building a photoshop computer

Today I saw a 128 gb ssd going for $99.00 usd with free shipping, do the 128 the same as the OS ssd and heck later you can run them in raid if you want or as the prices fall throw one in your lappy.

You can always partition a larger drive so the space doesn't go to waste. ie 40Gb for scratch, the rest for apps etc

Another option would be to see how Photoshop goes without a scratch disc. If your wife then discovers her work often exceeds the Ram limit, buy the disc then. With 16GB or 32GB and semi-pro/casual work she might just be able to live with a few extra seconds of processing.


I haven't had PS installed for a while, so I honestly can't recall how often the scratch disc would be used.

jonass21 said:

linnemeyerhere said:

Today I saw a 128 gb ssd going for $99.00 usd with free shipping, do the 128 the same as the OS ssd and heck later you can run them in raid if you want or as the prices fall throw one in your lappy.

Yeah it would only save me around 30 bucks to get the 60gb ssd instead of the 120gb ssd, but I just feel like that large of a SSD for a scratch disc wouldn't necessary for a casual user. Correct me if I am wrong

Your correct and you can find a 60-64gb SSD for chump change most likely. I was just thinking about recycle re-use as for me a 128gb is the new 64 of just a couple of years ago and in fact for me a 256 is the new 128 but there still real money but keep on falling. Can't wait for us to be talking about our 1TB raid SSD set up's in a couple of years.

jonass21 said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

jonass21 said:

From what I read it speeds up photoshop for when you use up all your available ram, it only needs to throw info into it occasionally and if something else is using that drive it can cause a bottleneck, seems like if you are doing real intense graphics creation and multiple layers etc. then you could potentially use a ton of excess space, but I didn't think that more than 32gb ram + 60gb ssd was necessary for a hobbyist

Why not just get enough RAM to begin with? If you should need temporary parking space, why not just borrow it from another drive? I do it all the time.

This is just what I've read, I have never personally used photoshop. How much do you ram do you typically use and how intensive is your photoshop work? My wife will likely only use it for basic photo touch ups, not graphic creations, so I was hoping that 32GB of ram would be enough but pretty much everything on the internet says to get a scratch disc.

I actually don't have Photoshop but some scanning operations I do require three temporary folders for the initially scanned images, the color corrected images, and the final PDF made from the color corrected images. I'm not sure what a scratch disk is. If it's used for a temporary parking place for images in progress, I would think a folder or few on the data HDD would do the job. If more speed is needed, you could get a larger SSD, such as 256 GB, and either have scratch folders on it or make two partitions, one for the OS and the other for a scratch disk. If a scratch disk is to extend your RAM, it would make more sense to just put more RAM into the machine. Most MOBOs will support 32GB of RAM if used with Win 7 Pro or Ultimate (Home Premium supports up to 16GB RAM). The MOBO in my machine supports up to an insane 64GB RAM; I kept it "conservative" at 32GB.

Edit: Curiosity got the better of me and I looked up scratch disk. It's basically space on a drive that is reserved for virtually memory: overflow for when the demands on RAM exceeds it capacity. Here is a link that gives a good explanation on what a scratch disk is and what is needed.

The one big problem I have notice with people that have bought a SSD is they got one to small.
Put as much SSD in your computer as you can afford.

I cheap'd out back in the day when that first 64 was like $250.00 but with 128's going for 90 or less heck I picked up an OCZ 120gb for $49.00....just crazy and since I've settled on a 256 for my lappy and another for the monster desktop