Good processor vs SSD ?

I have an AMD Phenom II - 4 core 3.2ghz, mixed with a 1tb 7200 rpm HD.

Now my question is, if I buy an SSD, would I see major improvements in processing? Opening photos or running actions in PCS5, for example.

Am I missing out on the power of my processor with a 7200rpm HD?

Yes you would see a noticable difference.

Your processor is decently fast. You can overclock it if you want.

An SSD would make your system more responsive, but is not going to significantly change your render times. Startup and program loads will be much faster.

Swift wrote in post #12116081
Now my question is, if I buy an SSD, would I see major improvements in processing? Opening photos or running actions in PCS5, for example.

So long as your SATA bus is 3 or 6 GB/s you will see a dramatic difference. However, if it's only 1.5 GB/s you'll only see a little improvement. But I'd invest in 8 GB of RAM first if you don't already have it (and provided you're 64-bit).

I do have 8gb ram running W7 x64. I upgraded from 4gb to 8gb just last week, I haven't noticed any difference.
I also bought a Corsair CMPSU-650TX (650 watt power supply) , and a CNPS9700LED ( new cpu fan ).

So what would significantly change render times?

I'm not sure how Photoshop works under Windows, but under OS X it uses high RAM cache (4-8 GB) as scratch if it's available, and RAM will always be faster than SSD. Where you'll see SSD improve performance is in things that require disk access, such as booting, launching apps, etc. Otherwise, only those features of Photoshop that use the gpu would be the only other limiting factor (where a better graphics card could benefit).

Tony-S wrote in post #12116729
So long as your SATA bus is 3 or 6 GB/s you will see a dramatic difference. However, if it's only 1.5 GB/s you'll only see a little improvement. But I'd invest in 8 GB of RAM first if you don't already have it (and provided you're 64-bit).

???? Even a SSD drive running on SATA I would still be a night and day performance increase over the fastest hard drive. You don't need SATA III....

YP5 Toronto wrote in post #12117103
???? Even a SSD drive running on SATA I would still be a night and day performance increase over the fastest hard drive. You don't need SATA III....

Well, I connected my SSD to my old Mac Mini (1.5 Gb/s SATA) just to see how it did and I was getting about 110 MB/s sustained reads and writes, while a 7200 rpm notebook drive was getting about 70 MB/s. On my Mac Pro my 3.5" 7200 rpm drive gets about 90 MB/s. On my hackintosh (where the SSD is now) I get about 230 MB/s and its mobo (Gigabyte P55A-UD4P) has a 6 Gb/s SATA bus. So the SSD is faster, but it didn't appear tremendously faster on the Mini's 1.5 GB/s bus. This was all done with QuickBench from Intech.

Tony-S wrote in post #12117076
I'm not sure how Photoshop works under Windows, but under OS X it uses high RAM cache (4-8 GB) as scratch if it's available, and RAM will always be faster than SSD. Where you'll see SSD improve performance is in things that require disk access, such as booting, launching apps, etc. Otherwise, only those features of Photoshop that use the gpu would be the only other limiting factor (where a better graphics card could benefit).

I just thought a SSD would help with my batch photoshop script (file > image processing) with reading 200 25mb RAW files and then writing 200 500kb jpg files. So for batch processing, a SSD is what I would need?

And I have an Nvidia GT 220 -- graphics card.

it isnt all about MB/s, it is also about seek time.

It is also about the read and write times with smaller files...again SSD is night and day.

Yes...reading large RAW files, moving from one to the next, SSD will help

This post details a real-world test I carried out on Lightroom file conversion and preview rendering tasks. The SSD was substantially faster than the HDD.

hollis_f wrote in post #12123292
This post details a real-world test I carried out on Lightroom file conversion and preview rendering tasks. The SSD was substantially faster than the HDD.

Substantially ? I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate..The differences between the two HDs are only a couple seconds apart. Or maybe I'm reading it wrong lol : p

3m06s vs 2m52s and 7m54s vs 4m33s.... the later time comparison is quite huge.

YP5 Toronto wrote in post #12124285
3m06s vs 2m52s and 7m54s vs 4m33s.... the later time comparison is quite huge.

Indeed, 8 minutes vs 4.5 minutes is much larger than I expected. Also - Windows, Lightroom and the Lightroom Cache were all on the SSD for both phases of the experiment. If they were also on the HDD then the differences would have been even larger.

moreover, his post was dated in 2009... SSD have made some huge improvements since then.

I find that people that have not physicaly used one in their day to day work routine of photo or video processing do not fathom the world of difference it makes in your work flow and overall enjoyement.