Some interesting info here. I'm planning on building a new Windows 7 system soon and am looking at getting an SSD. I'm wondering if anyone could steer me with a bit of advice...
I'm thinking my SSD would be just for the operating system and Photoshop, and files are stored on good old fashioned platter drives. But, what about the scratch disk? To this point the standard procedure has been to use a separate physical drive for the scratch disk. Does the same apply for an SSD? There's no physical mechanism jumping all over the place anymore, but the data still needs to go through a physical connection, right? So if you set up the OS and PS on an SSD, is it better to set the scratch disk to the SSD, or to the platter drive? Or take a hit and buy a second SSD for a scratch disk (which I'd prefer not to have to do)?
johnnyhuman wrote:
I'm thinking my SSD would be just for the operating system and Photoshop, and files are stored on good old fashioned platter drives. But, what about the scratch disk? To this point the standard procedure has been to use a separate physical drive for the scratch disk. Does the same apply for an SSD? There's no physical mechanism jumping all over the place anymore, but the data still needs to go through a physical connection, right? So if you set up the OS and PS on an SSD, is it better to set the scratch disk to the SSD, or to the platter drive? Or take a hit and buy a second SSD for a scratch disk (which I'd prefer not to have to do)? ...Show more →
Although I bought 2 SSD's, one specifically for PS and Windows swap files, SSD's suffer very little from multiple requests.
You -certainly- want the swap files on SSD. Large file reads/writes (IE: image files) should go to HD's. Put Bridge's work/temp/thumbs files on SSD.
If you use a program such as LR or Aperture that does not alter the original image files but reads from them to apply changes on the fly then perhaps the image files could live on an SSD if there is enough space. Programs like PS keep changing the files they are used to work on and so are fundamentally different in how they operate.
I installed a Kingston 128 SSD as my scratch drive in my MacPro. I tried storing and opening big PS files (200Mb+) and only got 10/15% faster write/reads. So (far) I think I wasted my money.
SoundHound wrote:
I installed a Kingston 128 SSD as my scratch drive in my MacPro. I tried storing and opening big PS files (200Mb+) and only got 10/15% faster write/reads. So (far) I think I wasted my money.
It's not surprising, really. The first place to put an SSD is your OS/applications drive. The general OS swap/paging file should also be on this mechanism. This device is hit far more frequently than a Photoshop scratch drive, especially if you already have ample RAM.
Having Photoshop scratch files ALSO on an SSD, not necessarily a dedicated one, would be advantageous. 200MB fits in memory pretty easy, unless you have a really small system by today's standards. I'm not sure that's very stressful. Unless you meant 200MP - that's different.
Although it has been stated that Windows 7 was built to work on SSD drives, I would check on some of the blogs because it does not always work as smooth as it should. With the cost of disks, I think it is too early to switch. Not all the bugs have been worked out.
