SSD for heavy duty use (scratch disk)

Depending how you connect the scratch disk (USB 2.0 would be not ideal, USB 3.0 or Firewire 800 or Thunderbolt or internally would be better) to your Mac, any SSD will do fine and 64 GB should also be enough.

Normally modern SSDs have a theoretical write/read limit of 10,000 to 100,000 cycles (P/E cycles), meaning if you had a 64 GB SSD and its cycle limit would be 10,000, you would have to write 625 TB to it, which would be 351 GB per day everyday for the next five years. Assuming those numbers vary and it would only be a tenth of that, it would still mean 35 GB per day, which under normal usage no average computer consumer does, not even with temporary files.

Sounds like you'll have a fairly formidable machine. If you have not acquired the PCI card, consider getting one that's SATAIII to get the most out of the 830.

macstatic said:

Having installed a Samsung 830 128GB SSD as my boot/app drive I've become so thrilled about the idea that I'm considering getting another, separate SSD to use as a scratch/cache disk for Photoshop and other apps. As I understand SSDs have limited read/write cycles I'm worried that a "regular" SSD will "die" quickly with such heavy use.

Which SSD do you recommend for that particular use and would 64GB be considered enough? It should be reliable and of good quality (which is why I opted for the Samsung 830 because of its proven track record).

Click to expand...

Samsung 830 or Samsung 840 Pro. The 830 survived over 6 PB (6000 Terabyte) of test data.

See also:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...25nm-Vs-34nm&p=5157050&viewfull=1#post5157050