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Firewire SSD for photoshop

C

caughtintheweb

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 17, 2011
115
0
Hi All,

Apologies if this question might be raised in many forums. I use my iMac mainly for editing pictures using photoshop. While my current 2,93 Ghz i7 is extremely fast with all the touch ups, some large pics take a few secs to a min to edit. I was wondering if buying a SSD and connecting using firewire port would reduce the speed drastically. If so what size would be sufficient ? I rarely boot my computer and I dont really care about boot time. I just need some applications like photoshop and garageband to run faster.
 
Bergues said:
That would be a waste of money. Get a boatload of ram. Since Photochop is only 32-bit, you can still use all the extra ram as a scratch disk by using the following commands in Terminal.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure CS5 is 64-bit.
 
You don't say what type of edits, but some do take a bit of time to process.

Although you didn't say how much RAM you system has. if you're editing images that large you need at least 8GB on your system and possibly more.
 
I have 12 GB of RAM. Those edits are not painfully slow. In involves unsharp masks, constrast adjustments. Slowest would be when I superimpose two layers and do a dual layer adjustment.

Its much better than my 2.4 Ghz quad core PC at work which just hangs the whole system. I just don't understand that. Its supposed to have 4 processors running at a descent clock speed. It has 8 GB RAM. When I make heavy edits even with 200mb files, my system is not usable for 2-3 mins.
 
I thought we already agreed it will do nothing?

It would be counter productive to attach a SSD -- with file transfer read/write rates of up to 600 GB/ps -- to a FW800 port which only has a 80 MB/ps connection. Like 100X slower.

Perhaps you should consider whether or not you really need to keep scanned negs at that high of a DPI? maybe scan high for initial detail but then knock down to a more realistic/managable number?

Where do these scans go? Prints? advertising? magazine ads?
 
Badger^2 said:
It would be counter productive to attach a SSD -- with file transfer read/write rates of up to 600 GB/ps -- to a FW800 port which only has a 80 MB/ps connection. Like 100X slower.
Click to expand...

Lol, where did you find an SSD like that? 600GB/s :D

Fastest SSDs have read/write speeds of around 400Mb/s, and thats under most favorable conditions (sequential access, very large files).

Anyway, the whole point of an SSD is not the high read/write speed, but the low random access latency.
 
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