Quick SSD question.

[george - dicegeorge]

but i have no actual experience of SSDs. [g]

[RJH]

Processing images won't speed up, unless they're huge and you're short of RAM. But there's more to it than that. Opening and saving files happen in an instant. Browsing thumbnails. The whole thing becomes a lot more fluid.

Also the lack of noise and vibration (they're silent), lower heat and lower power consumption. Reliability looking good so far, too.

An SSD will compensate for a lack of RAM. But RAM is, in turn, a lot faster than the already fast SSD. I'd guess 4GB will do on Windows 8.1? Or is it 8GB nowadys? I use 8GB on Win7 and MacOS and never noticed a problem - use similar to yours I think.

[David Paste]

Show off! ;-)

[Ian]

+1 to that. Just got burned when I added a cheepo Kingston flash drive to an order with insufficient research. Claims 400/500MB/sec. Here's what I got after filling the drive with random data: [root@sv07 ~]# ./hdtest.sh Offset 0 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 1 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 2 GB, read rate 176 MB/s Offset 3 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 4 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 5 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 6 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 7 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 8 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 9 GB, read rate 175 MB/s

Just to rub it in, fill a chunk with zeros:

[root@sv07 ~]# dd of=/dev/sda if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 count=1024 oflag=direct seek=5120 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.26032 s, 475 MB/s

Aaaaand:

Offset 0 GB, read rate 176 MB/s Offset 1 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 2 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 3 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 4 GB, read rate 175 MB/s Offset 5 GB, read rate 411 MB/s

[The Natural Philosopher]

SSD should be faster booting and faster program loading, but otherwise it wont make a lot of difference.

Up to the point where your graphic object exceeds available RAM and it starts using disk instead.

By all means use SSD, but what you really need for that job is

- enough RAM to hold the biggest picture you mean to process in it, times two..

- as fast a CPU as you can afford to buy and run.

But having said that, processing SINGLE images is not a hugely onerous task, The CPU eater IME is video processing, frame by bleeding frame.

[The Natural Philosopher]

+1.

Bringing pikkies in and out of disk will be faster, but not processing them.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No.

once you have all the picture and a duplicate of it in RAM, more RAM isn't going to help. Beyond file caching which is not something that I think windows is as good as as say Linux.

What you need is a fast CPU.

and at least 4GB RAM and maybe 8GB.

Once the programs are loaded, the disk isn't used.

What is used here, and I do some photo processing, is massive amounts of CPU to process images and a lot of GPU to provide a snappy response to the whole GUI.

I've only got a 4GB system and a dual celeron core but its more than good enough to process pictures at such a speed I don't notice any really abysmal delays.

However when processing VIDEOS its a whole different ball game. I don't run out of RAM GPU or disk speed, I run out of CPU. It can't process at much more than - say - 3-4 times natural video frame rate and it takes ages to process an hour or two of video

[The Natural Philosopher]

Dont. Unless you are processing enormous pictures of gigabyte size.

What you need is one thing alone, the fattest hottest CPU you can afford, and I am not even convinced you need that for 'stills'

A very basic system will be entirely adequate for your needs.

[Martin Brown]

Also bear in mind the warning that running too many benchmarks on them can seriously shorten their working life! But you really do need to know if you will be mostly storing MPEGs, JPGs and PNGs which are all highly compressed and so want bare speed for incompressible data or mostly web pages and simple text (Office 2007 and onwards has confused things by putting stuff inside a ZIP envelope in its new formats).

If your data are already highly compressed then you should consider Crucial or Samsung otherwise you may well benefit from a Vertex etc.

The numbers for my Samsung 256k (series 830) drive are pretty uniform SeqR 500Mb/s SeqW 400Mb/s ReadIOPS 75k WriteIOPS 37k

On an i7-3700k (not overclocked). Newer models are faster still. Worth populating a machine with plenty of ram, but not worth paying a premium for anything with go faster stripes unless into overclocking.

There was a dated but otherwise good Anandtek review somewhere but I couldn't find it on the new improved site. Anyone thinking of buying an SSD should certainly do their homework. They are all a lot faster that fast physical drives but some are much faster than others!

[Martin Brown]

If you are not into gaming then you can use the inbuilt Intel graphics on i7 and i5 CPUs and it can be actually faster for 2D images than an external exotic high end graphics card (and a lot less power used).

i7-3770 is probably still the best price performance iff your software is capable of handling 4 cores *and* hyperthreading otherwise there are cheaper i5s that just offer 4 core. i5-3470 is slower but more bang per buck (at least it was when I had to make a choice).

[Adrian]

Which just reinforces a thought I had reading the original requirement.

It's mostly going to be used for GIMP and internet. So why Win8? Big heavy lardy OS.

Why not go with GIMP's native OS, Linux? No difference between any of the most common browsers and mail clients on Win & Lin. GIMP is obviously on both.

[Martin Brown]

8GB is usually enough for most practical purposes unless you are handling insane sized images. 4GB is a bit tight these days.

A 16 Mpixel RGB image takes typically 50Mb in ram.

Even more so with the built in Intel graphics which are for 2D up there with some of the fastest graphics cards in terms of 2D performance. The HD Graphics 4000 being a respectable improvement over earlier versions.

You can always fit a graphics card later if you decide you need one...

You won't much enjoy 3D gaming on the Intel graphics but its 2D is fine.

[Tim Watts]

For batch yes. Otherwise, you see an enhanced load/save time (if you use a GOOD SSD and not a crap one) - but it will be a small fraction of the time you spent on the retouch.

OTOH if you start to use Adobe Lightbox it'll make a big difference as that tends to make you want to do batch operations because it's so easy.

Samsung is a good name in the SSD market.

I have a SanDisk SDSSDXP2 (250GB) and it's smaller sister in a server - had them for nearly a year and both are rock solid and blindingly fast.

[Tim Watts]

And what the OP wants is a disk that can at least warn him when it's getting worn out. The Sandisk I just mentioned has a MediaWear indicator in the SMART attributes.

Oh and stay away from TLC (triple) - at least for now...

[Tim Watts]

It is certainly very much faster for booting. But it also makes program load much quicker too.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I cant believe you said in response to:

"SSD should be faster booting and faster program loading"

the following:

"It is certainly very much faster for booting. But it also makes program load much quicker too."

[Tim Watts]

I can - my head's mashed - too many work problems. That will teach me!

Anyway, just read it as "+1" :)

[D.M.Chapman]

Don't forget, it's not (usually) all about the transfer rates though.

For most uses, large file transfers are relatively rare - the lack of any need for a physical head to move around to find the data giving near instant seek times is a huge win.

Personally I'd go for a Crucial M500 - good price, ok performance, seem reliable.

Should you stumble across a real cheap M4 then they aren't bad either for a solid drive. Avoid the V4 like the plague though - so bad even crucial largely hide all evidence it ever existed on their website...

Darren

[dennis]

Not much if you..

have a lot of RAM and don't restart your machine frequently.

If both of these are true the OS will cache the programs, etc. in the RAM so you don't need to access the disk except to save or load data. You won't notice the difference with data unless you are into really big stuff, it only takes a second or two to load a 10 MByte photo from a spinning disk.

If you do like to shutdown and power off they make a big difference.

[Bob H]

I have a Samsung Evo 128Gb SSD with Windows 8.1 on it, as well as MS Office and some other stuff. It boots up from cold in 35 seconds, so that is 1 good reason for having SSD

All other stuff like documents , media and little used are on a 2tb spinning disc