PSA: The best upgrade you can make to your PC is an SSD

If you want to upgrade your computer, there is one device that will make the most difference: the SSD. Of course you may want to upgrade other components, like the monitor, or the CPU or whatever. But the one thing that will make the most difference is replacing your HD with an SSD, and it's the best money you can spend.

 

I'm coming at this from the angle of a photographer who doesn't need to process files any bigger than 24Mpx (most of the time anyway). My Mac is quite old now but let me tell you: upgrading the internal HD to an SSD was the best thing I could have done, and I wish I had thought to do this a long while ago.

 

More RAM is a good thing too, but trust me, an SSD will make life so much better. Boot times are dramatically shorter. You won't have issues with large swap files (virtual memory). Data transfers will be smoother. Waking from sleep will be almost seamless. And your PC will run more quietly.

 

In my case I'm just running an external USB 3 unit. This is one of the slowest SSD upgrades you could do - and yet it's much, much better than the internal HD. I do back up the important files to an external HD, of course. I stopped using optical discs for back-ups years and years ago, thanks to the falling prices of storage.

 

I don't think that SSDs should be trusted for critical data, as they tend to fail quite suddenly. When HDs start to decay, they decay one sector at a time, and this is a slow process that you don't even have to think about too much. Everything breaks, but HDs break very gracefully, giving you lots of time to migrate data. This is not a tutorial on backing up, though, so I'm not going to focus on that.

 

Seriously, if you don't have an SSD as your boot volume, just get one. It will be the best and cheapest upgrade you can make, and will probably give a few more years of life to your computer. That's a net saving that you should embrace. You're welcome. ;-)

Depends on your use, but for photo editing, I'd rate RAM>SSD.

 

Also, I might be out of date, but I was under the impression that swap on a SSD was a very bad idea. Actually, I thought swap had gone the way of the dodo once we started having 4 gig of RAM. I'd rather have the kernel kill a memory hogging application rather than wait ~30 minutes for the swap to max out, then kill the app anyway.

 

Different setups and needs are different though, so what works for me might not work for others.

 

In my case, going from 4 to 8 gig of RAM made a massive difference when I went from 16 to 24 megapixels.

 

(Would have fitted 16 gig, but Lenovo lied on their spec sheet...)

Glad adding an SSD improved your computing. With photo editing, the SSD isn't involved with the processing. My thoughts would be to open the Task Manager during your computing time and watch where the bottleneck seems to occur. For apps like Photoshop or Lightroom, the CPU does most of the work (if it can) followed by RAM. I no longer have a mechanical storage unit in my box but rely on M.2 SSDs. Yes, they are extremely fast for Read/Write but that doesn't help my processing workflow. I can't imagine working with a CPU with fewer than 8 cores.

My current studio computer (a 2015 27" iMac) had the option of a combination of SSD with regular hard drive that I have been very happy with. Photoshop launches almost instantly, as do other programs. I also maxed out the RAM--32 gigs, and noticed a major performance improvement over my previous Mac that had 8 gigs. As to which of these choices was the most important, I don't know enough to say anything useful. It was costly to load it up this way when I bought it, but I had my previous Mac for 8 years after essentially doing the same thing. It continued to work well until the last OS-X update, which made Photoshop slow down a lot and forced the issue of replacing it.

The smaller SSD, 120GB and 240GB are very reasonably priced.

 

If you can use one of those, definitely replace an HDD with it.

 

The computer I write this on is a Macbook Air, which only has room for an SSD, originally it has a 120GB

drive, but I got it from Goodwill with the drive removed, and put a 240GB drive in it.

 

I have NAS drives that I mount with NFS on different computers in the house, so files are available

on all computers. (But I mostly don't do photo editing, so won't say much about that.)

Gigabit ethernet, or higher speed WiFi will transfer data pretty fast.

 

The Macbook Air has 4GB RAM, soldering in and not changeable without resoldering.

(Normally not recommended.) It does sometimes start swapping, at which point I kill whatever

is doing the swapping, usually one window of Firefox.

 

SSD drives and/or software know how to spread the load around so that it doesn't wear out

blocks that are overused, such as swap file blocks.

 

Otherwise, there are whole drive failure modes for HDDs, some of which can be fixed by

swapping the circuit board from another drive. You want a good back-up in any case.

I don't think that SSDs should be trusted for critical data, as they tend to fail quite suddenly. When HDs start to decay, they decay one sector at a time, and this is a slow process that you don't even have to think about too much. Everything breaks, but HDs break very gracefully, giving you lots of time to migrate data.

I think I ran at least 2 SSDs as main drives in a previous box which both didn't drop dead but fell into a graceful agony that lets me still access files on them but they 'll bitch too soon to keep them wired in permanently and enjoy the machine.

Of course this is anecdotical experience since I can't base it on a large enough sample and the life of my HDDs in current use, does seem comparably impressive.

Actual moving head disks now have an MTBF of 1.2 million hours.

 

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/constellation-fam/constellation-es/constellation-es-2/en-us/docs/constellation-es2-fips-ds1725-5-1207us.pdf

 

In case you can't divide that fast, and don't have a calculator handy, that is 136 years.

 

That is mean, and some will be less, some will be more, but it is a long time.

 

I don't know about you, but I don't expect to be around that long.

Glad adding an SSD improved your computing. With photo editing, the SSD isn't involved with the processing. My thoughts would be to open the Task Manager during your computing time and watch where the bottleneck seems to occur. For apps like Photoshop or Lightroom, the CPU does most of the work (if it can) followed by RAM. I no longer have a mechanical storage unit in my box but rely on M.2 SSDs. Yes, they are extremely fast for Read/Write but that doesn't help my processing workflow. I can't imagine working with a CPU with fewer than 8 cores.

It will be pretty much involved if you move scratch disks to SSD:)

If you have enough RAM, you seldom resort to scratch disks for photo editing (or video).

 

You will run out of space very quickly if the root drive is less than 1 TB, and the bigger the better. If you need fast scratch space, use a second drive, inside the chassis or external using an NVMe or Thunderbolt interface. I use a 1 TB SSD for compiling video, which I later transfer to a standard hard drive. It is much faster to have the source in one drive and destination in another.

Agree Karin, Two of the most important things to do to extend the life of a PC / Mac is maximized the RAM and change over to a SSD, preferably a PCIe bus NVMe interface and M.2. The rest is up to God. Still using 10T spinning drives for mass storage. Not certain that SSDs are any less reliable than HDDs. My ownly drive failure over 30 years has been a HDD though I am sure the HDD tech is better now than ever. This blog awakens the inner nerd that I usually surpress with Bordeaux but it's too early in the day.

Well one needs 8GB now anyway, I had 4 or 6GB with a 2009 system Intel 2.33 Quad Q8200 and I could not stitch panormas with my 24MP FF dSLR. With 8GB, SSD is very important yeah. I had it with my previous system also. Now with a Ryzen 2400G yes with the builtin video card (freebie) for my hobby it is OK. Could be faster but it is OK for my hobby work. Using the same 250GB SSD from 2015.

Also, I might be out of date, but I was under the impression that swap on a SSD was a very bad idea. Actually, I thought swap had gone the way of the dodo once we started having 4 gig of RAM.

Swap files are never going away, as file size limits in modern OSes are huge. If you don't have a swap file, you will run out of RAM pretty quickly. Back when I got into computers, the Ataris and Commodores never needed virtual memory, as applications were so small. Nobody loaded video files or large images.

 

Glad adding an SSD improved your computing. With photo editing, the SSD isn't involved with the processing.

Processing time isn't the most important thing for me. Responsiveness is, and I suspect a lot of people would feel the same way.

 

This blog awakens the inner nerd that I usually surpress with Bordeaux but it's too early in the day.

You, sir, have taste and restraint. I would never drink before 6pm, unless I had to have an early dinner for whatever reason.

Swap files are never going away, as file size limits in modern OSes are huge. If you don't have a swap file, you will run out of RAM pretty quickly. Back when I got into computers, the Ataris and Commodores never needed virtual memory, as applications were so small. Nobody loaded video files or large images.

I've been running my laptops without a swap partition for quite a few years now, don't run into any memory issues under normal use (4gb). Can't hibernate, but boot speeds are fast enough that it's not an issue.

 

Normal reason to write to swap these days is a buggy or misbehaving application, which will slow down the machine to a crawl until the swap space is exhausted, what happens then depends upon how robust your OS is, but it may take hours. Typically, I'd just rather it fell over and died quickly, so I can get on with my work.

 

Desktop machines, again, I've mostly run without swap for the past decade, for the above reasons.

 

I view swap as a kludge of the past, necessary then, outdated and unwanted now.

 

 

As for Atari, Amiga, Commodore, Acorn, etc... When I was a kid we all wanted two things; RAM expansion packs and hard disk drives. Virtual memory was the in thing...

As for Atari, Amiga, Commodore, Acorn, etc... When I was a kid we all wanted two things; RAM expansion packs and hard disk drives. Virtual memory was the in thing...

As far as I was concerned, back then anyway, virtual memory was a sign of inelegance. It was a cludge. It slowed down everything. My goodness, the Windows 3.1 computers at my school (TAFE) were basically hard disk activity centres. That's all they did, just churn the HD. They obviously skimped on the RAM, big time. (Damn, though, I loved the '90s).

 

The original MacBook Air only had 2GB of RAM, but they could get away with that, due to the SSD. With a HD you need 8GB to ensure smooth running. So you see how powerful the SSD is.

The original MacBook Air only had 2GB of RAM, but they could get away with that, due to the SSD. With a HD you need 8GB to ensure smooth running. So you see how powerful the SSD is.

 

Having used it both ways...there's no really good way to make an original(early 2008) MacBook Air run well. An SSD is better than an iPod hard drive, but both are miserable.

 

That aside, if you REALLY want to see speed, look into a PCIe SSD, which is starting to become even more mainstream. They're more expensive than traditional SATA drives, but are blazing fast. New Mac designs have been using them since 2013 or so, and I've retrofitted one(or rather two) to my old Mac Pro "cheesegrater" tower. BTW, XQD and CFExpress are also implementations of PCIe storage.