Difference in PS editing from portable or desktop external drives.

[AlexNewstead]

Hi,

I want to edit images in CS6 from an external drive, which do you think would be better....



The portable LaCie rugged 120gb SSD?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409961,00.asp

or

The desktop Seagate Backup Plus?

http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/backup-plus-desk-mac/



I can get both for around the same price....the LaCie offers SDD speed while the Seagate would offer more storage, (not necessarily a problem as I have 2 other HDDs).

I'm looking for opinions on how much faster the portable LaCie would be whilst editing files from it in PS.

Also, what real world differences in performance would there be between the desktop Seagate Backup Plus and the portable Backup Plus version, does anyone know how fast the drive is inside the portable version?

A colleague of mine just uses portable drives to edit from with a desktop PC, but I can't imagine this would work well with larger files and I'd thought he'd benefit by using 7,200rpm drives with more cache?

Cheers

Alex

 

[SoAnyway]

This comes down to a choice between read/write speed vs storage capacity. The SSD will read/write faster than the HDD but will also store less of your data. Also, SSD's are primarily used for quickly booting the operating system and launching applications.

Drives are meant to be used as data storage and not as RAM. In other words, you will not see any added benefit to having faster read/write speed if you're only storing your data on it, either temporarily or permanently. Photoshop can use drives as scratch disks but you're better off using a USB thumb drive for such purposes.

Unless you're going to set Photoshop to save your work live as you do it, you're probably better off going with the HDD for storage capacity, at least until SSDs have a better price per gigabyte ratio. You can go with the SSD to save anything you're working on quickly but how much time will you really save with that, a few seconds?

 

[AlexNewstead]

Thanks for your reply....So once the file I'm editing has been opened in PS the speed of the drive the image is stored on is irrelevant?

Any processes PS executes are taken care of with ram and disk PS is stored on, until I come to save the edited image, in which case it's down to the speed of the drive I'm saving it to right?