[slodave]

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.