# Are you using an SSD?  Where do see gains?



## Fauxtog (Dec 6, 2008)

I am thinking of throwing a 128gb SSd in my MBP.  OS X apparently does write caching and because of this is not prone to the problems windows users are experiencing with the Jmicron controllers in the cheaper mlc ssd's on the market now.  

I have seen amazing videos of people starting 17 apps at once using ssd's but I am more interested in how this would affect preview rendering, image exporting, and batch processing.  If you experience doing these tasks with lightroom, cs3, and an SSD please let me know.

Thanks,


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## Denis Pagé (Dec 11, 2008)

Welcome to the forums Fauxtog!

No experience but for the purpose of helping you make a decision, suppose the SSD is twice faster. It wont do it twice faster because the computer still have to process the files. For example: Process time 1 second, old drive 2 seconds, SSD 1 second. With old drive: 1+2=3 seconds. With SSD: 1+1=2 seconds. This obviously get worse with a slow computer and better as the processing speed increase. What may be interesting tough is to put aside a few gigabytes of Lightroom cache on that SSD.

For me, that question do simply go down to: Can that money be put at a better use?... New body? New Lense?...


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## pknoot (Dec 12, 2008)

Solid-state drives are ideal for portable applications, where the risk of shock damage is high and where hard drives consume excessive energy.  They are less attractive in desktop applications.  Having said that, the jury is still out on long-term reliability and read/write cycles before the flash memory fails.  The technology was originally invented for occasional storage, like floppy discs (remember those?), not for continuous access like a main drive in a PC.  While much progress has been made since the invention of flash memory, it remains to be seen how long it will last as the main drive in a laptop.


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## Ruahrc (Feb 7, 2009)

But remember that often the bottleneck of modern computers is delivery of the data to the processors.  Which is why RAID drives and high-rpm (1'k, 15k) drives are used for better performance.

As I understood it, SSDs were not particularly faster than traditional HDs in terms of data throughput, but their access time is virtually zero.  This makes them really good for things like launching a lot of apps simultaneously because there is no head to move to multiple spots on the drive to get the data.  For example, a traditional hard drive will probably outrun a SSD when copying a 1'GB file to another drive (suppose the other drive is infinitely fast).  But the SSD will outrun the traditional drive when copying a million 1MB files (1'GB of data) to another drive because of the access time.

I don't think that a SSD would particularly benefit preview rendering (more dependent on CPU speed), exporting (again CPU dependent), or batch processing (only if the batch was very simple, but I still think the CPU would be the limiting factor).  However, using an SSD as a scratch disk might give significant improvements as the seek times would be eliminated, thus speeding the data access by a large margin?

Also, I think that read/write cycles on SSDs is not as big an issue as it might seem.  I have seen some ballpark calculations stating that for typical usage and the average number of reads/writes available on a piece of flash memory (something like 1 million cycles?) that SSDs should easily last like 1'-2' years.  This is far longer than you woudl probably have use for the drive considering increases in capacity and new technology.  Of course put it in a server and it will probably fail in 2 years... but for typical usage I think the lifetime is quite high.  Anyways I guess time will tell the answer to that.

Norman


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## kelchm (Mar 30, 2009)

I just got a new Mac Mini and dropped an Intel X25-M into it.  It is noticeable faster.  If you have the money for it it is a worthwhile upgrade.  Stick with the Intel models for now, though.


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