (one of the raid 0 drives showing an error every couple of days), but rolling it back to 8.8 seems to have fixed the issue.

After the first raid crash, I used one ssd for the OS and one for programs, and it seemed sluggish, so I went back to the raid 0.

Larry Becker

I would wait for next year when USB 3.0 is available alone with cheaper SSD drive or perhaps a SSD RAID with USB 3.0 interface.

alexkiowa wrote:
I would wait for next year when USB 3.0 is available alone with cheaper SSD drive or perhaps a SSD RAID with USB 3.0 interface.

We can always wait for what's coming next year - what is expensive now will be cheaper then. Sometimes half the price. With computers or photography equipment (mostly computers now) , we deal with what is there now and realize it will be better later. My 1DIII is MUCH better than my 1DII was, and the 1DIV is MUCH better than my 1DIII is... what is your pain threshhold for upgrading?

When I built my pc, I wanted to use the best components available... SSD's seemed a great way to go, and they made a huge difference in my computer's speed and power. Huge. And they'll continue to get better and cheaper. And I'll likely upgrade mine when they get cheaper, bigger and faster... That's part of the fun of building your own pc!

I was just looking at my old XP Pro Dell - five years ago it was really great - now, not so much. It was great because it was my first pc with a RAID 0, 2 gigs of RAM and was the fasteset pc I could reasonably get. And very noisy (5 fans!). My new one is in a water-cooled case, is MANY times the pc that my Dell was, and is dead quiet. Things change... Hard to keep up...

Larry Becker

News for anyone interested in a pretty decent SSD at a decent price:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/kingston-intel-ssd-solid-state,8932.html

Also, there are rumors that Intel might not be adopting USB 3.0 until 2011, which means nobody will be using it until then.