SSD question

Hi,

I've been pretty much ignoring the details of computer technology for the past few years.
My current PC is fairly high spec with an SSD for the OS and Applications but conventional (noisy) drives for data.

I keep hearing from my hardware obsessed PC gaming friends about the lifetime of SSDs. I know they do have a limited life but is it enough of a problem for me to turn down a deal from the IT department at work on a set of 4 OCZ Vertex 4, 512MB SSDs for 350 GBP each?

The drives would be used for storing raw files and the processed psd/tiff/jpeg. I'd also set them as 4 independent drives with no RAID configuration.

Turn it down. Great quality brand new 480 SSDs are GBP380 from OWC.

You don't need four. You don't need your images on an SSD, you just need your cache/catalog on the SSD. If you want super speed then one SSD that size for images you're currently working on, one 60-120GB SSD for the cache/catalog. Anything you're not working on can be moved to spinning disk, which are still plenty fast enough for holding and delivering raw image. All images on SSD should be mirrored to spinning disk too, in case they fail - data recovery from SSDs is probably very difficult.

My setup (and I process a lot of images): SSD for OS, SSD for cache/catalog/swap/scr​atch, spinning disk to hold images. I tried putting images onto an SSD and didn't get any significant speedup.

SSDs do wear out, but personally I don't worry about that at all. By the time they wear out I'll want faster, larger ones anyway.

Fair enough. I already have my catalogue on the SSD that my OS and apps live on so if I won't see a performance increase in replacing my current 2x1TB data drives then I won't.

I'll still buy them though and put them on ebay as they are brand new and sealed and cost over 500 GBP retail.

there is a free SW tool that will analyze SSD drives, i think it's called SSD Life.

I think the gain would be minimal, and not worthwhile unless you process a lot of images (thousands) very regularly. Processing services that work for other photographers might do it, but individuals, maybe it's not quite time yet.

I find that the bottleneck is elsewhere, even if images are cached in RAM things aren't as fast as they should be. I think maybe software needs to catch up with the hardware.

tim wrote in post #14589061
I think maybe software needs to catch up with the hardware.

this has been going on for years. my last dozen years were spent in intel, we were always looking for SW that would eat the excess processor cycles we had available. it's hard to push people to upgrade when they don't perceive the need.

I have a similar question as Hank: later this week assembly will start on my new pc. I have a 128gb ssd and a 256gb ssd on hand, along with a couple of hard disks. I probably went overkill on the ssd's, but there were some deals on Newegg that lured me in.

What's the best way to utilize the two ssd's? My current plan is to put the OS, Lightroom, Photoshop, office software on the 128gb. Lightroom catalog, cache, and the current photo shoot on the 256gb drive. Everything else I'm not working on, as Tim says, will be on the spinning disks. Does this make sense?

Jim, that's the setup I have. However my SSDs are half the size of yours, and they're still plenty big enough.

With SSDs that size you might consider putting the cache and catalog on the smaller SSD along with the OS, and putting your current working set of images onto the larger SSD. My logic is the OS disk will be otherwise idle when you're processing images, so you might as well make use of it.

Alternately you could put cache, catalog, and SSD on the larger disk. That wastes spaces on the OS SSD, and the more disks you distribute simultaneous data access across the faster the system goes. You'd also have to decide which disk to put your swap file on... I'd probably stick with the OS disk, personally, though if you have enough RAM the swap file will rarely be used.

When SSDs fail they fail fast, and recovery is difficult or impossible. I suggest you keep a mirror of everything on the SSDs on an internal hard disk. This internal hard disk should of course be backed up to an offsite disk.