Graphics Card

Hi Lu,

I would throw in more memory and forget about a scratch disk altogether. Adobe Memory

Scratch disks only come into play when Photoshop does not have access to enough memory to complete a process.

However, if you really do want to get a small SSD, using it for that purpose should not really effect its lifespan more than usual. Each memory cell in a SSD should be good for 8,000 refreshes. Pick up a 50GB or 60GB model, format it into 25GB or 30GB and let the drive controller handle the memory cells in use, it will map them the cells in and out according to its algorithms for lifespan and speed.

Some info on Trim, Garbage Collection, Drive Provisioning

8,000 refreshes doesn't seem very many to me. Is an SSD not very permanent?

They have a higher failure rate than normal hard drives, but then their use is difference to normal hard drives in that they are not used for long term storage of critical data, hence being used as boot disks.

In reality John, it's permanent enough. Imagine you bought a 60GB ssd and all at once filled it completely. Now wipe it. Do that 8000 times! Vast majority of ssds sell with more installed memory than advertised, I.e a 60GB will have 64GB or with cheaper drives they format down to lower, a 60GB becomes 50GB,this is to allow the controller chip to level wear rates on the memory cells.
Speed wise, a set of ssds is the biggest improvement you can make to any pc with a reasonably newish spec.

To be honest its been such a long time since i built my own system i prefer to buy of the shelf with the benefit of good technical support.

I have had components fail in the past and having to return a motherboard under RMA to ebuyer is not a good experience compared to sending in a complete unit to Dell or Toshiba etc, both i have had to use and both where collected repaired and returned in less than a week with the minimum off fuss.

Do you really save that much building your own system compared to buying off the shelf? Even the cost of buying windows makes it so uneconomical.

As a caveat, I don't use either Windows or Photoshop any more but:

In general I think wear is pretty much a non issue on any current generation SSD especially if you adopt a conservative approach and leave a bit of spare space on it. Personally I like to keep at least 20% free but with modern wear levelling algorythms on the SSDs I'm not sure I could justify that. In summary you are likely to replace your old obsolete SSD with a newer bigger shinier faster and cheaper one long before it wears out

My view of the best way to build a machine is to just put an SSD in it (no hard drives at all) for the o/s, programs,page/swap files and application work areas, in this case photoshop scratch disk. All data would go onto something like an external raid disk array.

Even better, particularly if you don't back up your PC, might be to put o/s and programs on one SSD and page file and photoshop scratch disk on a second, but I'm not sure if that is really worth the extra complexity on a desktop PC.

8,000 doesn't sound much when you compare it with
100,000 for a DVD-RAM Disk

Pretty sure it's much higher than 8000x
The NAND Flash chips usually have a 100,000 endurance. If the SSD does static-file wear levelling then it might be half that.
(I've worked with NAND flash at the chip level for over 12 years)

More than enough
Matt

Depends on the flash used I think. Most of us will be using the cheaper stuff instead of the nice longer lasting enterprise class stuff
Anantech has a good synopsis. There was a lot of noise a couple of years ago when the manufacturing of flash dropped in size from 32nm to 28mn and with it a drop in lifespan. Most of us won't actually get to wear out an SSD, they actually die of other causes before that , I speak from experience, in the last 6 months I've had to RMA 3 ssd drives , which is a complete PITA if you have 4 in RAID 0, I've become quite adept at backup, recovery and restoration live by the sword...

In my laptop i have an ssd as the boot drive and a second internal hdd which i use for photoshop and lightroom scratch disks etc.

I dont think its too much of a struggle to put both in a desktop, i think its generally recommended to use a secondary drive formfile storage.

Cheer's for the advice robbiec and all the others who are sharing their knowledge. More food for thought.

cabstar you are right and you are wrong. Depending on your approach you can save hundreds of £s on an off the shelf unit by buying bargain basement parts and assembling them yourself, or you can spend a bit more money by purchasing the latest top quality components. Of course if things go wrong you have no support but my personal experience is that machines usually only breakdown once the warranty has run out anyway (I feel that very few things are built to last in this day and age).

robbiec what make were those SSD's that went belly up on you? I'll try to avoid them when the time to buy comes.

Going back to FAT8BIKER's original question, I found this the other day. link I realise you're running Elements but I thought this info might be useful for CS users.

OCZ Technology.
To be fair though, I had a failure last year and the RMA took 5 weeks, the most recent one took 2 weeks. Practice makes perfect!
I'm moving to Samsung's now.

In my experience most components faults are at delivery causing unnecasary time and effort in diagnosing the fault and then waiting for an RMA from component stores like ebuyer or Aria etc which can take a long period of time to rectify as they test the faulty parts. There is also the time waiting in for couriers to collect and deliver your faulty parts and replacement which all add to the down time. I have been building PC's since 1993 so do have some experience in this area.

When building a system the cost does not just include the initial purchase but also the cost of support and also cost of getting a copy of windows and the cost of down time. I used to regularly build my own systems and found it was a false economy when things do go wrong, which they most likely do. Most computers do last a long time but do become obsolete due to software advancements. I change my laptop every two years now, not to keep up with technology but to keep a good support back up, which is more important to me than saving what will most likely be a couple of hundred pounds tops and the effort involved of building my own system. A laptop also has a better resale value than a desktop, reducing the computer costs further.

cabstar you're absolutely right on all of the above. I've got bits and pieces that i've been accumulating for over a year now with the intention of building a machine to run Lightroom. I have no idea if any of the parts will work when I try to put them all together. If any of these components are faulty I doubt I'll get any joy out of any of the e-vendors if I try to send them back. It makes sense to keep renewing your equipment and maintaining a support contract if your kit is critical to your livelihood and wellbeing. Down time is dead time as they say, or is it chill time.

OCZ hey, I think i'll go Samsung too. What do you think of 830's robbiec?

If you can find 830s at a good price go for them. The 840 Basic is a bit slower in larger file writes but quicker in smaller file writes and the 840 Pro just blows both away but costs 25% more.
You pays your money and take your choice.
Personally I ordered 2 128GB 840 Pros for my own machine if that helps.