Using SSD Drives

I use a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB hard drive with Windows 10 and it is definitely a lot faster to boot to the system and working with programs like Photoshop etc than my old hard drive, whether windows 10 has helped on that as well, I do not know.
I use my old hard drive plus one other as extra internal drives for photos etc so as to keep the SSD for use with windows and programs. The Samsung drive comes with its own optimisation program to keep the hard drive configured and in top condition for use. Life-wise they are reckoned to last a lot longer than conventional drives as there are no moving parts (platters etc) but it appears only time will tell on that issue.
Having mine in use for a few months with no issues and the speed increase all round, I would advise anyone to get one if they are looking to change hard drives. They are still a bit pricey for the larger hard drives but as you say they are coming down in price slowly but surely. I think the extra price on top of a conventional hard drive is worth it. It was in my case anyway.

I fairly recently went from HDDs to all SSDs.

My old machine had a 64GB SSD (60GB usable) but an old model which was fast compared to a hard disk but slow compared to modern SSDs. I used it as a boot drive and stored Photoshop and Lightroom on it. Any photographs were stored on a RAID0 array with 2x100GB 2.5" 7200rpm HDDs. This was horribly slow to load even pre-rendered images.

I did a side-grade on my PC changing to a similar power processor but with a higher bus and therefore RAM speed and SATA-III connections on the motherboard. I then went from 60GBs of SSD space to 1.2TB. I now have no slow downs at all and loading times are very small.

I chose SSDs that have a performance profile designed for long sustained loads without slowing down. Some will rapidly deteriorate after just 10 minutes of usage and their I/O rate will drop to a fraction of the advertised rate. The IOPS on most drives will drop from 80-100kiops to about 7kiops (Samsung 850s included). The ones I chose remain at 20kiops even under long sustained loads. Similar thing happens to response times, going from 3ms to 20-60ms depending on the drive where as the ones I looked at remain below 14ms.

It may not seem like much but if you are working for 4 hours or longer on mand GB of photos then it will make a difference. If you only work about 1hr at a time on fewer files then you won't notice as big a difference between drives.

There is nothing special in terms of market segment or price of the drives I chose. They were the cheapest per GB that I'd ever seen an SSD, which is why I got 3 of them and a low end model to boot. But they are consistently well performing even though their peak numbers are lower than other drives. I'd definitely recommend the OCZ ARC-100 drives (not the Triton drives, they are sadly very slow and the same price per GB as the ARCs).

I've reduced their capacity to 400GB on each as they have 447GB usable space. Some of the 480GB that isn't usable is already set up for improving performance and longevity but I added 47GB on each drive to this 'over-provisioning' to extend the lifespan and improve performance further. 10% makes a difference but 25% is best for performance. I can't quite afford to give up 25% of each drive though as I need the space.

SSD's are great. Single biggest performance gain you can get for the money.
Won't help with number crunching ability, but everything starts much quicker and feels much nicer to use.
One for the OS, one for the data.

SSD is definitely the way to go, though be sure to back up any essential data (the images themselves, Lightroom's catalogues, etc.), to something other than SSD. For all their faults, it's often possible to rescue data from a failing mechanical drive, whereas if your SSD dies, everything on it is likely gone forever.

Intel CPU's perform much better than AMD on Lightroom and Photoshop. It would be a much bigger boost than more RAM...

http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/6094/15/amd-vs-intel-57-processor-megatest-bench...

I've got an SSD, but I'm happy with a 2.5" 1gb 7200rpm Hitachi as the main drive almost as fast.

Some people have reported a massive increase in their PU posts after switching to SSD

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Problem with SSDs is that once you start with one, then you want two. Its like LBA for flash drives
Nippy though but always have a backup setup - I run 4 * SSDs in RAID 0, daily backup to 4 * 2TBs Mechanical in RAID 5 and then once a week I do an external backup as well. Pure paranoia but you can never be sure.




The new M.2 devices are exceptionally nippy, have a browse for Samsung 950 PRO , if you have or are thinking of upgrading your CPU / Motherboard, check to see if it supports M.2