SSD hard drive for PS scratch disk

[BernardLanguillier]

I tried on mine workstation with Vista64 / 16 Gb RAM 8 core Xeon the Retouch Artist speed test with changing the RAID of the scratchdisk.
THere was only 1 second difference in making the scratchdisk Raid 0 or Raid 1 (CS4 16 bits)
In the 16 bits CS4 I saw that efficiency stays almost all the time at 100%. But the 8 bits version of CS4 needs the scratch disk much more.
Making in CS4 16 bits the file much bigger (120Mb) makes also very little difference.
So, can I concluded that CS4 16 bits hardly needs the scratch disk? Investing in more memory is much better then investing in a fast scratch disk?

8 and 16 bits refer to the bit depth used by the image file, while 32 and 64 bits refer to the lenght of the memory words used by the application.

The former should only impact performance in that 16 bits file are larger, while the latter impacts mostly the size of the process that can be handled without using OS or appliation swap.

I am a bit confused which you are refering to here.

Cheers,
Bernard

[dct123]

For what it's worth:

I installed two VelociRaptor 300GB 10k rpm internal drives (Raid 0) and use one for CS4 scratch disc and the other for files of images in production. This was after upgrading my ram from 2 to to 4Gb on a Core 2 Duo 32 bit PC machine. I've noticed quite an improvement in performance, and have had no problems processing 500GB 16 bit TIFF files through HDR, Photomerge, ACR tweaking, etc. When the images are finalized and ready for printing, I flatten layers and save on a Terrabit external Firewire drive for Qimage retrieval, with backup copies sent to a Terrabit MioNet remote server that doubles as a client dropbox for uploading images to me. This workflow allows me to processes a couple dozen images a week for my photographer and artist clients. The only time I had a "not enough RAM" error was when trying to use CS4 Content Aware Scaling, and after trying it on numerous images, didn't really care for the artifacts it created and don't use it anyway.

[Huib]

8 and 16 bits refer to the bit depth used by the image file, while 32 and 64 bits refer to the lenght of the memory words used by the application.

The former should only impact performance in that 16 bits file are larger, while the latter impacts mostly the size of the process that can be handled without using OS or appliation swap.

I am a bit confused which you are refering to here.

Cheers,
Bernard

Sorry. I made some mistakes with 16 bits CS4. I mean 64 bits CS4. I didn't work with 16 bits images for this test

[johnchoy]

So, can I concluded that CS4 16 bits hardly needs the scratch disk? Investing in more memory is much better then investing in a fast scratch disk?

And yes I have the same findings as yours when using cs4 64 bit.  Some of my files are of 5Gb in size and  I have 16 G memory. I tested w/ and w/o a ramdisk as scratch, and the result is memory usage by PS is more efficient and faster.

I would probably get those 32GB for my older 8 core MAc pro if my current 16GB could be put to good use somewhere else.

a ramdisk is still essential especially for other program such as ptgui even though it's not for ps 64 bit anymore. And back to the topics SSD speed things a lot in the case of dual booting............one OS w/ ramdisk and another w/o

[dct123]

Ooops! Sorry, I meant to type 500MB instead of: "...had no problems processing 500GB 16 bit TIFF files..."