Buying a new PC for photo processing, need some help.

HighPlainsPhotographer wrote in post #17816516
And one more dumb question: no card reader on the PC I am buying, how about this http://www.amazon.com …LFNB&coliid=IYT​C7GFAUIEJC Or should I use something like this http://www.amazon.com …FNB&coliid=I1XL​65UC886FT0

To keep everything tidy I installed an AFT internal USB 3 card reader that I've been really happy with. I have a cheap Rosewill one in another machine and CF cards don't slot in very nicely and I always feel I have to be really careful to avoid bending pins.

Not all AFT card readers are great though. They have at least one model (PRO 37U) where there are a lot of DOA units. The Enermax ECR501 is also supposed to be decent.

Also remember that if you select a 3 1/2" one you need one of these: http://www.newegg.com …er-_-11-993-007-_-Product

Bob_A wrote in post #17816564
To keep everything tidy I installed an AFT internal USB 3 card reader that I've been really happy with. I have a cheap Rosewill one in another machine and CF cards don't slot in very nicely and I always feel I have to be really careful to avoid bending pins.

Not all AFT card readers are great though. They have at least one model (PRO 37U) where there are a lot of DOA units. The Enermax ECR501 is also supposed to be decent.

Also remember that if you select a 3 1/2" one you need one of these: http://www.newegg.com …er-_-11-993-007-_-Product

Thanks for the info on the internal card readers. I also liked not having extra cables running around.

I am still slightly perplexed on the SSD, one or two? What is the scratch disk? Any advantage two SSD's vs partitioning off a larger drive. FWIW, the PC I ordered has a 2TB internal hard drive, I will likely store photos (after processing) on two external drives.

I have multiple PC's, with different setups. All have at least one SSD. One PC has a smaller 120 GB drive with pretty much just OS and all other everyday type things on a separate 250 GB drive. I have another PC configured with a single 400GB SSD. I don't really see any great advantage to either setup. They both work fine.

HighPlainsPhotographer wrote in post #17816594
Thanks for the info on the internal card readers. I also liked not having extra cables running around.

I am still slightly perplexed on the SSD, one or two? What is the scratch disk? Any advantage two SSD's vs partitioning off a larger drive. FWIW, the PC I ordered has a 2TB internal hard drive, I will likely store photos (after processing) on two external drives.

I replaced my 120GB SSD with a 250 GB one when I moved to Win 10. Since I no longer had a use for the 120GB SSD after that I turned it into a scratch disk for PS instead of using my data drive for that purpose. The SSD is a lot faster for a scratch disk than an HDD, although with 32GB RAM it will rarely see use anyway.

Adobe recommends a fast drive that isn't your boot drive (especially if your boot drive is a HDD) for a scratch disk. They also recommend that you use a different disk than the one housing any large files that you may be editing. If you don't change anything in Photoshop (Edit -> Preferences -> Performance) typically your boot drive will be selected, which isn't a big deal if your boot drive is an SSD with lots of free space.

Honestly, if you have a 250GB or 500GB SSD for your boot drive and if your not RAM limited (you have 16GB or more) and not loading lots of huge files into PS then what you use for a scratch disk isn't going to yield much of a performance boost, if any. For me, I just had a spare SSD doing nothing, so I re-purposed it

Bob_A wrote in post #17817111
Adobe recommends a fast drive that isn't your boot drive (especially if your boot drive is a HDD) for a scratch disk.

The thing about "not your boot drive" is once the OS and programs are loaded it's completely idle - unless maybe there's a swap file and not enough RAM. I don't think that advice is applicable to everyone.

My W10 + programs without swap or data is 20GB. 100GB free on a 128GB SSD. I should probably partition it off and use it for something, since I don't want to fill it up and have huge disk images.

tim wrote in post #17817128
The thing about "not your boot drive" is once the OS and programs are loaded it's completely idle - unless maybe there's a swap file and not enough RAM. I don't think that advice is applicable to everyone.

My W10 + programs without swap or data is 20GB. 100GB free on a 128GB SSD. I should probably partition it off and use it for something, since I don't want to fill it up and have huge disk images.

If you have an boot SSD with tons of free space there shouldn't be any performance debit for using your boot drive for swap. And if you are never RAM limited you won't need a swap disk anyway. OTOH if you have 4 GB RAM and a 120 GB boot drive you may not to want to use that drive as your swap disk.

For me I have the following on my 250 GB boot drive:

23.7 GB for Windows
34.8 GB for LR catalog and previews
7.7 GB for "Users" (4.8 GB of this is for AppData)
36 GB for programs and system stuff

Total = 102.2 GB

It would be a 30 GB more if I used the standard locations for iTunes, Documents and Downloads, but I moved all of those to my data drive.

Bob_A wrote in post #17817829
If you have an boot SSD with tons of free space there shouldn't be any performance debit for using your boot drive for swap. And if you are never RAM limited you won't need a swap disk anyway. OTOH if you have 4 GB RAM and a 120 GB boot drive you may not to want to use that drive as your swap disk.

For me I have the following on my 250 GB boot drive:

23.7 GB for Windows
34.8 GB for LR catalog and previews
7.7 GB for "Users" (4.8 GB of this is for AppData)
36 GB for programs and system stuff

Total = 102.2 GB

It would be a 30 GB more if I used the standard locations for iTunes, Documents and Downloads, but I moved all of those to my data drive.

I think you're agreeing with me...

If you ever do an image using a tool like macrium reflect, which lets you back up your OS in a way that's easy to recover, your backups will be huge. This is why I don't keep that kind of thing on the OS disk.

If I am interpreting everything correctly, I should be fine with a single 500 GB SSD? The computer has 8 GB of RAM, I may upgrade to 16 GB while I am inside doing the SSD. Thanks for the replies and putting up with my lack of PC knowledge.

HighPlainsPhotographer wrote in post #17817864
If I am interpreting everything correctly, I should be fine with a single 500 GB SSD? The computer has 8 GB of RAM, I may upgrade to 16 GB while I am inside doing the SSD. Thanks for the replies and putting up with my lack of PC knowledge.

Yes. Make a 60GB partition (or thereabouts) for the OS, programs, and swap, the rest can be for data. 500GB is pretty big, I only use SSDs for performance critical data, the rest lives on spinning disks. RAW files for example are fine on there.

tim wrote in post #17817835
I think you're agreeing with me...

If you ever do an image using a tool like macrium reflect, which lets you back up your OS in a way that's easy to recover, your backups will be huge. This is why I don't keep that kind of thing on the OS disk.

Actually I think you're agreeing with me Tim As I stated in the post you replied to earlier:

"Honestly, if you have a 250GB or 500GB SSD for your boot drive and if you're not RAM limited (you have 16GB or more) and not loading lots of huge files into PS then what you use for a scratch disk isn't going to yield much of a performance boost, if any."

We're in agreement then!

HighPlainsPhotographer wrote in post #17817864
If I am interpreting everything correctly, I should be fine with a single 500 GB SSD? The computer has 8 GB of RAM, I may upgrade to 16 GB while I am inside doing the SSD. Thanks for the replies and putting up with my lack of PC knowledge.

It's always fun debating stuff like this as there's never one solution as it always depends on how you are using the machine. You're on the right track though and should have a really nice setup.

You said the PC you ordered has a 2TB internal drive. Because of that a 500 GB SSD for the boot drive is much larger than you really need, and if you want to save a bit of money you could get a 250 GB one instead and still be able to partition it as Tim suggested.

I'd recommend upgrading to 16 GB RAM, but again, it depends on how you use your computer. For what I do I exceed 8 GB RAM on occasion, but I rarely, if ever, exceed 16.

tim wrote in post #17818148
We're in agreement then!

Yup! In the realm of debating computer hardware that's quite an achievement