Even more fun!

Went out and bought a second SSD drive with the intention of installing CS6 on it. Now PS opens from one SSD and uses another for its scratch disk. While PS now opens very quickly, the PS tests did not increase much. Only one filter sped up by ten seconds using the 500 meg test file. The other numbers pretty much were equal to PS being on the slowest platter drive (C: ).

Pretty disappointing. Should not matter if it's a faster platter drive or SSD. Speed should increase. Maybe not light speed, but noticeable.

One last test tomorrow and I am out of ideas. I'll uninstall PS from the SSD. Since I have two SSD's at my disposal, I'll RAID 0 them, reinstall PS on a platter drive and set the scratch to use the RAID drive.

After that, I am at a loss. This MB can only handle up to 12 gigs RAM in triple channel mode, 16 in dual. The CPU is an Intel i7 950 quad with HT.

I'm still going to play with my above post, but...

I've come to the conclusion with Photoshop (PS), that no matter what you do to speed up performance, there are internal issues with PS that virtually nothing will fix in most home users PC's, even if they have the latest and greatest. You can have all the RAM in the world and PS will still use a scratch disk. I think the only way to get blindingly fast performance crunching large files - 500 megs plus, are multiple processors. Not just cores on a single processor, but 2/4/6 each having multiple cores....

EDIT: I tried to cripple PS by lowering that RAM it could use to 1 gig. The efficiency meter drop to 99% for 2 seconds, but the total time to repeat the test was identical to when it was allowed to use 10 gigs.

It's the databus on your Mobo..

Take the same disks on a motherboard with a Core I7 and tripple channel memory and you'll get much better results..
Your current motherboard will bottle neck cause it's memory is only dual channel, and it shares the bus to the cpu with the pci ports
For instance an X58 chip the memory is direct talking in bathes of 3 instead of 2 + not sharing the bus with the peripherals..

http://content.hwigroup.net/images/n...ockdiagram.gif

Right now, all your memory and stuff is comparable to that bottom group, sharing that single 2GB bus to the cpu

This is a MB with a Core i7 and triple channel memory. Just a bit older and with not SATA III onboard.

Still, after watching what is gong on, it seems to be PS doing calculations with certain filters that just do not get faster with any amount of RAM.

Seriously, the R/W times on the SSD's that there should be a noticeable gain in time to crunch data with those filters. PS is obviously using the scratch disk, I can watch the file grow. All the while, everything I read says that PS should be using only RAM. The 500 meg image should not run out of the 10 gigs of allocated RAM. The meters show that, but yet the scratch file grows, but even so, it should perform faster on SSD.

Right now, opening PS from a secondary SSD is very fast. PS does have an issue with opening and saving files, in that it uses only one core. When working on the file, it uses multiple cores.

Ok, in that case you'll have to agree that SSD performance is no good for scratch disks..
It's only good for fast read operations


I did the SSD thing, and in the end dumped em and got myself a hybrid instead.
Much more cost effective, fast reads on the stuff you frequently need, and normal writes to the platters.

The Adobe community does not agree with you (they do agree with RAID 0/5). Something else is going on with PS that everything tried will not speed up dramatically. There is a gain, but not what one would expect.

I don't think hybrids would help in this case. They seem to store roughly 4 gigs on the "SSD" side. That's not going to help with PS in reducing processing speeds.

They agree with the Raid 0 because they know SSD has $hitty writes. and Raid 0 is the only way to improve on that.. I'de stay well clear of Raid 5, cause that is a write bottle neckitself. Unless maybe you got 5+ disks in a set, but when you get to that price range there are other , faster solutions like a hardware ram disk..

Actually, they think using SSD for a scratch drive does improve performance, so does Adobe. They just also agree that RAID 0 is even better. Adobe suggests RAID 5 as an option. I'd go with RAID 0 (though I can't try RAID 5 currently anyway) and will with these last tests later.

I'm done testing and am sticking with my above conclusion.

I setup the RAID 0 on the SSD's and redid the speed test. 405/289 R/W. No gain on the read side, but 100 MB/s faster on the write side. Redid the picture tests and no gain. PS was also reinstalled back on the slow C drive. We redid some of the tests moving the scratch file from the SSD's to both large platter drives and times increased by 20 seconds for the large 500 meg pic.

We used a normal image that my dad would be working with and moved the scratch file around to the different drives and reapplied the same filter. No matter is it was the SSD's under RAID 0 or the two platter drives, the time was exactly the same, I mean exactly.