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Question

Best way to utilize SSD drive with Adobe/Photoshop?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
July 18, 2013
5 replies
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Hi guys,

Just bought my first SSD drive (240GIG)and are about to set it up for the purpose of doing any Adobe CC work the fastest I can.

Obviously I have to install the Windows 7 Pro system onto the drive and Adobe files, I imagine that any work Adobe .psd/work files I should also keep on the drive?

So partition it like

C: Windows 100GIG

😧 Program Files and Work Files 140GIG

???

Or should I add another drive E: so I can set scratch disks to it?

Or can scratch disks just utilise my old non SSD drive?

I imagine getting everything onto SSD would be the way to go, but thats only guessing.

Any help or advice would be great

This topic has been closed for replies.

B

bobmepp

Known Participant

Here's what I'm doing, for what it's worth, which you may be interested in if you are a lower budget Mac user. I have late-2012 2.3 i7 Mac mini with a 5400 rpm standard 1 TB spinning hard drive (not a fusion drive). I know it is pretty mundane compared to the impressive systems mentioned above.

Connected to it is a usb 3 dock, which holds my old windows low to medium end 256 GB SSD reformatted for the Mac OS. Photoshop CC and CS6 both recognize this as a usable scratch drive. I know this is not as fast as a internal hard drive connection, but I honestly cannot notice any slow down, even with a photoshop file of more than 1 GB. My mini has 16 GB of RAM. The whole thing works great for my rather ordinary photo editing uses and prints with great color accuracy thanks to the ability to send 16 bit files to my Epson 3880. 3D even works pretty well with the humble hd4000 graphics. Thanks to the 16 GB of RAM and the apparently efficient way that OSX handles memory, Photoshop starts as fast as it did when the above mentioned SSD held it and was in my old Windows 7 box. Saving a large file can take 30 seconds to 45 seconds. Not really fast, but this is when I grab a sip of Earl Grey (hot), stretch my hands, and close my eyes to give them a little rest. Just my 2 cents worth if you are a Mac mini user and have an old Windows SSD. I do recommend a usb 3 dock, not a usb 2 dock. I am a happy camper.

L

Lundberg02

Inspiring

I think you have a nice little machine there. I should have waited a bit and bought the 2012, but I will be getting the 2014 I believe. I am certainly not against SSDs. It's just that unless you're putting a machine together yourself, you have to buy a stock product, which I did. I will give my SATA II to my wife who doesn't use any speed. I have a 4TB Thunderbolt RAID 0 and two eSATAs hooked up to a Thunderbolt adapter. These will operate pretty well with SATA III. Then I will get some large USB3 drives. I am hoping that 2014 mini will have a 512 SSD internal of OS and apps. That is as small a boot drive as I can use.

Speed? i just tested a 1,03 GB folder transferred to the 4 TB and it went at 35 MBps. It had a bunch of seeks which illustrates the spinning drive slowdown. No point in SSD externals unless you have SATA III. Even then I expect that same file won't get above 110 MBps. 110 MBps is the highest transfer I have seen with my present machine with a homogeneous file. If you move files between two SATA II devices, the highest no RAID speed you can theoretically get is 1500 mbps.

Noel Carboni

Legend

That's probably an underestimate in real-world usage, Richard. Caching, when set up properly, can mean that the entire file will be read then cached into RAM - then your program will be able to move on while the OS works in the background to write it out. Thus, until you overwhelm your RAM cache it will seem like you have the full raw SATA speed, not half for read and half for write.

As an example, I can sustain about 1.7 gigabytes/second transfer rate. Note this 3.4 gigabyte file copies from/to the same drive in 2 seconds.

C:\TEMP\CopyTest>dir
Volume in drive C is C - NoelC4 SSD
Volume Serial Number is 00ED-C11E

Directory of C:\TEMP\CopyTest

07/31/2013 02:11 AM    <DIR>          .
07/31/2013 02:11 AM    <DIR>          ..
07/31/2013 02:11 AM     3,401,966,452 BigFile.tmp
               1 File(s) 3,401,966,452 bytes
               2 Dir(s) 925,897,904,128 bytes free

C:\TEMP\CopyTest>Timer Copy BigFile.tmp BigFile2.tmp
1 file(s) copied.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Start time: Wednesday, July 31, 2013, 02:12:16
Stop time: Wednesday, July 31, 2013, 02:12:18
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

C:\TEMP\CopyTest>dir
Volume in drive C is C - NoelC4 SSD
Volume Serial Number is 00ED-C11E

Directory of C:\TEMP\CopyTest

07/31/2013 02:12 AM    <DIR>          .
07/31/2013 02:12 AM    <DIR>          ..
07/31/2013 02:11 AM     3,401,966,452 BigFile.tmp
07/31/2013 02:11 AM     3,401,966,452 BigFile2.tmp
               2 File(s) 6,803,932,904 bytes
               2 Dir(s) 922,261,032,960 bytes free

C:\TEMP\CopyTest>

-Noel

Noel Carboni

Legend

I'd advise against partitioning your SSD into multiple drive letters. That really just serves to divide up your available free space so that if in a pinch you did need nearly all of it you might not be able to use it.

-Noel

RobertoBlake

Inspiring

Noel is right, avoid partitioning the SSD Drives. Here is a decent build for around $1700 you can get all of these components from New Egg.

3.2 gHz i7 6-core (OC’d to 4.4 gHz)
32 GB RAM (8×4 DIMM)
NVIDIA GTX 680
ASUS Sabertooth X79 Motherboard
2X Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HD
2x Samsung 830 256 GB SSD (in a RAID 0 Configuration)
Master Cooler 1000 Watt Power Supply
R2D2 Post Trash Compactor PC Case
ASUS DVD-RW Drive

JJMack

Community Expert

I don't have a 6 drive raid on my system.

Here is what I did a while back I bought a new workstation from Dell outlet. It came preloaded with Windows Professional on its 250GB SDD. Also had a hard disk and 8GB of ECC Ram. With Windows installed onto the SDD many things will be going to be put into the SDD by default. Users settings, Paging, hibernation and Programs files. I wanted to add lots more Ram. Use Photoshop on the machine and have Photoshop use space on the SDD for swapping. The only way to do the without adding a second SDD would be to pay careful attention to what can be moved off the C; and what can be eliminated from the c: drive.

First if you have a lot of RAM Windows Paging files is going to be large and you want paging on the SDD. Your Hibernation file would also be large and windows would but that on the C:. I added 32GB of ECC Ram with 40GB of RAM the page file would be 40GB and the the hibernation file would be 40GB and with some diligence I know I can keep Windows, Programs, User setting and a limited number of user file on the c: under 100GB. Adding that up 180GB of the SDD would be used. In addition Dell has a 14GB recovery partition on C:. There would only be 50GB free for Photoshop swap space. That would not do.

Its a workstation not a laptop so the first thing to go was hibernation. I used the windows command line power tool to disable hibernation. That delete the hibernation file. I regained 40GB on the SDD. Yes the machine has battery backup when power fails after a short while on battery windows power management is set to shut the machine down not hibernate. Some Programs insist on putting user data file in the User My Document tree. Others are not so infatic about that they can be moved and located elsewhere. So I added library space for user data files on an external USB 3 4TB drive. This is where I keep my user files including Images library, Music library etc. I also resist installing programs I will not use much and un-install programs that I don't use. Like pre install software from Dell. I have been able to keep around 120GB od free space on the SDD, The second drive that came with the system is a 500GB 10K RPM disk I use it for backup and additional. Photoshop has 400GB of swap space to work with. With an SDD its does not matter that Photoshop swap space and Windows paging space are on the same device.

If your system running well you may just want to add the SDD as an additional disk. Then move Windows Page space to it and use the rest for Photoshop swap space. You spend most of you time in applications not loading them. Load time is not that important you want the applications to work well. You will gain some performance it application the use caching have the cache space on the sdd. In my case windows is on my sdd. Most caches are stored in user space so the are on my SDD. Browers cache Adobe caches etc are on SDD.

JJMack

RobertoBlake

Inspiring

I wasn't suggeting a 6 Hard Drive RAID system outright.
This is what I was talking about regarding a 6 Hard Drive Setup

OS- SSD

Application HDD
Data 2X HDD RAID1- Mirroring to protect your data.
ScratchDisk/VRAM/Caching - 2X SSD RAID 0 - Performance+Spac

So you can use the RAID0 SSD Drives for Paging as well as Scratch Disk.

This setup combined with the great advice you gave will increase performance dramatically.
But since the poster asked specifically about SSD that is what I attempted to cover.

RobertoBlake

Inspiring

I would recommend that you consider using your SSD drive for the Scratch Disk exclusively. I'm writing up an article on optimizing Photoshop Hard Drives in general but my older blog post below still has some valid information on how you can improve Photoshop performance in most modern versions of Photoshop and still applies to CS6 and CC today. I also included my artitcle on building one.

With regard to drives most people support the idea of a 4 hard drive configuration:

OS Level -SSD (smaller drive under 60GB)

Application Level SSD or HDD (if SSD 250-500GB depending on what you need)

Cache Level (caching, scatch disk, vram, etc) SSD (50-250GB)

Data Level HDD (1TB-4TB)

This may seem like overkill if you don't know about "internal bandwidth". The simple explanation being imagine your data as cars travelling in lanes of traffic. 4 Lanes will get more cars to their location especially if 2 of them are dedicated to oncoming and 2 are deciated to outgoing. So instead of your OS, Applications, Caching, and Data all using 1 Pipeline or Drive to send information back and forth, everyone has their own dedicated lane and can move faster.

Let me know if you want me to give you some information on a 6 Drive configuration which includes RAID info.

http://robertoblake.com/blog/2011/07/speeding-up-photoshop-cs5/
http://robertoblake.com/blog/2011/07/building-a-photoshop-cs5-computer/

C

complexityAuthor

Known Participant

it appears as though Adobe recommends scratch disks on SSD too, so I guess its 3 partions it is!

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-performance-photoshop-cs4-cs5.html#main_Solid_state_disks

Is there any performance loss when partitioning a SSD drive is there? I also read somewhere online that using SSD for conistatnt read/writing (sotring your work .psd files on it) might lead to shorting the life of the drive to 5 years or so, any truth to this?

J

Josh Wilkinson

Participant

Yes there is, SSDs are only good for so many R/W cycles (like 10k). The average life though isn't much different from a HDD with the same wear and tear. Just back everything up really well and plan to replace it every 3-5 years.

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