SSD for Photoshop?

[anthony_bez]

<p>Eric,<br>

Yes I intend fitting a PCI-e SSD controller card for the two 240GB SSD's.</p>

<p>Your system is over-clocked and water-cooled..... but you call my standard workstation complicated?</p>

<p>Cheers</p>

[EricM]

Lol, I guess that does sound a bit wacked doesn't it? If you

look at the corsair water cooling units, it's as easy as

putting a normal air cooled unit on. Temps are always

stable and never over 58* C. The over clocking is now

done by simple alterations in the bios and a few minutes on

a few threads for a walk through, and anyone can do it. I

think it's remarkable in this greedy age that Intel let's

you buy a $300 cpu and over clock it to match one of

their $800 cpu's. If you want a fast PS machine, run your cpu over 4ghz :)

[Wouter Willemse]

<blockquote>

<p>Yes I intend fitting a PCI-e SSD controller card for the two 240GB SSD's.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Bad plan. Assuming mean you mean a PCI-E card with additional SATA connectors, you usually loose the ability to boot from drives connected to it. If you meant something else: there is no such thing as a SSD controller card.<br>

SSD drives can be connected in two ways: SATA or PCI-E (which means your drive itself is an interface card); the latter can be a lot faster, but tend to be enterprise class with matching price tags. The SATA ones are more like normal drives - and also these now already exist up to 1GB.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I'd probably rather get a good pcie-e raid controller card and plug a couple Samsung Evo 256 ssd's into it and run raid 0.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I absolutely would not. With a good RAID card booting from the card shouldn't be a problem, but the speed advantages of a RAID0 with SSDs are not that huge, while you keep all the downsides of RAID0 (higher risk of failure, bigger dependency on drivers and more complications when you need to do disaster data recovery). All nice and fun if your hobby is playing with PCs and tweaking maximum performance out of them, but if you need a system to do productive work, keep things as simple as possible. The hardware discussed is more than ample, so speed isn't going to be an issue.</p>

[michael_bradtke]

<p>I run a 500GB Samsung Evo SSD for my C drive and find it to be amazingly fast on boot and launching applications. I also have a 90 GB Corsair SSD that I run as a dedicated scratch disk. My system is running Win 7 pro with 32 GB of ram and an i7 2600@3.4 GHz.</p>

<p>Because of the volume of files that I tend to work with at one time I do end up hitting the scratch disk. Having the speed of a SSD as the scratch disk really helps keep the performance where I need it to be.</p>

<p>After I photograph a show and during the edit phase I will be opening as many as 100 RAW files at a time from my D4 and running batch actions on them. This will go on for 8 to 10 hours a day for as many days as it takes for me to finish the show. That is typically 4 days. I have found my system to be rock solid under this kind of a load.</p>

[mike_earussi1]

<p>I don't understand why you're skimping on the ram. It's not that expensive anymore and makes a huge difference in operation ease. There are plenty of motherboards on the market that can handle more than 36gb.</p>

[anthony_bez]

<p>Wouter,<br>

You can boot from a SSD connected to a PCI-e card..... but I now agree it does not seem optimal to use one. I am now looking at..... http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-080-OC&groupid=1657&catid=2101&subcat=2199<br>

Mike,<br>

I guessed 4GB modules (36GB) would be adequate, I can upgrade to 8GB (72GB) or more if needed. My present editing needs are not that demanding.</p>

<p>Cheers</p>

[EricM]

<blockquote>

<p>With a good RAID card booting from the card shouldn't be a problem, but the speed advantages of a RAID0 with SSDs are not that huge, while you keep all the downsides of RAID0 (higher risk of failure, bigger dependency on drivers and more complications when you need to do disaster data recovery). All nice and fun if your hobby is playing with PCs and tweaking maximum performance out of them, but if you need a system to do productive work, keep things as simple as possible. The hardware discussed is more than ample, so speed isn't going to be an issue.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Not a huge gain with raid 0 but still there, Wouter. And yes, way too much trouble imo for the very small performance gain</p>

[Wouter Willemse]

<p>Anthony,"You can boot from a SSD connected to a PCI-e card"... not all systems can. It really depends on the motherboard (well, the BIOS/UEFI). Verify first, do not blindly assume it can. In similar vein, verify if your system can actually boot from a PCI-E card - again, not all systems can do it. If it can, that revodrive makes a nice choice for sure.<br>

Eric, we're effectively saying the same thing :-)</p>

[anthony_bez]

<p>Wouter,<br /> Thank you for the warning..... yes I had checked my motherboard/BIOS will support booting from a PCI-e card.<br /> I don't need the revodrive, but it is interesting and if I am buying SSD's I may as well have a fast one.<br /> But I need to stop pondering as the build is starting to get out of hand. Mike has me doubting my choice of 4GB modules, thinking now I should of bought 8GB (72GB).</p>

<p>I will stick with 36GB RAM, fit the revodrive for scratch or OS, and a second 240GB SSD. Swap the GPU for the FX2000. And fit two 3000GB 7200rpm spinners for storage.</p>

<p>Thank you again everyone for your help!</p>

<p>Cheers</p>

<p> </p>