Performance as Photoshop Scratch Drive (diglloydHuge Benchmark)

2017-03-26 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: 2013 Mac Pro, Mac Pro, memory, Other World Computing, PCIe SSD, Photoshop, SSD, storage, Thunderbolt, weather events

OWC Mercury Accelsior Pro Q PCIe SSD

Tested on 2013 Mac Pro 3.3 GHz 8 core with 64GB memory The two Accelsior Pro Q units were in OWC Helios enclosures, each on its own separate Thunderbolt 2 bus (2013 Mac Pro has 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports on 3 busses). This dual setup allows the striped RAID to run at full Thunderbolt 2 bandwidth.

Photoshop users doing large jobs that exceed the memory capacity can benefit from a fast scratch drive.

This real-world test examines the ability of the OWC Mercury Accelsior Pro Q PCIe SSD to compete on performance against the internal 2013 Mac Pro SSD.

Photoshop CC 2017, diglloydHuge benchmark

The diglloyd Huge benchmark uses a mix of the core Photoshop operations with a file size that requires about 56GB of real memory. It puts a premium on the speed of a scratch drive.

A single OWC Mercury Accelsior Pro Q slightly outperforms the internal Mac Pro SSD, which is very impressive! A striped pair of Accelsior Pro Q units cuts the time down further.

The speed gains with the striped pair of Accelsior Pro Q units ought to be greater, but internal inefficiencies in Photoshop squander the benefits*.

Years pass, but Adobe fails to increase the transfer size for its (namely, a maximum transfer size of 1MB).

diglloydHuge Photoshop benchmark
OWC Accelsior Pro Q vs internal SSD of 2013 Mac Pro