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Comparing SSD's

Yeah, thanks. That's the reason I got 8. Looking at usage its about 4.5GB with Chrome and a few other programs up. I might check how much Photshop takes up soon too.

I was just interested in why NYC got 16 as I knew he would've had a good reason to. :-P

Edit:
1. I've seen the phrase "scratch drive" a few times... what does that actually mean?
2. Is there a way to get dropbox to run off Windows on my SSD, but syncing files from the HDD to the cloud?
3. Is it better to move my photos/videos onto my SSD? Or will it be better to keep it on the HDD?
 
A scratch drive is a drive set up for programs to do their actual work on. In Photoshop the processing will occur on the scratch drive and physical RAM if you are set up that way, otherwise it will use the physical RAM and whatever available disk resources it needs to perform it's functions.

2 & 3 can be answered in one, keep just the OS and crucial programs (any that require being located on the same drive as the OS) on the SSD. All data and other programs, Dropbox included, should be loaded on a separate drive. You can even go so far as to have a drive for data and one for programs like I do at home, for programs I use a 300GB Raptor and a 1TB Cavier Black for Data.
 
For the Dropbox, when you install the program just point to the drive you wish to install to. The simplest way is change the drive letter when it asks where you want to install (if it will let you, you may have to browse to the location), it will create all the proper files for you. Syncing files is done by selecting what you want to sync within Dropbox, instructions can be found in Dropbox Help.

You should also change the target location for My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, My Videos, Downloads, basically everything in your user folder to your data drive. Open your User folder and go into your file, right click the files there and anything with a Location tab should be moved to your data drive. There are better ways to do this but they all require editing your registry so I would not recommend it for the casual user.

For a scratch drive just install the drive and format it. To do this go to Control Panel, Administrative Services, Computer Management then a new window will pop up, click Disk Management and you can set the drive up from there.

Once that is done go into Photoshop click Edit, Preferences, Performance, a new window will open and there you can select the location of your scratch disk. Notice it is your C drive by default, which you don't want with an SSD. You can use an SSD for speed as a scratch disk but they don't like heavy write cycles so be prepared to replace it eventually if you do a lot of editing.

This applies to the full versions of Photoshop, not sure about Photoshop Elements.
 
Alright cheers!

How much of a difference would making the scratch drives make compared to just running Photshop off the ssd?
 
I would highly suggest it since you are running multiple read/write cycles performing the operations and you don't want to kill your OS disk. You can use a regular disk for the scratch disk also, just make sure you use at least 100GB.
 
Does that mean it'll load off the ssd but use the reads and writes from the HDD?

(This is what you recommend doing yeah? )

Also, when you said
You should also change the target location for My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, My Videos, Downloads, basically everything in your user folder to your data drive. Open your User folder and go into your file, right click the files there and anything with a Location tab should be moved to your data drive.
Click to expand...

Is there a particular reason why I shouldnt have stuff like that on my SSD?
 
Mehta23 said:
Is there a particular reason why I shouldnt have stuff like that on my SSD?
Click to expand...

You paid a premium price for your SSD compared to your traditional hard drive, so the general idea is that you only put stuff on the SSD that will benefit from the extra performance. Music, movies, pictures that you're not Photoshopping, Word documents, and the like don't really have a speed benefit that justifies their presence on an SSD.

I will say that, in my experience with an application drive and a data drive on Windows XP (I haven't tried that approach in Windows 7), you have to be very diligent to make sure things end up in the proper place. Most users let crap pile up wherever it falls, and usually the defaults that Windows uses aren't right. Moving your profile locations helps, but even that has some problems. I've cursed Microsoft many times for not having an easy way to move a user's home directory to a different volume, or to even to create a new user's home directory on a non-system volume.
 
Actually, you make a really good point. I am that person.

I would say that I want the pictures and videos on the SSD, but it's not exactly necessary, just wanted quick browsing through them for when I (ever get round to ) edit them.

And I've also realised I have more than 100GB of pictures/videos. They're going on the HDD :P

Do I actually need to move the stuff in my user folder, or would saving files onto the HDD be good enough? It doesn't look like I have all too much, just some game files and my downloads.
 
Mehta23 said:
Yeah, thanks. That's the reason I got 8. Looking at usage its about 4.5GB with Chrome and a few other programs up. I might check how much Photshop takes up soon too.

I was just interested in why NYC got 16 as I knew he would've had a good reason to. :-P

Edit:
1. I've seen the phrase "scratch drive" a few times... what does that actually mean?
2. Is there a way to get dropbox to run off Windows on my SSD, but syncing files from the HDD to the cloud?
3. Is it better to move my photos/videos onto my SSD? Or will it be better to keep it on the HDD?
Click to expand...

Truthfully, I do not need 16GB. However, I could not pass up the sweetest deal I would ever see on Amazon. Same exact pair I already had for $12 USD. You don't pass that up.
 
Mehta23 said:
Actually, you make a really good point. I am that person.

I would say that I want the pictures and videos on the SSD, but it's not exactly necessary, just wanted quick browsing through them for when I (ever get round to ) edit them.

And I've also realised I have more than 100GB of pictures/videos. They're going on the HDD :P

Do I actually need to move the stuff in my user folder, or would saving files onto the HDD be good enough? It doesn't look like I have all too much, just some game files and my downloads.
Click to expand...

Convenience is certainly a factor to consider, though with over 100 GB of media I personally would not be willing to put that on an SSD smaller than 256GB. I do not like having things helter skelter on my drives, so I would try to move whatever I could into my user directory. It makes backups easier.

My main desktop is a Linux machine with a 128GB SSD system drive and a 1TB regular hard drive (HDD) for movies and music. When I encode movies I do it all on the regular hard drive. I just don't think the speed benefit from encoding on the SSD is more than the time it would take to copy the thing to and from the SSD. I don't know this for sure; I haven't tried encoding at all on the SSD. My compromise with Linux is that I have my regular profile on my SSD at /home/(username), and then I create a similar structure on the HDD at /mnt/hdd/home/(username) where my music and movies live. Then I have simlinks where I need them. It's not perfect, but it works out OK for me. I have some SSD space to work on my hobby code projects, and if I need bulk space I have that available as well.

My old computer runs XP, and while it doesn't have an SSD, I applied the same principles via RAID. I have a 4x250GB RAID 0 system drive, and a 2x250GB RAID 1 drive for movies and media. I was mostly able to beat Windows into submission (for starters, XP doesn't do RAID 1 until you get into server editions; you have to hack its RAID drivers to enable that, and every time you get a service pack you get to do it again), but every now and then something grinds my gears. I can't be really specific because I don't use it much anymore except to play games of yore; it's been about 6 years since I've done meaningful work on it. I hacked the registry to move my Windows profile to the RAID1 volume, and just about everything respects it. My iTunes, saved games, default Office document storage all goes on the RAID 1 where I want it, inside my Windows My Documents folder.
 
NYCHitman1 said:
Truthfully, I do not need 16GB. However, I could not pass up the sweetest deal I would ever see on Amazon. Same exact pair I already had for $12 USD. You don't pass that up.
Click to expand...
Yup! If you don't need it now, you're sure to need it one day. So if you can get the RAM cheap today, why not?
 
Mehta23 said:
Does that mean it'll load off the ssd but use the reads and writes from the HDD?

(This is what you recommend doing yeah? )

Also, when you said

Is there a particular reason why I shouldnt have stuff like that on my SSD?
Click to expand...

Yes.

You have a limited amount of storage on your SSD and as said previously you only want things that will benefit from the speed increase which data storage will not.


Mehta23 said:
Actually, you make a really good point. I am that person.

I would say that I want the pictures and videos on the SSD, but it's not exactly necessary, just wanted quick browsing through them for when I (ever get round to ) edit them.

And I've also realised I have more than 100GB of pictures/videos. They're going on the HDD :P

Do I actually need to move the stuff in my user folder, or would saving files onto the HDD be good enough? It doesn't look like I have all too much, just some game files and my downloads.
Click to expand...

Your picture browsing will be plenty fast running from a data drive, you will likely not notice a difference if you use a good 7200rpm 64mb buffer drive or a Raptor:D (pricey but worth it). And the higher the drive capacity the faster the response will be due to increased headroom.

It is a good idea to keep all the folders that can be moved from your users folder on the same drive so yes, move them all to the data drive.

Mehta23 said:
I was following this guide to move my user folder to the HDD Sean's Windows 7 Install & Optimization Guide for SSDs & HDDs

But after I moved the My Documents folder, it's still here on the SSD's user folder. Is that safe to delete now?
Is there a way to set it so that the user folder on the HDD shows up without having to go to F\users\my documents etc?
Click to expand...

According to the guide you used you can delete it, it doesn't hurt anything to have it there so you could leave it.

It should automatically go to the folder on your F drive, you should be able to open the start menu, click my documents and go right to the folder. Likewise if you go to save a file it should go to my documents on F.
 
Yeah, now when i click on the downloads folder, it redirects me to F:/ Downloads. I'll be doing the rest soon and then deleting the copies on the ssd :-D

Also, I still have the system partition from windows from the HDD. when im done with that copy of windows, how would I delete it?
 
Mehta23 said:
Yeah, now when i click on the downloads folder, it redirects me to F:/ Downloads. I'll be doing the rest soon and then deleting the copies on the ssd :-D

Also, I still have the system partition from windows from the HDD. when im done with that copy of windows, how would I delete it?
Click to expand...

Should have reformatted the HDD prior to moving stuff to it, imo.
 
NYCHitman1 said:
Should have reformatted the HDD prior to moving stuff to it, imo.
Click to expand...

This.

I've tried taking ownership and playing with permissions till I'm blue in the face. It won't let me just delete all the os folders I don't need off my F drive.

Haven't had the time to pull the stuff I do want to my external and format.

Plus I have tons of stuff installed on F that run perfectly. Don't wanna re do all of that
 
NightAngel79 said:
This.

I've tried taking ownership and playing with permissions till I'm blue in the face. It won't let me just delete all the os folders I don't need off my F drive.

Haven't had the time to pull the stuff I do want to my external and format.

Plus I have tons of stuff installed on F that run perfectly. Don't wanna re do all of that
Click to expand...

I knew that I was going to start from scratch, so what I did was backup all of my documents and etc onto my external, then went into diskpart and did the dirty deed. All quiet on the western front afterward.
 
Yeah, but I don't have an external drive yet, and I have hundreds of gigabytes of files on it that still work perfectly. :-P
 
Mehta23 said:
Yeah, now when i click on the downloads folder, it redirects me to F:/ Downloads. I'll be doing the rest soon and then deleting the copies on the ssd :-D

Also, I still have the system partition from windows from the HDD. when im done with that copy of windows, how would I delete it?
Click to expand...

You should have definitely wiped the F drive first. I understand the limitations you are working with so what I would suggest is as soon as you can (borrow if you have to) copy all of your data over to an external, restore the folders to the SSD and remove any programs you have loaded then reformat the drive, reinstall and go through the whole process over again. I know that is going to suck but having an OS installed on the F drive can actually cause problems with your OS on the SSD. Sometimes you can get away with it (I have before) but it can make things go real wonky also.
 
It's the best way. As Night Angel said, permissions can become a problem since you will have to force ownership which doesn't always work to be able to delete the files.
 
:(

That's nearly 500GB ill have to move there and back. I'll be able to start this when i get a backup drive sorted out.
 
Just to be clear, scratch disks do not actually mean you should scratch the drive with your fingernail!


/found that out the hard way!












/kidding
//mostly!
 
Mehta23 said:
:(

That's nearly 500GB ill have to move there and back. I'll be able to start this when i get a backup drive sorted out.
Click to expand...

Just use the Windows Easy Transfer. You can literally select the things you want moved. For the simpler things, just manually re-install afterward. Just get an external HDD to have the file created pointed there.
 
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