Mercury Extreme Pro 3G and Photoshop on Windows

2010-02-10 updated 2010-04-16 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: Other World Computing, Photoshop, SSD, storage

I don’t do Windows, and I cannot vouch for these figures reported by Gunther Van Ruysevelt, but they show that the OWC Mercury Extreme offers a huge performance boost for Photoshop on Windows also.

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!

With diglloydHuge, we see a 65% drop in processing time in 32-bit Photoshop, and a 60% drop in 64-bit Photoshop. Double wow!