Photoshop CS5 on SSD?

Roy C

Roy C

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I am taking delivery of a new PC next week to replace my ageing XP machine. Basic specs:
Intel Core i7 3770K
16GB of Memory
120GB SSD Drive
2 x 1000GB SATA 7200rpm Hard Disks
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Being a PC nob I need some advice on what to load on the SSD and what to load on the HD's. Windows will be going on the SSD but what else should I put on there. One of the main uses will be Photoshop CS5 – should I put CS5 on the SSD also how about the SC5 scratch disk.
I guess the photo files will be best on one of the HD.
How about an email client like thunderbird and firefox which drive would these be best on?

Thanks in advance
 
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Put all programs on the SSD. You write once read many and the read speed of an SSD (not to mention access times) will kill an HDD stone dead.

Play with what works best for you for PS5 scratch disks. It's easy to swap locations in PS. The problem with the SSDs that have capacities ending on a 0 are they use compression to improve write performance. Great for documents, but pants for easily compressed data. The tradeoff between scratch disk location and performance is one you will just have to try yourself.
 
Installing all your software, and using it as a scratch disk as well? I'd seriously consider a larger SSD then. 120GB is a bit tiny isn't it?

As for incompressible data performance.. that varies from device to device. What kind of SSD is it?
 
Pookeyhead said:
Installing all your software, and using it as a scratch disk as well? I'd seriously consider a larger SSD then. 120GB is a bit tiny isn't it?
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I was only looking to put Windows and CS5 on the SSD drive, not too bothered about the scratch disc and I use very little else (never games or video editing). I have been using an XP machine with 2GB ram and a small HD for the last 9 years so just hoping for a bit of a performance boost while working in photoshop (some of the filters take a while on my old XP machine so just looking to speed it up a bit).
I have not got a clue what type of SSD it is, I was not even going to bother with one to be quite honest but decided to have one if only to put windows on.
 
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Pookeyhead said:
As for incompressible data performance.. that varies from device to device. What kind of SSD is it?
Click to expand...
If the device size ends in a 0 and not power of 2 it will be a SandForce drive - which has pants write performance on incompressible data as it uses data compression to improve performance. When data is incompressible....
 
arad85 said:
If the device size ends in a 0 and not power of 2 it will be a SandForce drive - which has pants write performance on incompressible data as it uses data compression to improve performance. When data is incompressible....
Click to expand...
Is this drive suitable for putting Win7 on? that's about all I was initially going to put on it. Not too bothered about mega speed as I just need something a bit faster than my 9 year old XP machine, at the moment it is several minutes before everything loads so thought a little SSD might help. Should I not even bother with a SSD?
 
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arad85 said:
If the device size ends in a 0 and not power of 2 it will be a SandForce drive - which has pants write performance on incompressible data as it uses data compression to improve performance. When data is incompressible....
Click to expand...


Samsung 840 non Pro? I think you'll find that uses all in house stuff... in this case, the MDX controller.. which does just fine with incompressible data. All the 840 non Pro range end in 0 sizes.

You;re right though... that bundle will probably not be a Samsung SSD.


Roy C said:
Is this drive suitable for putting Win7 on? that's about all I was initially going to put on it. Not too bothered about mega speed as I just need something a bit faster than my 9 year old XP machine, at the moment it is several minutes before everything loads so thought a little SSD might help. Should I not even bother with a SSD?
Click to expand...

Still worth doing regardless for access times.

My PC boots from pressing the button, to a fully functional desktop in 35 seconds... and it's a bloaty install with loads of stuff start up.
 
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Thanks for your help guys :thumbs:, I think I will just put windows on the SSD and hope for the best LOL
 
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Roy C said:
Is this drive suitable for putting Win7 on?
Click to expand...
Good God yes... Windows drive is all about write once (install) read many... Just dedicate the drive to "programs".
 
Pookeyhead said:
Samsung 840 non Pro? I think you'll find that uses all in house stuff... in this case, the MDX controller.. which does just fine with incompressible data.
Click to expand...
Nope. Look at: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/678?vs=665

Incompressible Sequential Write Performance - AS-SSD

840: 244.8MB/sec
840 Pro: 492MB/sec

The drives that have a 0 at the end (OK, that particular drive may not use SandForce) have to keep extra storage available for "the bits that don't compress" which is why they are advertised as slightly less than the power of 2 since they need to leave some "breathing space".

Read speed is fine....
 
Look at small file writes... the benchmark that actually matters in real world performance. It outperforms many "2" drives.... well it does in Bit Tech's review anyway.

large sequential writes only matter in benchmarks and advertising.... even using one as a dedicated scratch disk won't see it needing to write massive single files unless you have very little memory, and anyone using a SSD for storage of large contiguous single files needs their head examining :)

Unless it's a specialist application, like live recording of uncompressed HD video the large sequential write speed is the least important result in a benchmark test.... actually.. scratch that as well.... even a fast HDD can cope with that.
 
Pookeyhead said:
Look at small file writes... the benchmark that actually matters in real world performance. It outperforms many "2" drives.... well it does in Bit Tech's review anyway.
Click to expand...
Ahh... The difference with the Samsung is the memory type, not the controller. It is the first drive I have come across that breaks the "0" rule. By the 0 rule, I mean the drives that are 60/120/240/480GB in size (the Samsung is 250, not 240). The 120/240 etc is pretty indicative the drive has a SandForce controller and can't deal with compressed data writes very well - whether small or large sized
 
Roy C said:
Thanks for your help guys :thumbs:, I think I will just put windows on the SSD and hope for the best LOL
Click to expand...

I have all my programmes on a 120Gb SSD, incl CS5, LR4, Office, iTunes etc. etc. and still have 50Gb left.
 
Mikesphotaes said:
I have all my programmes on a 120Gb SSD, incl CS5, LR4, Office, iTunes etc. etc. and still have 50Gb left.
Click to expand...
That's interesting Mike, thanks for that:thumbs: I do not have any more prog's than you.
I have one expert telling me 'I'd seriously consider a larger SSD then. 120GB is a bit tiny isn't it?' and yet it looks as if 120 Gb is more than enough for my needs :shrug:

BTW I have since read on a few other sites that using a SSD drive as a scratch disk for Photoshop is of no real advantage and the most gain is had by faster processors and more RAM.
 
120G is fine for a system disk. I run several that size ;) It is probably too small as a laptop replacement drive though.

Unless you have lots of things open at once, PS will use all available memory first (or at least as much as you have set it to use in the preferences) before using the scratch disk. Lightroom uses it for faster previews of images. There is a noticeable improvement in speed if you browse up and down a catalogue in LR. No real difference in processing speed though.
 
my main drive is 128gb (the better 830 samsung, why they killed the 840 non-pro speed i dont know)..

got windows 7 installed, LR, CS4 suite, StarCraft2 + addon, Bioshock, few other games, LOADS of various other apps for system monitoring/testing, video encoding etc etc. think im at about 80% usage.

but then pretty much most of my data is stored on remote drives, working data is on a second 128gb samsung 830 SSD.
 
arad85 said:
120G is fine for a system disk. I run several that size ;) It is probably too small as a laptop replacement drive though.

Unless you have lots of things open at once, PS will use all available memory first (or at least as much as you have set it to use in the preferences) before using the scratch disk. Lightroom uses it for faster previews of images. There is a noticeable improvement in speed if you browse up and down a catalogue in LR. No real difference in processing speed though.
Click to expand...

Interesting...... My main reason for moving from my laptop to PC with SSD and i5 processor was to try and speed up export time. From what I can gather looking at system resources, when I export from Lightroom (I use Mogrify too) the HDD seems to be the bottleneck.

I'm guessing that by default, having a better processor, more memory and faster HDDs will improve things by default?
 
Russ77 said:
I'm guessing that by default, having a better processor, more memory and faster HDDs will improve things by default?
Click to expand...
Yup.

What SSD do you have?
 
Russ77 said:
So I'm guessing from that even the fasted tradition HDD is trounced by the slowest SDD tested?
Click to expand...
Current standard HDDs will do 125MBytes/sec read, 100MByte/s write sustained. The slowest SSDs aren't much faster (they tend to be 30 or 60G drives. They leave HDDs for dead on random read/writes as the disk has to seek to the correct location which is 2-3 orders of magnitude longer on an HDD.

Basically, if you're doing a lot of I/O, you should try and get it on an SSD. Having said that, not all SSDs are made equal, which is why I pointed you at the benchmark site (not everything is benchmarked but there is a good spread).
 
I bit the bullet and bought a 512GB Samsung 830 when they first came out. Never regretted it. I have all my software and windows installed on it. Everything is just so smooth now. A big layout in one go, but ooooh.... so worth it. best upgrade ever.
 
Yup... The 830 is a nice drive....
 
arad85 said:
If the device size ends in a 0 and not power of 2 it will be a SandForce drive - which has pants write performance on incompressible data as it uses data compression to improve performance. When data is incompressible....
Click to expand...

If you are new to this, avoid Raid 0. the performance gain is not worth it. you are twice as likely to have hardware failure and errors can be more often Configuration software Raid is OS specific,Software Encryption works better on SSD, There is no encryption in classical ATA security because Class 0 = ATA Security + Encryption,
 
mikeyanrol said:
If you are new to this, avoid Raid 0. the performance gain is not worth it. you are twice as likely to have hardware failure and errors can be more often Configuration software Raid is OS specific,Software Encryption works better on SSD, There is no encryption in classical ATA security because Class 0 = ATA Security + Encryption,
Click to expand...

:thinking:
 
mikeyanrol said:
If you are new to this, avoid Raid 0. the performance gain is not worth it. you are twice as likely to have hardware failure and errors can be more often Configuration software Raid is OS specific,Software Encryption works better on SSD, There is no encryption in classical ATA security because Class 0 = ATA Security + Encryption,
Click to expand...


The performance gain is definitely worth it. I used to have 2x 256 Vertex3s in RAID0 and read speeds were well over 1GB/sec, and write speeds around 800MB/sec. Yes, it's more risky, but you should have a decent back up solution then shouldn't you.

The only bad thing about striping 2 SSDs is that not all chipset drivers can support TRIM. That's the only negative aspect I can see... so long as you have back up.
 
Roy C said:
I am taking delivery of a new PC next week to replace my ageing XP machine. Basic specs:
Intel Core i7 3770K
16GB of Memory
120GB SSD Drive
2 x 1000GB SATA 7200rpm Hard Disks
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Being a PC nob I need some advice on what to load on the SSD and what to load on the HD's. Windows will be going on the SSD but what else should I put on there. One of the main uses will be Photoshop CS5 – should I put CS5 on the SSD also how about the SC5 scratch disk.
I guess the photo files will be best on one of the HD.
How about an email client like thunderbird and firefox which drive would these be best on?

Thanks in advance
Click to expand...

It is your computer and you are the customer so it is up to you where you want to install your operating software and your application software in your computer, and it is up to you where you want your data to go, just for a figure of speech, if you want to install your Windows software on a floppy disk and load from A: drive (just a figure of speech), you are enlist to do so, nobody can tell you where you must install them. Apart from the rules being that your operating software should only be installed on one machine according to Windows license (unless you have Windows with license that allows you to install on more than one machines) and your application software installed on one machine or up to 5 machines in your home, or whatever depending on the software's license, you are free to install them on whichever disks or drives you want, be they A: B: C: D: drives, be they SSD, HDD, CD, DVD, or any memory cards.

So if you want to install Windows and CS5 on SSD and your data such as your photos on HDD, and if you feel happy with this plan, then you go ahead.

Whenever people suggest that operation system and application system should be installed on SSD while you save your data on HDD, that is just a suggestion not a rule, and I agree with this suggestion. You are free to chose to follow the suggestion or chose to say "No thanks.", but the reason for the suggestion is mainly due to the fact that...

Although SSD are really great, they have limited write lifespan, they can be written to only a x number of times (not sure about figures, maybe 10,000 times or something, guys help me out here) before it fails. After that, the SSD will still be useable, but mainly as a read-only. When installing Windows and CS5, as well as other applications like Word, Excel, iTunes, etc., etc., they will be written to the SSD heavily, a lot of writing to SSD in one go, but after that, would be written to only once in a while, (such as installing updates, patches, changing settings, and so on,) but they will be read a lot of times. Every time you turn on your machine, it reads from SDD and it very quick to read and load Windows, every time you start CS5, it will read and load very quick, hence usefull recommendation that they should be installed on SSD.

Every time you do some work on your photos with CS5, you will be saving the changes you made to your work, that means loads of rewriting to disk, every time you start new files, change files, be they photos, documents, etc., you're writing to SSD all the time, they will start wearing out the SSD, hence the suggestion it is more suitable to save data to HDD. Of course it takes a little white longer to load big files from HDD and takes time to save depending on how big the files are.

It is useful to just install CS5 on SDD so when you want to do some work, just click on CS5 and it loads in a faster time than if it was on HDD, unless you don't care about how long it takes to load CS5 therefore feel free to install it on HDD if you wish.

So, any application software, like CS5, Word, Excel, iTunes, email programs, etc., etc., if you can't wait for it to get a move on and load them, then install on SSD, but if you don't care about waiting for it to load, feel free to install on HDD. Of course, it is a different of just a few to some seconds. You could of course split them up, a mix of install whichever applications on SSD and whichever on HDD depending on whichever programs you want to load quicker and whichever you don't mind taking a while to load.

I'm not sure about email client, but I would say it depending on how much email you get, if hardly a few email, like just a few every week, maybe on SSD, but if a dozen email every day, that means loads of writing (saving incoming email to disk) then maybe better on HDD.

It's your machine, feel free to install where you wish, if it was me, I would put CS5, CorelDRAW, Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, iTunes, and so on, on SSD, the iTunes application itself on SSD but the files such as tracks, apps for iPad, etc., the main library on HDD.

Food for though: Not sure if you can install email client like Firefox and such on SSD and set up to save incoming email to HDD, but if anyone else can explain if it could work, then worth a try.

Hope it helps?
 
Major Eazy said:
Although SSD are really great, they have limited write lifespan, they can be written to only a x number of times (not sure about figures, maybe 10,000 times or something, guys help me out here) before it fails. After that, the SSD will still be useable, but mainly as a read-only.
Click to expand...
This borders on being correct, but isn't.
SSDs are made from flash devices. Flash devices have a limited number of writes. This is true. In order to protect against this, SSD drives employ 2 techniques:

  • Wear levelling
  • CRC data checks

Wear levelling means writing data throughout the whole disk evenly. That way, when you rewrite a new bit of data to the SSD, it doesn't go back in place, but gets put somewhere else on the disk. This means that for a 128G drive that has failures after 10000 writes, you will have (on average) to have written 10000 x 128G of data to the drive. Before failure starts.

The second thing that is used is CRC checking. When data is written to flash, a checksum is also written. If there is any errors in the data, they can normally be recovered at the read.

These two things can be combined so that if a poage is reported as having errors in, it can be mapped out of use (like a bad disk block).

Let me put it this way. I use SSDs for all my system disks. I use an SSD as my main disk in my laptop and my main disk in my desktop. I do not worry about SSD lifetimes as I have had a number of HDDs fail in the past, sometimes catastrophically. I treat SSD/HDD just as the storage medium that can (and does) go wrong.

I do however have a good backup strategy.
 
Samsung util gives you a rather useful life indicator (I.e. it tells you how much you've written to it). Mine are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay still in the green after several months hard graft.

I think there is a bit of old and/or misinformation going around on ssd, especially now trim support is widely available.

But like andy said, hd also fail (and can do anywhere from day 1 to day 10,000+) so a good backup process should be in place anyway.

Not putting the bits of the system on the ssd that would benefit the most would be like buying a Ferrari and having it limited at 30mph.
 
Major Eazy said:
Although SSD are really great, they have limited write lifespan,
Click to expand...


Had mine 18 months now.. used heavily. Still showing full health.


Don't worry... your machine, and the SSD will be obsolete before anything happens. Plus.... anyone with a brain will be fully backed up anyway.
 
arad85 said:
This borders on being correct, but isn't.
SSDs are made from flash devices. Flash devices have a limited number of writes. This is true. In order to protect against this, SSD drives employ 2 techniques:

  • Wear levelling
  • CRC data checks

Wear levelling means writing data throughout the whole disk evenly. That way, when you rewrite a new bit of data to the SSD, it doesn't go back in place, but gets put somewhere else on the disk. This means that for a 128G drive that has failures after 10000 writes, you will have (on average) to have written 10000 x 128G of data to the drive. Before failure starts.

The second thing that is used is CRC checking. When data is written to flash, a checksum is also written. If there is any errors in the data, they can normally be recovered at the read.

These two things can be combined so that if a poage is reported as having errors in, it can be mapped out of use (like a bad disk block).

Let me put it this way. I use SSDs for all my system disks. I use an SSD as my main disk in my laptop and my main disk in my desktop. I do not worry about SSD lifetimes as I have had a number of HDDs fail in the past, sometimes catastrophically. I treat SSD/HDD just as the storage medium that can (and does) go wrong.

I do however have a good backup strategy.
Click to expand...

Both HDD and SDD can fail anyway, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. My HDD is still in good working order, and is still ongoing after 14 years of use.
 
I couldn't care less if a drive fails. I could format my C: drive right now, on purpose, just for ****'s and giggles, and be back as I was, right down to icon placement, themes... even contents of my recycle bin within 20 minutes.

Only people with crap back up need fear drive failure.
 
Major Eazy said:
My HDD is still in good working order, and is still ongoing after 14 years of use.
Click to expand...
A 14 year old HDD.. Crikey, I can write longhand quicker than that ;)
 
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