SSD hard drive question with a twist..
 

My dad is really into photography and these days, it's all digital. His latest camera is the Nikon D800e, which produces very large file sizes in RAW and even larger when opened Photoshop (PS). He goes on a couple photography seminars/photo shoots to various places each year. When the photographers get together, invariably, computers or computing power is often discussed. When he came home from his latest trip, he was telling me how at lest one guy has 22 gigs of RAM. The latest computer I built for him, now dating back to 2009, had 6 gigs, running Win 7 in 64 bit mode. He also uses PS in 64 bit mode.

His thing with speed is primarily with PS, especially when applying filters or merging multiple photos together to create a panorama. In building his system 3 years ago, 6 gigs was adequate, I think it still is. Unless you are manipulating very large files (he as done one 20(or so) image pano that took hours to stitch together). We bought 12 gigs last night, this is triple channel DDR3. Before I swapped the old RAM out, he did a few practical tests in PS and timed them. When he was satisfied, I swapped out the RAM. With 12 gigs, stitching a 5 pic pano was faster by a good margine. Applying some known intensive filters showed slower times with the larger RAM. I sat back and watched the HD activity and noticed that it picked up a lot at one point in the operation. I think that PS is starting to use it's "scratch space" which is located on a drive that is separate from the OS. So....

I was thinking that if we installed a smaller SSD drive 64-128 GIGS and dedicated it as the primary "scratch disk" for PS, that this may greatly speed up things. What do you think? Remember, this is to speed up PS, not really the entire OS.

Yeah, the SSD scratch disk would probably help speed it up if it really is hitting that. Can you do some more precise benchmarks though?

I was just pricing out building myself an ESX box to run part of my lab on. Looking at a little Shuttle deal with 32GB of RAM and an i7 processor. Hard drive for me doesn't really matter too much. I'll probably just throw in a couple of 2.5" 500GB drives I have on hand. SSDs would make it scream though.

I wanted to do some real benchmarking, but my dad wanted to create his own tests via PS. I may offer to run some software on there again and do some real tests. :)

as you describe it, i am going to go with, "yes. an SSD should make just about all operations faster for PS."

Just switched to a 256Gb sshd. Win7. 64bit OS, and all programs on the sshd. Much faster! Exactly what you are thinking; swap space is now on fast ss memory. Even the anti-virus software runs fast!

I started using SSD drives for most of our computers today. Huge difference in operation. I have also had more drive failures than I've ever seen before. Go for quality drives.

I also shoot with a d800e. I am looking at computers again, my present system built early 2010 is gettting a little slow and bloated. You can easily see if an ssd scratch drive will do anything. Photoshop has an efficiency indicator- bottom left corner. (you may need to turn it on) At 100% photoshop is using ram, anything below 100% it is moving off to the scratch drive. A scratch ssd may help- if this indicator is below 100% a lot- otherwise it will not improve anything.
More ram is always better with photoshop- I presently have 16 and rarely drop below the 100% efficiency goal.
Fast cpu is vital
Make sure photoshop is configured to use as much ram as possible.
Make sure photoshop cache is set correctly for your cpu.
Check the number of history states he is running- more history is more ram use.
Video card and driver up to date- photoshop will use the gpu is properly configured.
This just scratches the surface, but will get you going.
By the way- here is a thread measuring computer photoshop speed, doing a set of filters on a specfic supplied image. This thread goes back several years, but you can compare his present setup speed to other configurations before you spend much money.
NikonCafe.com
Gary

What he said.

I have 32 gigs of RAM on my computer. I work with giant 1GB and bigger images and for virtualy all operations the scratch disk is never used. The drop down that shows the efficiency indicator also has a scratch disk indicator. I prefer to see the scratch disk usage at 0%. That means it is all done in RAM.

Dave, the thing with PS is at some point it's simply not practical to have enough RAM to hold an image without resorting to scratch space.

PS keeps a copy of the original, a separate copy of each channel, current state, undo states, clipboard etc...

To prevent swap with a 20 GB file you'd need 80-100 GB of RAM in the box.

Dedicated scratch drives make a big difference. 10k RPM discs, RAID5 or SSD is the way to go.

gchappel, Efficiency tells you how much of the RAM allocated/available to/for PS is being utilized.

You can run at 100% efficiency and still have it hit scratch.

Click the tab in the bottom left where efficiency shows up and select scratch instead. If the first number is larger than the second you are using scratch.

This is easy to validate in OS X, simply open a finder window and watch the available drive space, as you work you can see PS chewing disc space while efficiency remains at 100%.

Run a system monitor like gkrellm (there are windows versions available) and see what is spiking - RAM use, CPU use, etc

Get an Intel 330 or Samsung 830 128Gb SSD for less than $100 and try it out for your father. If it works - great! If not, use it in another PC and you will still be ahead.. Good luck!

It will probably help, but you can still have I/O contention, unless its on a different controller channel than the OS drive. However, the R/W speeds of the SSD should really help.

A 20 GB file would have to be very unusual. It would likely be 100,000 pixels in each dimension, or many many layers on a big file.

I doubt his dad will ever get to 200 MB on any single file. 20 Gigs is just crazy huge.

Yeah it's kind of big ;)

Was just tossing simple math out there.

How about a 2 GB file, will over run 10 GB's of RAM pretty quick.

But if you've got several large files open then you start to get into stupid numbers.

Just sayin.

No doubt Photoshop can suck up some ram. That is why we have 32 gigs on the computer.

As I mentioned I work with crazy big files all the time. We scan a 9x9 aerial negative at 12 micron which is about 2,500 PPI. It makes a one gig file. We are in the middle of a job that has 4,500 frames of film. In the end we make hundreds of files that cover 16.44 sq miles at a one ft pixel resolution each file is 1.3 gigs. The final product is hundreds of those files deliverd on a 3 TB hard drive.

good lord, glen. let me know when you want another PC spec'ed.

d.

And I thought that my raw pics running 20-30 megs was big...

i have a negative/slide scanner that will scan at a true optical 3600DPI. i only tried it once. after that, i scanned things at about 600DPI.

Thanks for the info! I'll look into the status monitor for PS.

BTW, the RAW files from the d800 are over 25 megs. ;) Very common for both my dad and myself to be working on files that are a couple hundred megs.

You guys must be looking at some seriously hi-res porn.

and you aren't?!

The little sideways arrow that the big arrow points to is where you can change the setting. I like to see the scratch sizes. There are several options.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1355434953.jpg

glen, that photo rocks!

Not at "work" . :D

That is a little tiny piece of just one image of many hundred. It is a 1.3 gig image. I can "zoom in" a lot more.

well, that sucks. :D

Looks like we are going to get a SSD and dedicate it as a scratch disk.

More tests. Opening PS creates a 410 meg file on the scratch disk. Open a 500 meg image it stays at 410. Apply a filter that seemed intensive and you can seethe scratch file grow - to about 2 gigs. We closed the image, but the scratch file stayed at 2 gigs. Next, we did a photo merge with 8, 35(roughly) meg images. After the merge was complete, the scratch file ended up at 15.5 gigs and remained even after the large image was closed. Upon shutting PS down, the file was deleted.

One thing I just did, was open a 35 meg RAW image. Under image resizing, it shows the image as being 103.4 meg pixel size. In the lower left corner, the scratch window in the lower left of the image showed 619 megs. The PS temp file on the current scratch disk then showed 590 megs. That was without any manipulation, just opening and image.

We did repeated a couple of tests with the efficiency meter up. It never we t under 100%, but that scratch file sure did grow while applying certain filters or merging multiple files.

PS is set by default to use up to 70-75% of installed/available RAM. You can set it higher but that can result in not enough RAM available for system or other app resources creating a potentially unstable environment.

PS is supposed to gracefully give RAM back if the system needs it but what's supposed to happen and what does happen are not always the same thing.

What PS holds in RAM is really just cache for the scratch file. Meaning its always going to create a scratch file but there is no drive thrashing as long as the scratch fits in allocated RAM. Efficiency just means PS is able to use all the RAM it's allowed to and that nothing else is dipping into its bucket.

You can clear the scratch manually via Edit->Purge. Useful when you are not paying attention and run out of space and can't even save the file. You purge scratch with the doc open.

The reason a dedicated scratch drive makes a big difference is the read/write heads are not hunting/thrashing around the disc dealing with PS + OS + whatever else you have running read/writes. Even a lot of idle apps will do periodic auto saves.

I'm done with all the research. :D That is exhausting. Tom's Hardware has some info on the Caviar Black drive that is currently the scratch drive. His tests show an average read/write at around 85 for average speeds. The SSD drive we are looking at shows average read/write times at around 250 mb's a second. That's a huge difference and should really speed PS up.

When I build his next PC, it'll have a SSD C: drive, a SSD scratch drive, plus two larger normal drives for storage.

Apple has this interesting hybrid mini out now - at a guess it is continually writing in and out between the SSD and the platter based HDD...

So when do you think that this will be the standard for all higher end computers?

The data transfer sounds great...

They now make hybrid drives, a small amount of NAND in a rotating disk HDD. Tests show a decent, not world-beating, speed up for far less cost than a large SSD or small SSD + HDD. This would not work for the OP's Photoshop purpose though.

My desktop...
 

My desktop is not a "powerhouse" by any means, but it's fast enough, reliable and does everything I need it to do. You're correct to build the system based upon your specific requirements... I can't affordably add more RAM (4GB is installed, would cost $300 to upgrade to 16GB), but this PC will do for a few more years...

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1355518535.jpg

PC Development in Windsor steered me towards the ssd. They now recommend it as the base.

I added a 1TB SATA drive for my data (J-drive) to the 256GB SSD wich is my C-drive. Any videos I edit are copied to C, and converted and saved to C. Much faster.

I think this the beginning, soon it will be the standard. It is just too fast for high end users to ignore.

I think the cost per gig needs to go down a bit more. For one thing, the prices really need to be comparable to one another. You've got one manuaturer offering a 120 gig drive for $100, another for $150, and another over $200. When you look at the specs for each SSD drive, they are almost the same.

I don't spec high-end machines from Dell or HP, so I'm not sure if they even offer this type of scenario using normal drives.

Realistically, to have the best machine using my PS example, would be to have 3 SSD drives and then one or two normal 1,2,3 TB drives for storage. One SSD would contain the OS, one would be used for the OS cache, one for PS, and one for all programs, PS, Word, Excel....

Little bit of disappointment at the moment. After a couple hours researching SSD drives, we settled on an Intel 120 Gig SSD. The max read value under SATA III is supposed to be 550 MB/s, the max write, 500 MB/s. The price was also right. We went to Fry's, picked up the drive and a PCIe SATA III controller - which claims 6 Gb/s. Got it all installed and redid some of the PS tests. Virtually no difference in speed when applying a certain filter. But, when I redid the 8 image panorama, it did speed up, though not Earth shattering. Since the pano test requires PS to open 8 images that are on a platter drive, I redid that test again, copying the 8 images to the SSD. I realize that the scratch file is on the SSD, but I tried anyway. Only a second faster.

I finally broke down and grabbed a free HD speed test utility and ran it on the SSD. It recorded a max read value of around 175 MB/s. Write was about 117MB/s. I decided to run the test against one of the TB platter drives. Read was 100 MB/s, write was about 90 MB/s.

Tomorrow, I want to plug the SSD into a SATA II controller that's builtin on the MB and see if that makes any difference. So far, I am at a loss to explain why the SSD is performing slowly.

an SSD should never be used as a scratch disk, it's way to slow for writes , and a scratch disk is all about read writes..

SSD should be your OS disk, your program files disk.. your write once read often disk.


You need more ram, not rom.


The Sata controller on board, most MObo's only have 1 or 2 fast ones... yes it makes a difference in speed, but it won't make a scratch disk on SSD work well.
You will constantly be hitting the limits of the onboard cache buffers.

That may be, but the benchmark test was slow too. That should not be.

primary controller will be faster but not fast enough to scratch