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Mercury Extreme Pro 3G and Photoshop on Windows
Related: Other World Computing, Photoshop, SSD, storage
Note thatRAID-0 striping was not used here, just individual drives.
Two weeks ago I bought two OWC 100GB Mercury Extreme SSDs to use in my desktop computer. I benchmarked them with your Photoshop actions. Asus X58 motherboard with Intel i7 920, 12 GB RAM at 1066 mhz running Windows Vista 64 bit and Photoshop CS4.
First I used 2 WD Black Caviar 500 GB drives (one with Windows + pagefile, the other with the Photoshop scratch). After that I swapped the hard drives for two OWC SSD 100GB drives (one with Windows + pagefile, the other with the Photoshop scratch) CS4-32bit.
Pretty impressive, except that when you compare it to a similar Apple system. The Windows environment brings a large overhead burden, luckily we have Photoshop 64 bits to compensate a bit. I also have 2 PCI Express video cards (dual monitor) which could slow down the system a little.
You can’t lose: the SSD solution provides a huge performance gain with Photoshop. Perhaps installing 16/24/32GB memory would be helpful as well, but it does show the power of SSDs, and SSDs benefit any program that accesses the disk. It’s also suggestive that a 64-bit Photoshop CS5 potentially offers a large performance boost.
With diglloydMedium, we see a 63% drop in processing time in 32-bit Photoshop, and a 46% drop in 64-bit Photoshop. Wow!
Photoshop CS4 32-bit | Photoshop CS4 64-bit | |
---|---|---|
2 X WD Black | 240 | 80 |
2 X OWC SSD | 88 | 43 |
With diglloydHuge, we see a 65% drop in processing time in 32-bit Photoshop, and a 60% drop in 64-bit Photoshop. Double wow!
Photoshop CS4 32-bit | Photoshop CS4 64-bit | |
---|---|---|
2 X WD Black | 3440 | 2110 |
2 X OWC SSD | 1180 | 843 |