Anyone using an SSD to run Photoshop?

[Ron Marshall]

I'm planning a replacement for my slow 7 year old PC and considering a faster hard drive.

Has anyone installed Photoshop on a Solid State Drive, and if so, how much of a performance boost did they observe?

[jp]

I have a new windows7 computer that boots of a solid state drive. I have the OS installed on the 30ish GB OCZ vertex SSD and the applications and data on a 1TB sata 3.5" drive. It does boot quick!

Application performance does not seem to differ much as once the program is running, it's not using the hard drive. Swap space (scratch disk) should be on a traditional hard drive.

[Ron Marshall]

I have a new windows7 computer that boots of a solid state drive. I have the OS installed on the 30ish GB OCZ vertex SSD and the applications and data on a 1TB sata 3.5" drive. It does boot quick!

Application performance does not seem to differ much as once the program is running, it's not using the hard drive. Swap space (scratch disk) should be on a traditional hard drive.

I'm not concerned with the scratch disk, as my new machine will have 16 GB of RAM and I'll get 64 bit PS.

Just wondering how much time would be saved with an SSD, or are the most used PS files loaded into RAM and in that case the SSD would not help much?

[Jeremy Moore]

Just wondering how much time would be saved with an SSD, or are the most used PS files loaded into RAM and in that case the SSD would not help much?

I've been testing this at work and the SSD works great for batch processing lots of smaller files where you're spending most of your time reading to and writing from the disk. With larger files where I would actually work on the image for an extended period of time there was no distinct speed difference, but I also have quite a bit of RAM so this may have forestalled any issues there.

[Lenny Eiger]

Application performance does not seem to differ much as once the program is running, it's not using the hard drive. Swap space (scratch disk) should be on a traditional hard drive.

Hmmm, this is curious. I would have thought that one could get a boost with large files by using the SSD as scratch disk - and maybe containing the main file, maybe not. Is this a glitch I don't know about, a bus issue? Or am I just thinking incorrectly about it?

Lenny

[Eric Leppanen]

Regarding SSD's and Photoshop scratch disks, Joseph Holmes did some testing earlier this year (see http://www.josephholmes.com/news-fastphotoshop.html). Here is an excerpt of his results:

...I need to discuss some of the key issues for Photoshop scratch usage. It appears from my earlier tests with a script which requires nearly 15 GB of scratch to complete, that Photoshop relies mainly on writing 100+KB chunks of sequential data to the selected scratch disk, in at least some configurations....Unfortunately, small sequential reads and writes (4K to 128K) is the area of disk performance where even the best SSDs (Intel E drives) have the least performance advantage over standard hard drives, and for the smallest of those sizes they're actually slower in this particular benchmark result, at least. I have been able to get some confirmation from the blog of one of the Photoshop engineers that this size of data chunk (a little over 100 KB) is typical for Photoshop's scratch writing, and it seems likely that the chunks are written sequentially, requiring little seeking from a traditional hard drive, thus eliminating the larger of the two main speed benefits of SSDs over spinning disks — phenomenally fast seek/latency speed.

Anandtech also recently published a Photoshop application benchmark where a Velociraptor hard drive generally held its own versus a variety of SSD's:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=25

A compelling case can be made for an SSD as a system drive, as OS's traditionally perform a lot of random I/O. Apparently SSD benefits for specific applications can be more problematic, at least at current prices.

If you do decide to go with an SSD, try to get one which is upgradeable to TRIM mode, which improves both drive performance and longevity. Windows 7 will support TRIM; I'm not sure whether Snow Leopard does.

[Doug Dolde]

I use an Intel 80 gb SSD for my boot/application drive. But I have a 64 x 3 gb scratch disk spanning 3 x 1TB hard drives in Raid0. It's FAST.