Weird haltings doing simple things in photoshop CS5 with late 2010 13" macbook pro

I recently upgraded my hard drives to SSD and the ram to 8gb.

I purchased the Intel 320 120GB SSD for my OS and a bit of storage and a OCZ Agility 2 90GB SSD (in a good optical bay hdd caddy, nimitz) which I have broken up into 2 partitions: Which are the photoshop scratch disk 59.68gb and the one labeled storage which is 29.87gb.

I have also upgrade the ram to 8gb consisting of 2 4gb sticks from corsair CMSA8GX3M2A1066C7

I have tested the ram with apples hardware tester and rember and both test pass.

Okay so to the symptoms:

A lot of what I do is take a RAW file from my Canon 7d and convert it in ACR then reduce the size of the file 2x and apply a two step sharpening process to the file. What is happening now is I am getting these weird halts or freezes with the pinwheel displaying doing simple stuff like applying the sharpening or finishing my measurement and applying a reduction to the photo.

THIS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE THESE UPGRADES.

In photoshop under performance I have the photoshop scratch disk partition setup as the scratch disk option and only option.

Could it be this is not enough for these simple tasks? Should I just try deleting the storage partition (really don't need it as I store all my files on 2terabyte external drives) and use the whole 90gb hard drive as a scratch disk.

Or do you think it's my ram. Incidentally what is the most compatible ram out there for this model macbook pro?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

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ArmanUV said:

That seems like an SSD problem. Since you have 2 SSDs, it's hard to track down the problem. Reset the PRAM and the SMC. If you still see beachballs, try clearing caches using Onyx.
If software solutions didn't work, try replacing the SSDs one by one with the stock HDD and see if you still experience the problem. This way you can track down the issue to one of the SSDs.

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Well looks like it might be the OCZ Agility 2 drive (think a firmware upgrade would fix it) since it is photoshop's sole scratch disk then. I have not try clearing the caches using onyx though, do you think that will help.

Thanks so much for your help btw!

Was going to update the firmware, but I don't have an internal CD ROm anymore, just two hdd. Lucky me.

ArmanUV said:

Take a look at OCZ forums. You can find great toturials there that don't require an optical drive.
And don't be so sure to disregard the Intel SSD. The OCZ drive is most likely the problem here but it might as easily be the Intel.

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Yeah I posted my question there. It seems for the agility 2 you need to access a cd-rom drive and a external usb thumb drive for you to be able to update the bios, which I do not have. Think I am going to have to reinstall the optical drive into my mac in order to update the bios, and that really sucks.