a few thoughts in random brain spit out manner
again these are all my opinions and everyone has them and not trying to say I am correct
so nobody get your twinkies steamed if I disagree
hehehehe
my side is I do PS and LR for a living and wife does layout for a living
I came from a commercial photography background and we started a post production company for PRO photographers we have about 300 clients now
we have had our company online now for over 10 years so a good long track record
just gives some a background
SSD for main storage is overpriced at this point as other threads have shown writing and reading to PS is bottlenecked by PS threads itself so not disc speed so much so modern fast HDD will do fine again yes SSD are quicker but for PS and LR writing reading I bet if you really crunched numbers you would be thinking WOW its not as fast as I thought in time savings ? if you have lots of money then go for it but get some SSD and some regular drives do some testing and you will see opening and closing files from PS SSD wont be that much of a time saver !
if you use large files use uncompressed Tiffs !!!! that alone saves huge amounts of time
for scratch the idea is not to hit scratch so more memory is better and with CS5 and SL 16 is the new minimum and I think 24 is worth getting if your PS files are over 300 gigs jump to the 24 if under 16 should do you but for the price jump and one time purchase of 8GB sticks ? you have to think 24 might be worth it in the long run ! so that is why I say 24 for photographers
SSD for PS-scratch and LR-cache
I prefer two in raid 0 and I found that the 40s are big enough the 60s are coming down in price so its a personal budget choice
the reason two 40s is if one dies I still have a fast scratch cache and am not totally slowed down so the few days till I get one to replace wont see my workflow changing much !
a single can work as two of them means you might want to get a basic good eSATA card like the OWC ones to run your SSD on and that means two external case setups ? so its a tradeoff and really a single or two in raid 0 ? again both work and both setups would be a personal choice
the upside to a single is that if you have it in the drive bay and a SSD for boot and a few HDDs working you wont hit the limits of the ICH where if you had two in raid 0 and your boot and your data drives you are going to hit the limits of the ICH and have to go external for them ! so thats the trade off
the speed jump of getting just the cache of LR on the SSD is worth it I saw about a %50 jump in speed using develop mode meaning the white sliders popped white and I could adjust %50 quicker with the SSD cache
I did tons of testing and the catalog along the original images or on its own or on SSD the speed was all the same meaning it really does not matter where your catalog sits !!!! so thats good cause SSD are not cheap and catalogs can get large !
PS checking efficiency is key to finding the best memory but SSD for scratch is worth it since the second you open PS it writes temp scratch as a place holder !
also if you run out of memory might as well have that fast scratch
always set PS though to have the SSD as first scratch then a second disc
also if doing a large PS job clear the LR cache before you start !!!
this brings up one other thing some use LR as a huge catalog to look at files and want a HUGE cache drive I tend to do my files get them in JPG and move out of LR ! this might effect how big of SSD you use
for me working with 800-1500 files at a time from photographers jobs 80 gigs total has never left me needing more !
also a side note when building previews in LR the standard are for develop mode and the 1:1 are whats used in Library mode so if you only work in Develop mode just build the standards or vice versa
SSD for boot 120 if you keep your boot to a minimum and store all files on a storage disc !
I ended up with the 3.2 ? the 3.3 is quicker but it depends sometimes %10 other times it wont matter so that extra money for the times when I was taxing PS I decided was not worth it this time around ! and I usually am one that preaches its worth it
but this time around ! I used the money for more SSD and memory and some of my buds with 3.3 machines mine is faster !
theirs are in a few instances but the time saved would not have been made back again this is me and I dont mind paying to go faster if the time is saved but again this time for my business it would not pay itself off !!!
so I think the 3.2 is fine for PS and LR work
video rendering and such ? dont know music ? dont know as I only play with this stuff its PS and LR I make my living with
I was shocked when running the numbers the 3.3 would not pay back !!! truly was
the one thing while its quicker its only when things are really taxing the machine to its fullest with certain filters and or actions etc.. and those still dont save in the end
setting up LR to batch out when I eat dinner or something saves me worrying about output times
in PS I open a image and have it run a action that puts my base layers up I need
some who like to move on and off files to a SSD for the extra speed ? it might work for them ? for me the extra time to take on and off is a step backward as that time I saved would be lost moving things around !
my main storage though is a 8 disc raid setup on a areca 1222x so that is not my limiting factor
so I might say good setup the 3.2 should do you fine
I might say how much more is the 24 gigs vs the 16 ? that might be worth updating now to 24 and be done ?
the scratch size 100 gig or so total is usually enough but again depends on total file size and if you use it for LR how much cache do you really need on hand ?
just make sure you have a good backup plan
