External SSD as Photoshop Scratch Disk?

Has anyone ever used an external SSD as a Photoshop scratch disk? I was thinking about this, but was also hoping to get experiences shared.

I was looking at either an SSD meant to be an external drive or putting an SSD in an enclosure and using that as a scratch disk on a mobile workstation. Is this feasible? Am I just looking at killing a drive very quickly?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I don't see why it shouldn't work - the concept is basically sound. The SSD will be quite fast in and of itself and I don't believe there should be any speed loss by being external since it would have a SATA cable attachment either way.

When shopping though check the specs of the various SSD's. Some are faster than others and some have faster/more reliable controllers than others. You just have to look around.

Sounds good. Thanks!

Another option to consider is swapping out the optical drive to an SSD.

If your computer has a built in DVD, it often possible to make the DVD external and put a SSD in the place of the DVD. If you never use the DVD for movies, this may be a better option for you.

Is this for a laptop or a desktop?

If its a desktop throw it inside. You can place a SSD anywhere. Give it power and a data connection and stick it down with velcro or double sided tape. You can let it just sit too, I have had mine just sitting above my optical drive for ~2 years now with no issues. They have no moving parts so they don't really need to be secured.

Mobile workstation - you mean a laptop? Yes this will work, but you're probably limited by the interface speed and latency - USB3? ESata?

A better option is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. The Samsung 850 evo is reliable, the pro even moreso. If you just want it to run Windows, Office, LR, Photoshop, with cache scratch and working set you could probably get away with 256GB, though 512GB would be nicer. I'd partition 60GB for OS and programs (maybe less, my OS Win 10 + programs takes 36GB), another partition for data and swap/scratch/temp. The reason for partitioning is then you can use Macrium Reflect to image your OS and programs and make a nice compact system image, 20GB or so, which isn't the ideal backup mechanism for data (it's not bad - just not the best).

Waitasec (edit: it seems Tim and I posted on the same interface issue about the same time!) Where an HD/SSD connects to the motherboard thru an on-board controller, the external HD/SSD data has to go via the bottleneck of the USB port. If your computer has USB 3.0 ports, it is not as limited in the bottleneck as USB 2.0 port smaller bottleneck. In fact, USB 3.0 supports up to 5Gbits/sec whereas SATA III supports 6Gbits/sec, and there is an even faster 'internal' connector on the newest motherboards and also supported by the newest SSD's, called 'PCIe (x4)'

I've bee working with a very mobile station lately. I'm using an Surface Pro 3 when I'm on the move (believe it or nor, it does get the job done) so I've got a USB 3.0 port. It's got a 256 GB SSD inside, but I've seen large amounts of disk space getting used up by Photoshop, and then some more by Window's VRAM. I've just ordered a budget SSD to try this out. It's not expensive, so if I trash this with the constant read and write I won't feel the pain too much.

http://techreport.com …xperiment-theyre-all-dead

SSDs are pretty tough.

As Tim and Wilt said, the bottonneck is the USB port. USB3 protocol supports up to 5Gbit/s, but it doesn't mean every USB port will be as fast. 5Gbit/s channel bandwidth under USB protocol translate to about 400-450MB/s of user data rate only, still pretty fast, but well below the 550MB/s range of SATAIII, not to mention PCIe interface. If you have USB2 interface, then forget about it.

It's good to know that SSD's are very durable. Thanks!

Here's to hoping that the next Surface (or at least the one after) will have USB 3.1.

Remember everything fails, the only question is when, so backups are essential. I've had two older SSDs fail, they go suddenly with virtually no warning.

tim wrote in post #17948950
Remember everything fails, the only question is when, so backups are essential. I've had two older SSDs fail, they go suddenly with virtually no warning.

First I've heard of that but hey, electronics do fail. At least with conventional spinning disks there is sometimes an audible warning: screeching, clicking, slow RPM spin, etc so you may have time to back things up, but failure is failure.

Failure is usually without warning with either disk type, in my experience.

tim wrote in post #17949036
Failure is usually without warning with either disk type, in my experience.

Fortunately I haven't had too many failures over the past 30 years and in half the cases they called out my name with obnoxious sounds before giving up the ghost . That gave me time to save critical data. The strangest episode I had though was two years ago when I had a disk lose it's master boot record. It would still power up and spin but I was not able to reclaim the data by conventional means.