Best use of SSD's for Photoshop

[Mecio]

Hi guys,

I am planning to upgrade our workstations to SSDs to speed up general tasks and in particular photoshop. We are using Mac pros with ram ranging from 16 to 24gb and we use Photoshop CS5.

I am thinking one OWC 6G 120gb for system and applications and either one OWC 240 gb for temporary working files (all files reside on a nas for filesharing) or alternatively 2x OWC 120gb in raid 0. Do you know what will be faster? I have read that the larger capacity ssds are faster than the lower ones but does it become faster to raid 2x120gb than 1x240gb?

I am mostly looking to speed up opening and saving of files. Also is there a big boost in this compared to a hard-drive based raid 0 with two drives?

Will it be ok to have the PS scratch file on the same ssd as the working psd's?

Many questions... I would be very grateful for any input or experience!

Thanks

 

[Kimmo]

Hi Mecio, try Lloyd Chamber's Mac Performance Guide for some very good information on maximizing Mac's for photography.

http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html

 

[Mecio]

Thank you Kimmo. I read his pages which are very informative but I can't seem to find an answer to the question whether 2x 120gb ssd would be faster then 1x 240gb ssd?

 

[Loa]

Hello,

but I can't seem to find an answer to the question whether 2x 120gb ssd would be faster then 1x 240gb ssd?

In theory the RAID0 is faster than a single SSD, but for PS, I'm convinced that you won't see any difference.

Also, with 24GB of RAM you'll only rarely have to write to scratch in any case.

Finally, if you ever experience very long open/save times with large PS files, the bottleneck for those are not the drives.

Loa