Solid State Drive and Photoshop

oshead

Has anyone bought, installed and/configured an SSD in their workstation with an eye to improve performance of Lightroom and Photoshop specifically. I am on the verge of forking out for one or maybe two at around €150 a go and don't want to waste money.

Did it make a huge difference speed wise to those programs?

Borderfox

No personal experience but
ftp://download.intel.com/design/flash/NAND/extreme/Photoshop_CS4_Performance_Comparison.pdf

Thecageyone

Going on the table there you get anything from 4 to 7 seconds overall improvement. Not worth €150 I'd say. More RAM and a faster processor would surely be the better investment?

oshead

Those tests are run against 4 15k SAS drives in a Raid 0 config. If I had that hardware I probably wouldn't bother with SSD. Unless the noise bothered me of course. I have single disks running 5400 and 7200. I could probably expect an x4 times improvement over the slower drive and maybe x3 over the 7200.

In all honesty, I'm just looking for a quick fix performance boost. I'm afraid i'll go down that old road of continually upgrading/replacing everything in the box till I'm completely broke.

Thecageyone

Have you tried using ready boost?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

I've tried it before and it seems to speed things up a little. Not sure how effective it'll be with power hungry programs like LR3 and photoshop. Worth a shot, and it's cheap.

How to:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial136.html

gloobag

I assume (as most are quite small in capacity) you're talking about having the SSD as your system/apps drive while pulling your files from an existing 2.5/3.5"? The problem here is that your OS and Photoshop will be faster, but your still going to be accessing files from a slower drive, so you might not see as big a performance increase as you might expect.

oshead

Thecageyone wrote: »

Have you tried using ready boost?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

I've tried it before and it seems to speed things up a little. Not sure how effective it'll be with power hungry programs like LR3 and photoshop. Worth a shot, and it's cheap.

How to:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial136.html

Readyboost is just a gimmick IMO. You need a fast USB drive for it to be anyway useful. Though I could be just talking through my....

gloobag wrote: »

I assume (as most are quite small in capacity) you're talking about having the SSD as your system/apps drive while pulling your files from an existing 2.5/3.5"? The problem here is that your OS and Photoshop will be faster, but your still going to be accessing files from a slower drive, so you might not see as big a performance increase as you might expect.

I'm thinking of getting two @ 120GB. One with the OS, Photoshop and Lightroom and the other being the working drive with the Photoshop scratch disk, the page file and my current working files. I have some external drives I use to backup the days work which I can transfer to slower drives when finished working on them.

Nforce

I've been running a pair of 64GB SSD's in my main PC for the last 3 years. ...though I'd never had PS/Lightroom installed on them (back then these drives retailed at ~£600 ea!!:o). One is used for the OS and this'll provide much faster boot up times.

As has been mentioned already, you'll see better PS performance by concentrating on the CPU speed (overclock your current chip if possible) and memory (~8gb of the fastest memory that'll run on your computer's motherboard). As regards the HDD.....maybe get a 10k 300GB WD Velociraptor which will provide more than adequate performance for your PS install.

DaireQuinlan

You could always raid 0 your working volumes, that ought to provide some improvement, but that said I don't know what the PS/LR profile would be like with regard to write size or whatever so It's probably up in the air a bit. Plus I'd get freaked out leaving stuff on a raid 0 volume even overnight or anything so constant backups would be a necessity ...

oshead

Nforce wrote: »

I've been running a pair of 64GB SSD's in my main PC for the last 3 years. ...though I'd never had PS/Lightroom installed on them (back then these drives retailed at ~£600 ea!!:o). One is used for the OS and this'll provide much faster boot up times.

As has been mentioned already, you'll see better PS performance by concentrating on the CPU speed (overclock your current chip if possible) and memory (~8gb of the fastest memory that'll run on your computer's motherboard). As regards the HDD.....maybe get a 10k 300GB WD Velociraptor which will provide more than adequate performance for your PS install.

Back in the day when I worked in IT and had loads of money :cool:, I was really temped to pick up a pair of 64GB OCZ SSD's from Komplett. The price was just total madness. The other thing that stopped me from purchasing was the write speed. It wasn't much better than a 7200K drive. The 10k drive is not a bad option but it won't give the boost I crave.

I don't think overclocking the CPU will make much difference. I did a few unscientific tests, and most of the time the comp is dealing with a 2Gb + Scratch file. Extra ram may help with this but not that much me thinks.

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

You could always raid 0 your working volumes, that ought to provide some improvement, but that said I don't know what the PS/LR profile would be like with regard to write size or whatever so It's probably up in the air a bit. Plus I'd get freaked out leaving stuff on a raid 0 volume even overnight or anything so constant backups would be a necessity ...

The only way I can do this with my current hardware is by using window soft raid and I don't really fancy that. Besides, none of my drives are from the same manufacturer and/or speed.

You mentioned backups. That's another thing I need to re-look at. Since I started doing some photography for other folk, the demand on space and a properly redundant system has become much more of a necessity.... :pac:

BostonB

AFAIK ready boost is turned off if you have a SSD.

Some SSD are better than others, so you can't really compare older drives with the recent one's and the price keep dropping.

You'd have to look at what files you are working with. What part of your process is taking the most of the time and which you want to reduce. Its it loading, saving, processing. If it processing, using filters etc, then CPU and RAM. If its loading and saving then is the disk. Of course you need to have enough ram for the files you are working with too.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2365870,00.asp
http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshop-RAMDisk.html
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/763927
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/252007-32-boot-disk-dilemma-velociraptor

I dunno what you are doing. But the first thing to do is make sure you have a good backup strategy in place, before you start messing around with faster disks. No point losing a days or a weeks work. Have a back up of the day, week, months, years work somewhere.

BostonB

Assuming you have enough RAM. If I was on a budget, I'd go for a fast SATA disk on a decent Sata Raid (hardware controller). Then multiple copies of the data as back up on other slower disks. Some external so they could be moved to a different location. Long term archive of the most important stuff on DVD or similar.

In case someone breaks in and robs everything, including the backups.

oshead

Lol.... Getting back to an earlier post. Not wanting to spend every cent I have upgrading the comp...

Anyway, the things that need Improvement IMO are

• Lightroom load speed. Both for the program (Which isn't so bad) and loading individual file previews. This is very annoying, almost 10sec per file. Thats for the lowest res preview too.
• Converting Raw to PSD and opening up in Photoshop. For this a combination of faster RAM and Disk should do the trick. CPU would help here too but not as much as the other two.
• Saving PSD file (can be up to 500MB) to working disk.
• Scratch disk access, as I mentioned earlier 2+GB. This is read/write and would need RAM and Disk.

My current 'backup strategy' is to do a load of work and if I remember, dump it on to a 2TB drive using MSSync 2.0. Every now and again I duplicate that drive and leave it in my Mammys. I should really get a little more serious about this. Soon as the money allows and the work load rises I no doubt will.

BostonB

I think you need to get specific like you are doing now.....


http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1082342&page=2
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1004&message=36446700&changemode=1

I thought this was relevant...

if only your OS and apps are on the SSD, then why would LR3 image files open faster?

By default, the camera raw cache is on the C drive in C:\Users\user-name\AppData\Local\Cache. Also, the default location for the Lightroom catalog and previews is c:\Users\user-name\Pictures. Much of the heavy disk activity for LR is to those two locations.

and...

I used to use C1 a lot
not as much these days but in the old Rob Golbraith days I did a lot to promote them so never had to pay for C1 they gave me a few lic to have

my setup is LR cache and PS scratch are on SSD
my main files and catalogs live on the areca raid which is pretty quick and secure etc..
then backup to a PM setup and TM is also on a PM setup
my boot is on SSD

all my testing showed the cache was the main thing to get on SSD and with catalogs and files being larger figured why waste the expensive space of SSD

3 SSD on the ICH throttles I had a post with numbers some months back ?

woody_2000

If you're thinking of SSDs, then maybe one SSD might be enough - just for managing RAW and PSD files, and previews. That's where your main problem appears to be - and you could try that out first and see how it works out. Maybe consider a good quality SSD with good write speeds as well as read speeds (for writing those large PSD files). Maybe partitioning an SSD drive, if possible, might help also with performance -- partitions possibly for general orgainsing, scratch file, extended memory (like Turbo Boost), and such... The particular characheristics of an SSD might also be particularly useful in this regard, over a regular hard drive... You could possibly get a good few years out of an SSD, justifying its cost, and it may even be useful if you ever wanted to use it in another computer or notebook/netbook computer at a later stage (2.5" drive) - or maybe even turn it into an external drive, if possible...

On the idea of external drives, there are also external SSD/flash drives which are very compact and should run well off USB 3.0 - and maybe just as well as an internal drive... If you don't have USB 3.0, then maybe an appropriate expansion card could be installed in your computer - if possible...

On a general point regarding speed: Halving your load speeds with a drive twice as fast from, say, 10 seconds to 5 seconds may be ok, and have its own benefit - but would halving your speed again from 5 seconds to 2.5 seconds with a drive four times as fast be as beneficial?... Would there be diminishing returns to consider, depending on cost/benefit?...

Just some random points which may be worth considering...

oshead

Thanks woody. You hit the nail on the head. Very well said.

Just on your last point, the one about diminishing returns and all that. Surely you gotta take into account my ability to multi-task.

woody_2000

Yes, that's true - the ability to (seamlessly) multitask is important for ease of use and productivity... I've just installed the Lightroom 3 demo on my netbook (Compaq Mini 311), and it works quite well for the most part except for loading files, etc. I can't justify the cost of an SSD at the moment, but it would be interesting to try one out just to see what effect it would have on overall usability - but prices should probably come down somewhat in the future. Then there's intermediate hybrid drives, which could balance the performance of an SSD with the economical storage capacity of a hard drive. These drives (SSD and hybrid) could be an important part of the overall performance and usability mix, and could probably be more suitable for netbooks and ultraportables than regular hard drives.. Actually, manufacturers should probably optimally integrate a certain amount of fast flash memory (maybe 8/16/32/64 GB) directly on computer mainboards - which could then compliment regular hard drives, as necessary...

James Collingwell

Overall it depends on what you are planning to do with the SSD.
If you compare pure sequential reads and write than a 15K RPM HDD will be close to todays SSDs (Although the newest SATA II SSDs max out at 285 MB/s). This applies to RAW format files (Video, Pictures)

Now, if you are working with compressed files (random in small blocks) than your 15K HDD will physically be limited to 1.2 MB/s, maybe 10MB/s if block size is larger. A SSD will easily maintain 70-120 MB/s, which is quite an improvement if you are planning to save, load and manipulate files in Photoshop or other applications.

Finally, the chances of the SSD failing over time are much smaller than a HDD, which wears out and is susceptible to shock and EM fields. Anyone familiar with the "click of death" knows what I am talking about.

Overall I would personally recommend switching to a few OWC SSDs. You can get a 120GB SSD with 285 MB/s read and write and 30.000 IOPS here in Ireland for about 156 EUR. Have used them for over 4 years now on my Macbook Pro and custom built PC and they work like a charm.

For those with a little more money, there is also the 480GB version for about EUR 618 available... prices definitely have come down lately.

Just check a few online retailers in Europe for OWC or other SSDs.

Hope this helps OShead,

James

oshead

James Collingwell wrote: »

You can get a 120GB SSD with 285 MB/s read and write and 30.000 IOPS here in Ireland for about 156 EUR....

Thanks for that James. I was looking at OCZ but OWC drives are equally as good, ie using the same Sandforce chipset. Where can the OWC be purchased for €156?

James Collingwell

Hi,

Well, a few months ago, I purchased my OWC drive at a site called SSDeurope.com

Ask for Marco, he was quite knowledgeable and helpful and say hello from me!

James.

oshead

Thanks. I'll give him a call. I see they're down in Fairview. I might get the newer OWC drive, the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G.

DaireQuinlan

Actually, funny that this popped up again. I was reading a piece by Jeff Atwood (CodingHorror) the other day on SSDs that both himself and Joel Spolsky (joel on software) have used over the last few years, and how Every. Single. One. has failed catastrophically. In most cases in less than a year, in some cases in only a few days. So it looks like they're still a little bit on the bleeding edge. I wouldn't be averse to using them as a scratch drive or temporary working store, but I certainly wouldn't be actually leaving stuff on them for more than a few hours without backing it up somewhere else.

Here's the link...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

And I know, the plural of anecdote is not data etc etc. It's an interesting piece though. Surprisingly enough, he's still solidly in favour. Stockholm syndrome maybe :-)

oshead

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

And I know, the plural of anecdote is not data etc etc. It's an interesting piece though. Surprisingly enough, he's still solidly in favour. Stockholm syndrome maybe :-)

Thanks for that Daire. I just googled "SSD failure rates" and I got about 24,400 results (0.27 seconds). "HDD failure rates" got about 27,900 results (0.23 seconds)...

But seriously, Bleeding edge tech is going to have its teething problems no matter how you look at it. Just about 7 years ago I bought 4 whopping great big 160 gig hdd's and they were all dead within a year. Each one installed on a different machine. I think they were made by Matrox. Probably a bad batch or something. Who cares really. As long as the data is backed up... Right? By the time they went, I was busy purchasing 300+ gig drives.

I'm just hoping that whatever I get will last me at least a couple of years. By then I'll be ready to upgrade to the next gen for all the trouble it's worth. :pac: