Do I need SSD?

[lboquet]

I am shopping for a mid-range workstation to edit photo and run basic Office programs. No gaming. Weight is not an issue. Price range is $1200.

My understanding is that SSDs offer a speed gain at system boot, program load, and any R-W operation.

For my applications, do I really need an SSD since I will :
1. boot only once a day (and I don't care to loose an extra 10 sec.
2. load MS Word, Excell and Photoshop once a day, and again, can loose 10 sec extra each time.
3. mostly save data to a HD anyway since I need capacity (1-2Tb).

Regarding 2. I understand that programs mostly reside on RAM once loaded, so SSD or HD become irrelevant afterward in term of speed. Is that correct (at least for the type of programs I intend to use)?

If I get a machine with 16Gb of DDR4 RAM, Photoshop should have no problem using part of it for swapping files, then again making SSD speed advantage moot?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[bailojustin]

Yes you need to get an SSD, I would especially recommend it for the Photoshop, its way better with a SSD scratch disk, you will wear it out slightly faster due to the writes, but that would be insignificant in comparison to the performance increase.

 

[Scottray]

Buy the SSD. The overall improvement in system usability is worth it. I won't build a PC without a SSD now. I even upgraded my wife's 4 year old work laptop with an SSD and it's like a new PC again.

 

[rkzhao]

No one "needs" an SSD. However, I would highly recommend one (256GB SATA which will run you about $100). An SSD is sort of one of those amenity type of things where no one feels that they need one if they haven't used on much but once you get used to it, you would never want to not have one.

Even if you only have your OS installed on the SSD, just by helping with background system processes, it could help improve the general snappiness feel of the system. There's also page/virtual caching on the storage device which can affect general performance. So Photoshop can certainly benefit from using an SSD. I would say Photoshop would seem more benefits than gaming depending on how complex your image editing projects become.

But at the end of the day, no you don't absolutely "need" one.

 

[lboquet]

Well, thanks to all who chimed in. Very useful comments.
Seems like SSD is recommended regardless of RAM installed which appears to be irrelevant (never mentioned), which is a bit surprising to me. Anyway, I will probably go with a combo of HDD and SSD.
cheers.

 

[USAFRet]

"Need" ? No.
Highly recommended? Yes.

Personally, I wouldn't build a main use PC without one or more.
Except for an old cheesy laptop, and the NAS box, ALL of my house systems are SSD only. No spinning drives at all.

Excel for instance:
Opening a moderately complex Excel workbook from an HDD takes....5 sec.
Opening that exact same workbook that lives on an SSD is open almost before my finger stops moving from the doubleclick.

 

[bailojustin]

Well, thanks to all who chimed in. Very useful comments.
Seems like SSD is recommended regardless of RAM installed which appears to be irrelevant (never mentioned ), which is a bit surprising to me. Anyway, I will probably go with a combo of HDD and SSD.
cheers.

Ram is only as good as your hard drive in situations like photoshop.

The ram is caching information from your program for fast access, if you have a slow HDD then when unused information is cached to your disk, the slower the longer it takes, using up critical resources.

When pulling from the cache, the ram contains most recently used, so if something has been moved from the ram to the disk it will take significatly longer to load from a bad disk in comparison to flash memory