SSD Benefit In Digital Photo Professional?

[idata]

Greetings Intel forumers,

I had a quick question regarding looking into the X25-M G2 160GB Drive. Although many sites give excellent benchmarks on how great these drives appear, none have really gone into detail regarding specific photo-editing tasks outside of Photoshop.

For anyone that uses and exports from Canon's Digital Photo Professional, I was really wondering how much faster the SSD would be in exporting say, Jpegs from the orginal RAW files from a Canon 5D Mark II.

A typical client of mine generates a data folder of 60-70+ GB and to handle the proofing exports with my current 1TB Western Digital drive (presuming 7,200RPM), it can take almost a day.

I am wondering if I took a batch of the photos and copied them to the SSD, would exporting them go any faster? I know it would be writing to the disk a lot but I figure I could copy batches to and from the SSD to go through a client's set of photos rapidly - well, hopefully more rapidly than letting the HDD grind all night / day.

Thanks for the input.

[idata]

Hi Davem,

Thanks for the quick reply on the topic! Yeah that was more or less my thought too - I would use the X25-M to take batches of media (RAWs) to and work on them, then export them out either to the SSD or a secondary drive.

Though I would plan to write far beyond 4 GB a day (the typical wedding for me so far has put the file counts at 60+ GB per event), I figure the SSD will help with working on more events faster while the drives will fall in price through next year. Not saying they wouldn't last a long time still with my useage but I don't blame you for figuring out how much you can write per day due to the lifespan of the cells.

I don't know how long it'll take for you to get your drive in but if you could run say, the same exporting test of 80 of your shots, would you be able to reply with the times again?

I'm so excited to get one of these drives - at the same time though if it's not really going to help me accomplish what I need then why keep it (though I honestly don't see how given the speed comparing to a HDD). Even barely topping raptor speeds are fine in my book for now... I've only seen the drive here top anywhere nearing 70-80MB/sec when it's empty. Right now it's sitting more like 20-50MB/sec depending on task so again I don't think I can go wring. I'd just wish for an equivalent test with an SSD so I know how quickly I need to take the plunge, heh.

Thanks again.

[idata]

I am building a new machine, so as soon as I get all the parts and the assembly done, I'll let you know the speed results of the Intel SSD. Realistically, this could be in a week or so.

As your tests showed, there really isn't much difference in reading and writing to the same drive. Maybe doing a 4 drive 7200rpm Raid 0 array short stroked, would be the most cost effective and yield tremendous speed in read and write. This way, you could just dump the 60GB on the 4 drive RAID 0 array, and then edit and convert right on the array. For $200 you could be done, and as well with writing 60GB of data each day, you won't have the high SSD cost/wear/TRIM issues since you can't TRIM raided SSD's....

[idata]

Hi Davem,

Thanks again for the prompt reply. I'll certainly await your rebuild and stats if you don't mind! It'll be interesting to know for myself (and many other I'm sure) as to how things compare to the SSD.

Though I'd love to build a raid array, my current case is a pre-built BTX form factor and I've long been out of drive bays to mount more than two drives at a time, let alone four! Though raiding is also fairly cheap, don't disks have to be the same size and, forgive me if I'm mistaken, but raid 0 will fail if one drive crashes, correct?

Granted with the support concerns, I'm not saying SSD technology is at a perfected point where it's infalible either, however you're right at least when it comes to probably being cheaper and still offering a huge performance boost.

I guess I'm just really set mentally on jumping to the SSD since I've never raided drives together before. It doesn't seem hard to do - I've just been wary of having drives fail and the loss of capacity a raid would give. Right now though since I do have the WD 1 TB drive, do you think I could always just pick up another one and raid those two? That way I still have tons of space and a performance gain without as much a headache as four drives?

I suppose at any rate though, it'll have to be something I'll think over and observe to see if the performance gain with either method justifies the expense. For an SSD I'm sure it will and likewise for a raid I don't see why it wouldn't help tremendously. I guess I'm still just unsure.

Thanks again for all your recommendations.

[idata]

Hey Real-Link,

A raid 0 array will fail if one drive fails, but, since you would have all your data backed up or at least on the Compact Flash cards, the only thing you would really lose is time. If your 1TB drive failed you'd lose time too, so while it's something to consider, I don't think it's worth giving too much weight to.

You could just buy the same 1TB drive and raid 0 that drive, which would be even cheaper. For less than $100 or so, it's a no brainer. Then you could see the performance boost, and better judge what you need. You could use them separately too for extra data storage. At 60GB per wedding, it seems to make sense to have a second one.

We'll see how the SSD works and then revisit this....

In the meantime, you could also see if some other photogs have solved this. I sometimes check/use the forums at www.luminous-landscape.com or www.dpreview.com

All the Best!

[idata]

Hi Davem,

Fair enough. Again I'm somewhat unfamiliar with raiding drives so I just thought a raid was inherently more prone to failure than a single drive. Guess it really doesn't matter though since the photos are indeed backed up as it is.

I will certainly have to consider the second drive raid option. That's a lot cheaper than an SSD and may suffice. I will still wait to hear for your research though if you don't mind. I'm still tempted by an SSD only because along with the photos, I do do a lot of graphic / web design, 3d rendering, video work and gaming - all aside from just taking photos. But hey, then again a raided drive would help all those too.

Certainly will look at the forums man, thanks. I had checked them awhile ago but since these drives are becoming more affordable, people may offer some insight on them now.

Thanks again.