Does partioning a fusion drive improve photoshop performance?

[Rodekater]

Hi all,
I ordered a 5K iMac with 3Tb fusiondrive, will receive it tomorrow. Now I wonder wheter it makes sense to partition the Fusiondrive, to "force" photoshop, lightroom and the scratchdisc to the SSD partition?

I read aboud this here:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Fusion-partitioning.html

However, elsewhere partitioning was not recommended, because the fusiondrive will automatically use the SSD part for the most used apps (which in my case would be PS and LR).
And I have never partitioned harddrives before, so I would prefer not to do this ;-)

Any thoughts? What would you reommend?

 

[MCAsan]

If you got the hottest CPU, GPU, and at least 16GB of memory.....do you really think the scratch disk will make that much difference? If performance is a killer issue, replace the fusion drive with a 500GB or 1TB SSD.

Or plan B....stop using PS. Use LR for your DAM and use other apps as plugs for editing such as Pixelmator, Nik, Topaz, Perfect Photo Suite, DxO....etc.

 

[Apple fanboy]

Hi all,
I ordered a 5K iMac with 3Tb fusiondrive, will receive it tomorrow. Now I wonder wheter it makes sense to partition the Fusiondrive, to "force" photoshop, lightroom and the scratchdisc to the SSD partition?

I read aboud this here:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Fusion-partitioning.html

However, elsewhere partitioning was not recommended, because the fusiondrive will automatically use the SSD part for the most used apps (which in my case would be PS and LR).
And I have never partitioned harddrives before, so I would prefer not to do this ;-)

Any thoughts? What would you reommend?

If PS/LR are your most used apps, they will already be in the SSD part of your hard drive. Let OSX do what it does and don't worry about the partition.
I have a fusion drive, and it's no slouch on LR (don't use PS) so can't comment.

 

[Rodekater]

Thanks!

Thanks both, Not partitioning is also my preferred option (easiest), so thanks for confirming it is also fine wrt performance!
I now have very slow bridge/PS performance on my Macbook Pro, so I look forward to getting the 5K!

 

[robgendreau]

I'm not a huge fan of Fusion drives but I gotta agree that for your uses it doesn't make sense to partition. I don't see that the applications you have are gonna be any kind of problem for a Fusion drive to sort out. The point of having a catalog type program like LR is to have frequently accessed info in the database, so it's already halfway there.

Enjoy...the new machine will change how you look at things (as in more clearly as opposed to looking through a sock).

 

[Designer Dale]

Trying to partition a Fusion drive sounds like trouble to me. The software that creates it does so by partitioning of sorts in a way that it can manage on the fly. It takes two drives and merges them into one, but remembers which is the SSD and which is the HDD and puts stuff on each depending on usage and type. If you try to add a partition to that mix, it sounds like kablooie time to me.

I read online that adding a partition to an Apple created Fusion drive will make it unreadable by Disk Utilities.

People smarter than me earned big bucks thinking this stuff up with people like Tim Cook and the ghost of Steve Jobs looking over their shoulders. Why mess with it?

Dale

 

[phrehdd]

There are various combinations that help achieve the best exploitation of your new computer with respect to Photoshop. Don't partition a Fusion drive. This is counter productive. Try the following for general set up:

1) Max the RAM as much as you can afford

2) Scratch space will take a hit on a fusion drive as compared to a Thunderbolt 2 external SSD. Fusion may be faster than a single mechanical drive.

3) Research setting up preferences in Photoshop which includes history states and such. There is a balance that will make a difference in performance.

4) I don't recall the GPU on your new system but see if Photoshop really exploits it and if not, go into PS preferences and disengage as usually only one or two filters really take advantage and the rest it is just overhead.

Hopefully, this will be a good start for you and don't forget you will need to create soft calibration settings via 3rd party tool and the profile generated.