Upgrading

The23rdman

The23rdman

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Dean
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Okay, my OCZ RAM has all died except for one 2gb stick out of the 8gigs. I'm assuming it's faulty so have raised a ticket. Looking now though I can buy 16gigs for the same price, but (and money is tight) I could just buy 8 gigs of faster RAM (my mobo will take up to 1600) and put the rest towards one of these that looks amazing value.

I assume the benefits of the SSD will far outway the extra 8 gigs, but a will 120GB SSD easily fit and run Win7 64x, LR4 and CS5?
 
I have a 120GB SSD

It has on it
Win7 64bit
CS5
LR3 (not buying 4 until it works properly)
BF3

I still have over 60GB left after BF3.

I changed the location of my docs, pics etc to D to stop it from filling up with stuff

All other software is on one of the other 4 internal hard drives as is the page file and scratch disk for CS5.

As SSD will fail with no warning I also have a second cloned SSD ready to swap in if/when it fails.
 
Is there any issue with SSD's and capacity affecting performance? Can I all but fill it up?
 
You can, but be aware that you don't get exactly what is written on the tin for storage space.

If I were buying a new SSD I'd get a 128G one as a minimum. They are also likely faster than the 64G as they use more "lanes" of flash everything else being equal.
 
120 gigs is my price limit. :)
 
I'm putting a 120gb ssd drive into my iMac tonight. Going to load the os, all program's and this years Lightroom catalogue on the ssd. Everything else is going on the 1tb internal drive
 
I reckon 8GB Ram and the SSD will give you a much faster workflow than 16GB Ram and a standard HD because all the times you don't need that extra 8GB you'll still have all the benefits of the SSD!
 
gman said:
I reckon 8GB Ram and the SSD will give you a much faster workflow than 16GB Ram and a standard HD because all the times you don't need that extra 8GB you'll still have all the benefits of the SSD!
Click to expand...
Except........ when you aren't using the extra 8G for programs, it's used as a disk cache which is faster again than the SSD.... I have 16G of memory, currently 9.7G used (I always have a lot of programs going and PS uses a lot), 6.5G standby (i.e. cached) and 200M Free...

Don't forget, if all your data is on the HDD, you'll be getting no benefit from the SSD for that....
 
Good points, so it's not worth going SSD? I'm also thinking about it.
 
So as Graham asked, which is better for photographers?
 
gman said:
Good points, so it's not worth going SSD? I'm also thinking about it.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's worth going for just ANY SSD because it's cheap, you have to balance what you want to do with it. For example, I have a cheap SSD in my main system, it's write speed is actually LOWER than a HDD but I only use it as a boot disk and I hardly ever reboot (the only time I restart Chrome is when it wants me to to upgrade to the latest version). It's performance isn't that important to me (although it helps boot times).

I also have a fast SSD in the laptop - it is a BIG improvement, but that is used in a different way to the main system. Many more program starts. It also wasn't cheap (£250ish for a 256GB one). You really need to look around as at the moment, prices are inconsistent. For example:

http://www.ebuyer.com/318422-samsung-256gb-830-series-ssd-mz-7pc256d-eu (£250)

and

http://www.ebuyer.com/318423-samsung-256gb-830-series-ssd-mz-7pc256n-eu (£150)

appear to be the same, apart from the cheaper drive is 7mm thick as opposed to 12.5mm thick.
 
The23rdman said:
So as Graham asked, which is better for photographers?
Click to expand...
A couple of quick questions: how often do you boot LR/CS5? are you thinking of using the SSD as a scratch disk? Do you ever have swap space in use?
 
arad85 said:
A couple of quick questions: how often do you boot LR/CS5? are you thinking of using the SSD as a scratch disk? Do you ever have swap space in use?
Click to expand...

Did you see the one I linked to above?

As for your other questions, I boot them a lot. I hate leaving my PC on when I don't need it.

The other questions might as well be in Klingon. ;)
 
If you boot a lot, look for something with good read speed. Above about 300MBytes/sec you'll need a SATA III interface onboard to take advantage of the speed.
 
Sorry for the hijack Deano

What about adding an SSD as a 'cache' disk? I have seen a few of these advertised recently and as I don't have one (an SSD) would this type of set up benefit me. I am a nerd with this stuff as you probably have gathered from other threads
 
What about is you have a nice fast SSD for your OS, programs and also use it for say current data, as in photographs you are currently editing. Once the job is done you can transfer them to the regular HDD. Would this be beneficial as I can't imagaine needing anything more than 100GB for any current work - unless you work on multiple huge jobs!
 
tiler65 said:
That link is from 2011 and deals with sandybridge...I have ivybridge and the article does say it is awaiting for the results which they expect to be better.

Is there no test with ivybridge yet?
Click to expand...
It's the chipset that does it all. You have a Z68 board. The test was on a Z68 board.
 
I've got a Dell XPS 420 which I don't think is very good for SSD. It's a pity because it's an extreme processor, fairly decent ram and a good graphics card. I feel the HD lets it down.
 
gman said:
What about is you have a nice fast SSD for your OS, programs and also use it for say current data, as in photographs you are currently editing. Once the job is done you can transfer them to the regular HDD. Would this be beneficial as I can't imagaine needing anything more than 100GB for any current work - unless you work on multiple huge jobs!
Click to expand...
That's what I was saying above as the scratch disk. What I'm not sure about is if PS/LR writes its scratch images compressed. If they do, your choice or SSD for ultimate performance may be different. The OCZ 3 disks have very high performance, but they compress the data on writing. If the data is already compressed, performance suffers....
 
arad85 said:
It's the chipset that does it all. You have a Z68 board. The test was on a Z68 board.
Click to expand...

Actually I don't have a Z78......I have a Z77....doesthat make a difference?
 
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I'm still none the wiser.
 
Okay, well I bought 16 gigs of RAM. I figure it'll improve things well enough for now.
 
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