Build a new PC (def DIY)

[D.M.Chapman]

You ought to see the prices of enterprise SSDs to go in SANs etc....

They make your eyes water...

Darren

[D.M.Chapman]

Aye. I can only stuff 4GB ram in this macbook, and it does thrash the disk somewhat when running VMs. Can't stop it thrashing the disk, but hopefully this will make the thrashing a bit more bearable :)

A couple of macbook airs we have are similar spec but with slower CPUs - they fly compared to the macbook. SSD really helps there...

Darren

Darren

[dennis]

I'm not sure an SSD is suitable for a swap drive. Hundreds of writes a second will eat into the drives life.

[Pete Shew]

Even in Windows you can mount a second drive as a directory on the first

- it then looks like a single drive. This is fine as long as your second drive can be entirely within a subdirectory of C:\ (More complex mount points are possible but more difficult to set up and maintain).

Pete

[Man at B&Q]

Different problem. They don't have wear levelling algorithms that get in the way.

MBQ

[D.M.Chapman]

Indeed.

Still, 3 year warranty, and when it dies I'll stick the old one back in while they replace it. I can live with that.

I don't expect my computers to live forever, they have a hard life, and I'm willing to accept I'll need to replace bits :)

Darren

[Bob Eager]

[e-mail]...

dennis views the world differently to the rest of us. He'll maintain that block replacement algorithms are exactly the same thing.

Or he'll wriggle. As usual.

[John Rumm]

IME that does complicate matters. Single point of failure, and an inability to use multiple drives to gain performance and reduce thrashing.

[John Rumm]

Hardly matters these days - it will still probably outlive the usefulness of the rest of the system.

[dennis]

I have no need to wriggle, you can't address physical blocks as I stated. You don't even know what the reallocation algorithm is if the drive does decide to move a sector. If telling the facts is wriggling then I am quite happy to do so.

[Rick Hughes]

. I've got a terrabyte in here - that's a grand for an SSD!

Is the benefit in having the OS on the SSD ? ... or OS and the apps

Also a big thing for me is the Scratch disk for Photoshop .. must be on physical separate drive to OS, but I could use a normal HDD for that

[Martin Brown]

The largest benefit is for anything that you write seldom or once and read many times like memory mapped code. Chess endgame tables which are huge and require unpredictable random lookups are much faster from SSD.

Write speeds are not so great on SSDs but you can RAID array them to improve that if you have the patience and budget. The big gain is that there is no physical seek time to speak of on read so for the random lookup of data they really excel. Worth a try if you use it wisely.

[John Rumm]

agreed

Not arguing with the facts, just the assertion that the two are comparable in terms of the scale of the potential problem.

[John Rumm]

Both really. The OS will be forever loading DLLs, accessing the registry, writing logs etc, so run time overhead for the OS is reduced a bit. Boot times are also significantly faster as you would expect. Apps obviously benefit from reduced load time.

That constraint mostly applies to spinning disks. The argument for a separate disk being both to minimise scratch space access latency and also to avoid congestion of the IO channel in use due to photoshop and OS demands having to share. The former requirement being the lions share of the motivation for using a dedicated scratch disk.

SSDs don't suffer the large latency hits from thrashing in the way a real HDD does, although they are still limited by the one physical IO interface. (the better drives go to some efforts with internal parallel controller architectures etc to maximise the actual throughput through the interface - getting real world speeds well in excess of the read speed of the actual individual flash cells).

[Rick Hughes]

It was avoiding the common I/O channel that I thought benefitted Photoshop ... so it could be happliy writing to scratch disk while reading form Apps disc ... but understand your comment that this may be less of a problem with SSD.

If I get an SSD then I would still have my 2 x 500GB HDD as well .... so could always do a few simple tests on some big image renders. Moving swap file pointer around is easy enough task.,

=================================================================/

[John Rumm]

On a modern SATA interface, the IO channel should be good for around

300MB/sec or so, so there is no real danger of saturating it with current drives (solid state or otherwise).

Indeed, it would be interesting. I have got a SSD on one machine, but that's not my preferred photoshop machine so I have only really observed the impact on the load time of the old version of PS on this machine.

[Lieutenant Scott]

Sometimes it's best to use normal ones. Does your business really need faster access?

[Lieutenant Scott]

I think I'll avoid "more difficult to set up and maintain".

[Lieutenant Scott]

And 50 other things, hence it's a lot easier to replace the whole disk instead of messing about moving things around.

[Lieutenant Scott]

On an SSD? Anyway I have a mirror.