How to run Photoshop from second HDD / SSD

<p>Good Morning,<br>

<br />I believe it is possible to improve speed of Photoshop by running the application from a second HDD / SSD. I have installed a SSD into my laptop as a second drive, but am having difficulty in installing PS and Lightroom to it. Can any kind soul help? The drive is initialised and working.<br>

<br />HP Envy 17 running Windows 8.1 64bit. 16GB RAM, Drive 0 1TB HDD and Drive 1 128GB SSD.<br>

I use Creative Cloud as a PS subscriber.<br>

Many thanks in advance.</p>

<p>Hi,<br>

Maybe there is a bit of mix-up in the information. The biggest speed increase would not be the fact that PS/LR run on a second drive as such, but rather to have the Photoshop 'scratch' disk, or the LR catalog on a seperate drive. And second (in parallel, so to speak), to have your operating system and applications installed on a SSD.<br>

So, ideally, your SSD would become the primary drive, with Win8.1 and your applications installed onto it. The existing 1TB drive would then become mainly your storage drive. However, the software installation processes of OEM machines, such as HP, Dell etc., typically make this a hard task. You may want to check with HP how to best to this, and possibly they'll not be extremely willing to help (no idea how hard they've made it, I have little experience with HPs).<br>

If this is really not possible, then I'd leave the applications as they are and only set the SSD as scratch drive for Photoshop, and move your Lightroom catalog file to the SSD. This would not make an equally impressive jump in speed, but still be better. Moving the applications themselves only, without moving Windows, to me doesn't make too much sense.</p>

<p>Thanks Wouter, I'll try that and see what happens. It isn't exactly slow at the moment, just not as fast as I'd like.</p>

<p>I switched my Dell XPS from Dell's win8 bundled mess to a straight Win8.1installation. You can get the ISO file from windows knowledge base and create either a DVD or thumb drive installation. Win8.1 will assign all disk space of any hard drive active in the machine as "C". The way around this is to disconnect all but the drive you want to be the "C" drive, install windows, then reconnect the other drives then label and partition them as you wish in disk manager or via a third party utility.</p>

128GB for Windows and Applications might be a tight fit. It will work, but not much more room for bloat from downloads and updates. 250GB is the sweet spot for enough room, its what I run as my system drive.

 

If I did not care about any of the data on either drives, AND you have a full version of Windows 8.1:

 

Remove both drives from case

 

Install SSD into spot previously occupied by 1TB (it becomes disk 0)

 

Boot Windows setup either by DVD optical drive or via a bootable windows thumb drive method

 

Install OS to SSD (it will be the only choice), Format to wipe previous contents clean

 

Shutdown

 

Install 1TB drive in SSD's old spot and reboot

 

Run 'diskpart' from a command window with Administrative permissions.

 

select disk 1 and clear the partition table of all content. diskpart is very powerful, so check the web for the correct steps

 

This will rid the 1TB drive of all traces of the hidden HP recovery and the data partitions

 

Run Disk Management in Control Panel (search in Control panel by typing in "Create ")

 

Create disk partition on drive 1, set size as big as possible, then format in NTFS, assign volume a drive letter, likely D

 

diskpart is the new fdisk for the old timers out there

<blockquote>

<p>This will rid the 1TB drive of all traces of the hidden HP recovery and the data partitions</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I would be extremely cautious with that; if you ever are going to need HP support, they might insist you re-install the original software, and arguing with support organisations over such things is a massive waste of time. So, as lovely a tool as diskpart is, I would leave that recovery partition as it is. If you get the SSD to act as primary drive, and do a clean installation of Win8.1 on it, that recovery partition should give little problems and you don't burn bridges behind you.<br>

128GB for Win8.1 with applications can be quite enough - I've got a reasonable amount of software installed, and OS+applications is just around 70GB.</p>

Agreed regarding the recovery partition and HP service, it is very small so missing a few 100MB out 1TB is OK.

 

diskpart is nice if you are recycling HD's and really need to wipe the contents clean.

<p>Very recently I purchased my first SSD (250GB Crucial). I then cloned the old C:\ (system) partition, containing all installed programs including Photoshop, from the HDD to the SSD making it my system drive.<br>

Bottom line: I can detect no appreciable increase in speed of operation of any programs. Somewhat disappointing; that said I cannot say that any operation is so slow as to be annoying. I have 16GB ram installed.<br>

YMMV.</p>

A SSD is not a magic bullet. Depending on NAND memory technology and the hardware layout, you will get different levels of speed across vendors and their offerings.

 

If you have a more modern system with SATA 3 support on the MB or a PCIe SSD, you will get some decent performance from a SSD. Also setting drive mode to AHCI will enable further performance gains from native command queuing.

 

On an older setup with SATA 1 or 2, not so much wow factor.

 

HDTune is a free way to measure how well the drive is performing.

Here is another avenue to consider: "SSD Caching" via Intel's RST

 

I have used it in a X79 build with 40GB SSD (which was an unwise buy @$100) + 500GB mechanical drive. No complaints from me performance wise.

 

This is a good use for smallish ssd if you have some laying around.

 

It may be as easy as turning on ssd caching and pointing it at the existing 1TB drive.

 

or other ssd caching methods unknown to me

 

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/How-it-Works-Intel-SSD-Caching-148/