Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: nemophoto on November 14, 2008, 06:02:00 pm
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I've had a Samsung 120GB SATA drive on my system for quite a while as a dedicated scratch disk for Photoshop (and a few other select programs like my RIP). I've been watching as SSD drives have come down in price as well as gone up in capacity. It's to the point where I'm willing to plunk down $385 for a 128GB SSD drive. Has anyone tried one of these, especially related to Photoshop, and do you see a worthwhile speed increase? Thanks.
Nemo
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I've had a Samsung 120GB SATA drive on my system for quite a while as a dedicated scratch disk for Photoshop (and a few other select programs like my RIP). I've been watching as SSD drives have come down in price as well as gone up in capacity. It's to the point where I'm willing to plunk down $385 for a 128GB SSD drive. Has anyone tried one of these, especially related to Photoshop, and do you see a worthwhile speed increase? Thanks.
Nemo
Which manufacturer/model are you looking at, Nemo?
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I found this 128GB for $349..... ----> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820183204 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183204)
Which manufacturer/model are you looking at, Nemo?
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You should read the customer reviews on that drive. Anandtech has some interesting benchmarks of the new intel drives compared to ones like the one you're looking at.
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I've been looking at OCZ, Patriot, Ridata and Tanscend. All in the 64GB or 128GB range.
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I decided to bite the bullet and bought the Patriot 128GB SSD drive to use on my PC as my PS scratch disk. (It helped that there was a $70 rebate going on till the end of November, so the cost was the low $300's.) I'll let you know if I can see an appreciable difference. I know working with some of my 1Ds3 images that are enlarged to 200-300MB images that the current scratch disk really drags on the system perfromance. I'll be curious about the difference.
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Is it necessary to buy a 128Gb SSD? Isn't a 64 Gb not more then enough to handle even the biggest files?
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Good question. Yes, 64GB would probably have been enough. I also use the scratch disk as cache for my RIP programs and Bibble (which I rarely use these days). If I could figure out how to get Windows to use it as its cache, then the 128GB might really be worthwhile.
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According to adobe in their paper about photoshop performance the best set up is a raid 0 stripe. I use two 78gig Western Digital Raptors striped raid 0 that are very fast as the swap disk.
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I actually use to use a RAID 0 on my system -- till it started screwing everything up (something corrupt kept me from defragging, or fully doing disk/virsus scans, doing complete surface scan CHKDSK, etc.). On top of that, performance had a marginal, real world increse, and in fact, most of the time, I seemed to take a perfroamnce hit. The best thing I did was upgrade to a single 750GB 7200 rpm drive (replacing the two 300GB RAID 0). I couldn't even clone the RAID properly for replacement. I spent a weekend searching for a DOS-based cloning program. Found one and it saved my life.
In the end, for me, I will stay far FAR away from EVER doing another RAID setup.
So, I'll see how the SSD works for my scratch disk. Hopefully, it'll give me a bit of a performance boost in the end. I'm even thinking of replacing one of my "digital wallet" 80GB drives with an SSD, if the unit works in my desktop.
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nemo it sounds like there was something wrong with your controller or drive(s), that's not the typical experience with RAID.
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I have been using raid 0 set ups for years with no problems at all. Try two SAS drives, they are so fast!!!
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If for the fastest of scratch disk, I vote for ramdisk. A workstation with 32 Gb ram can occupied a 24 Gb ramdisk........... and that's my ideal machine
Dennishh, can you please explain more on how to set up a raid 0 of SAS. Is it simply the same set up of raid with SATA but just replacing with the SAS drive ?
Mine is just a desktop computer and not a workstation, Is it possible to utilise SAS raid setup?
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My motherboard supports SAS drives and has raid card built in. The best way though is to buy a SAS raid controller that in most cases will be even faster than the motherboard rout. http://www.google.com/search?q=sas+control...lient=firefox-a (http://www.google.com/search?q=sas+controllers&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3a%6ffficial&client=firefox-a) Drives http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computi...technology.html (http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/sas-technology.html)
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My motherboard supports SAS drives and has raid card built in.
Oh! that's mean you're using a workstation motherborad. heh heh.....really envious
Tried a Single Adata 32 Gb SSD today and found out that a raid 0 from a pair of SATA WD raptor is faster than it.
As u'd said , I believe a raid 0 of SAS should be the fastest...........if ramdisk is omitted . SSD is still not the best for scratch disk.
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Yep, a tyan dual xeon with 16 gigs of memory.
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Nemo,
so what results did you get with SSD drive?
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Nemo,
so what results did you get with SSD drive?
I've had the SSD installed for several weeks now. I'd say it's a modicum faster and more responsive than a mechanical hard drive, but I haven't noticed a HUGE increase in speed. I believe part of that is all the background crap Windows does at times -- like reindexing every bloody file on your system. I turned indexing off, but then searches took longer and Google Desktop decided it couldn't find ANYTHING. But that's beside the point.
I believe it's slightly worth the extra money paid. I find the write times to save a file after numerous changes are decreased. So, I'd cautiously recommend it.
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If for the fastest of scratch disk, I vote for ramdisk. A workstation with 32 Gb ram can occupied a 24 Gb ramdisk........... and that's my ideal machine
Pretty realistic dream actually:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Mac-Pro-Memory (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Mac-Pro-Memory)
I would probably get those 32GB for my older 8 core MAc pro if my current 16GB could be put to good use somewhere else.
Cheers,
Bernard
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I tried on mine workstation with Vista64 / 16 Gb RAM 8 core Xeon the Retouch Artist speed test with changing the RAID of the scratchdisk.
THere was only 1 second difference in making the scratchdisk Raid 0 or Raid 1 (CS4 16 bits)
In the 16 bits CS4 I saw that efficiency stays almost all the time at 100%. But the 8 bits version of CS4 needs the scratch disk much more.
Making in CS4 16 bits the file much bigger (120Mb) makes also very little difference.
So, can I concluded that CS4 16 bits hardly needs the scratch disk? Investing in more memory is much better then investing in a fast scratch disk?
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I tried on mine workstation with Vista64 / 16 Gb RAM 8 core Xeon the Retouch Artist speed test with changing the RAID of the scratchdisk.
THere was only 1 second difference in making the scratchdisk Raid 0 or Raid 1 (CS4 16 bits)
In the 16 bits CS4 I saw that efficiency stays almost all the time at 100%. But the 8 bits version of CS4 needs the scratch disk much more.
Making in CS4 16 bits the file much bigger (120Mb) makes also very little difference.
So, can I concluded that CS4 16 bits hardly needs the scratch disk? Investing in more memory is much better then investing in a fast scratch disk?
8 and 16 bits refer to the bit depth used by the image file, while 32 and 64 bits refer to the lenght of the memory words used by the application.
The former should only impact performance in that 16 bits file are larger, while the latter impacts mostly the size of the process that can be handled without using OS or appliation swap.
I am a bit confused which you are refering to here.
Cheers,
Bernard
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For what it's worth:
I installed two VelociRaptor 300GB 10k rpm internal drives (Raid 0) and use one for CS4 scratch disc and the other for files of images in production. This was after upgrading my ram from 2 to to 4Gb on a Core 2 Duo 32 bit PC machine. I've noticed quite an improvement in performance, and have had no problems processing 500GB 16 bit TIFF files through HDR, Photomerge, ACR tweaking, etc. When the images are finalized and ready for printing, I flatten layers and save on a Terrabit external Firewire drive for Qimage retrieval, with backup copies sent to a Terrabit MioNet remote server that doubles as a client dropbox for uploading images to me. This workflow allows me to processes a couple dozen images a week for my photographer and artist clients. The only time I had a "not enough RAM" error was when trying to use CS4 Content Aware Scaling, and after trying it on numerous images, didn't really care for the artifacts it created and don't use it anyway.
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8 and 16 bits refer to the bit depth used by the image file, while 32 and 64 bits refer to the lenght of the memory words used by the application.
The former should only impact performance in that 16 bits file are larger, while the latter impacts mostly the size of the process that can be handled without using OS or appliation swap.
I am a bit confused which you are refering to here.
Cheers,
Bernard
Sorry. I made some mistakes with 16 bits CS4. I mean 64 bits CS4. I didn't work with 16 bits images for this test
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So, can I concluded that CS4 16 bits hardly needs the scratch disk? Investing in more memory is much better then investing in a fast scratch disk?
And yes I have the same findings as yours when using cs4 64 bit. Some of my files are of 5Gb in size and I have 16 G memory. I tested w/ and w/o a ramdisk as scratch, and the result is memory usage by PS is more efficient and faster.
I would probably get those 32GB for my older 8 core MAc pro if my current 16GB could be put to good use somewhere else.
a ramdisk is still essential especially for other program such as ptgui even though it's not for ps 64 bit anymore. And back to the topics SSD speed things a lot in the case of dual booting............one OS w/ ramdisk and another w/o
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Ooops! Sorry, I meant to type 500MB instead of: "...had no problems processing 500GB 16 bit TIFF files..."