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 Real-Link,

All sounds good.

I found this on the Adobe website. Thought you might enjoy looking through this: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404439.html

They talk about RAID and scratch disks, and even touched upon the ideas we were having in this thread about fast access to files.

Also, now that you mention Video/3d rendering, here's what Adobe recommends for Premier Pro: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405744.html

I'm starting to think that it might be more likely that giving Photoshop the fastest access to the files since they are no more than 20MB, is mostly a random read/write operation. Many sites describe sequential read/write as video files that are like 700MB...

Here's a review that touches on the Intel X25M random and sequential read compared to other drives: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1022/8/

Here are more 50MB and 1000MB file tests on various SSD and raid 0 setups: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1034948741

Will be interesting to see. I just got my X25M today, it's so tiny and weighs less than my small flip open cell phone....

It would be great to really understand exactly what is happening to cause these performance differences in Photoshop...Is it disk access time, random read/write, Iops etc...

Hopefully we'll figure it out...

[idata]

Hi Davem,

Wow that's tiny! Oh, also thanks for those links. Some of them are new to me whereas others I've already passed through when researching the drive and comparisons. Yeah I figured if I got the 160 GB SSD that I'd put all my PS files on it, 3ds Max and all the texture sets, other photo tools, and anything else needing the horsepower to crunch through for work.

Thanks again and I'll keep an eye posted as to how your testing and install goes. Good luck and enjoy your drive!

[idata]

Hi Real-Link,

I asked our same questions an another forum and got a couple responses.

Here's the link: http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/614805-samsung-f3-1tb-raid-0-hdtune-3.html# post7776310

All the Best!

[idata]

Hey Davem,

Thanks very much for looking on these forums about it too and to take up so much of your time. Needless to say I've learned a bit more about drive settings from the people there!

How about this then, I'll test the same 100 RAW / Jpeg test from my 10D then. Granted, 6 MP isn't exactly 10 MP like the Sony A700 like IdPlease is using but it's still a far cry from 21 MP of a 5D Mark II.

Also, first time color-recalibrating video from some rushed footage from a weekend event... The video clip was about 3 minutes long, and took 3 hours to reconvert (changed color temperature) on my standard WD Caviar drive here.

Thanks again for the help and will get you more tests. How's your SSD treating you so far?

[idata]

Hey Davem,

Hopefully you're doing well with the drive. Sorry for bumping the thread but I was curious to know how your progress has been?