HDD or expensive SSD?

jarrrp

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So, I built my custom PC towards to beginning of this year. Very happy with it, miles better than my old PC that I had built for me. However, I will be upgrading parts of it that really could have been better to start off with at the beginning of next year. One thing I didn't change and dragged over from my old PC was the ancient hard drive. I ran out of money and just couldn't afford anything more than my current 168GB slow-as-hell hard drive. It still works though and Windows 8 Release Preview has made my PC lightening fast. But I'm aware that isn't a fix.

My biggest issue is Photoshop, being a photography enthusiast I built my PC with photoshop and casual gaming in mind. But, photoshop just isn't quick enough. A fellow photographer created a photoshop action designed to stress the computer and give it a huge work load. His PC did it in 37 seconds. Mine? 1:40. I was embarrassed to say the least. I asked him what he thought the issue was and he said he thought my issue was my lack of SSD.

But I digress.

For storing my photographs, I really need something big. I'm thinking 1TB. But, I feel like I need an SSD to really improve Photoshop. My biggest issue with SSDs is the fact that they wear out over time, are more expensive per GB and hard drives just last longer.

My motherboard supports 3Gb/s read and write.

So, do I get a 1TB fast hard drive and accept it won't be as fast as an SSD but will ultimately last longer and cost less or do I buy an expensive SSD to use as a Photoshop scratch disk to see the benefit, deal with the low capacity and get myself a second 1TB hard drive when I can?


Other PC specs:
AMD FX-4100 @ 3.6GHz
Asus M5A78L-M/USB 3
16GB DDR3 RAM @ 1333Hz
Asus 560 Ti DIRECTCU II @ 930Hz
 
If you want high performance in Photoshop, you need 1) Use a fast enough processor, and you don't. check the link for FX4100 review, even G860 is better than FX4100. 2) Max out on RAM, and you do. 3) Use a fast, large hard disk or SSD, you need the do Scratch Disks or defragmented hard disk( no for SSD), you are ???.

Check the adobe site to see how to optimize performance for Photoshop.

FX4100 review http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-8120-6100-4100.html
 

jarrrp

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Thanks for your reply. I understand that the CPU I originally chose was not ideal. I'm looking at the FX 8150, would that be sufficient? I'm trying to avoid using an SSD, I'd rather get a fast high capacity HDD, would THIS be good enough, or would it still be slow?
 
Yes, FX8150 is much better.

Other is the Cache Levels, set Cache Levels higher than 4. And you can use the raid0 too.

SSD allows Photoshop to launch fast. So you can get 8150 and use raid0 to get better performance.
 

jarrrp

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Thanks again for your help. This has definitely allowed me to set out my upgrade plan to get my computer to its best early next year. I'll have to brush up on my RAID terminology as I have yet to encounter "RAID". Thanks again!