SSD Benefit In Digital Photo Professional?

[idata]

Greetings Intel forumers,

I had a quick question regarding looking into the X25-M G2 160GB Drive. Although many sites give excellent benchmarks on how great these drives appear, none have really gone into detail regarding specific photo-editing tasks outside of Photoshop.

For anyone that uses and exports from Canon's Digital Photo Professional, I was really wondering how much faster the SSD would be in exporting say, Jpegs from the orginal RAW files from a Canon 5D Mark II.

A typical client of mine generates a data folder of 60-70+ GB and to handle the proofing exports with my current 1TB Western Digital drive (presuming 7,200RPM), it can take almost a day.

I am wondering if I took a batch of the photos and copied them to the SSD, would exporting them go any faster? I know it would be writing to the disk a lot but I figure I could copy batches to and from the SSD to go through a client's set of photos rapidly - well, hopefully more rapidly than letting the HDD grind all night / day.

Thanks for the input.

[idata]

Hi Real-Link,

I'm almost there---I finally got all the parts for the build, (my graphics card didn't arrive until last Monday) and now just slowly getting it all together between work and all the family holiday stuff. My HDD configuration is a 160gb Intel X25-M, 2 500gb Samsung F3 in RAID 0, and 1 1Tb Samsung F3....So I'll be able to do some nice comparisons between solid state and raid 0, and solid state and a single disk.

I will get back to you soon. Until then, Happy Holidays!

Best,

David

[idata]

Hey David,

Not a problem man! I certainly wasn't anticipating a fully blown observation with the holidays right around the corner. Looks like you got quite the present though . It's all good. I'll just wait until you've had time to get it all set up. Thanks again for the quick reply.

[idata]

Davem,

You know, I think I'm finally breaking down and grabbing myself one of the 160 GB babies... I have a drive here with Windows 7 64-bit ready to be imaged over as soon as everything comes. Despite all this talk of optimizing the drives leaving me still somewhat confused (though I understand the basics well), I think it'll leave me with a very easy way to truly test the performance.

Hey worst case is I can sell the drive but honestly, I'm guessing I'm probably going to like it enough to not want to do that.

[idata]

Interesting thread...

I work on simmilar setup to be ready from January. Decided to order dual CPU (2x Xeon 4 core) from HP (Z600) with SSD as boot disk for Windows 7 Ultimate (64), additional drive is Velociraptor 300 and data storage is two 2TB WD drives in RAID. Right now running only one CPU as second is not delivered from HP yet. Anyway, I purchased Monster 256GB from Photofast (this is not fastest SSD on the market but had good price/performance ratio). Using on board integrated Intel controller (6x SATA) with bios supported RAID. Many problems really. First is, that I had to use ACHI&RAID settings in bios to allow stripping data drives in RAID. So even my SSD is controlled by RAID driver and not in IDE mode. I tried to find out, what is faster and some people say that IDE, some say that with NCQ support in ACHI is better second option. I sticked with Windows Index for disk performance just 5.9 what is equal to my Raptor as boot device. Speed in Crystal Disk Mark is around 190/100, what is OK. But Windows recognise my SSD as disk and not as SSD - at least I had chache on etc.

Now I tried to install new Intel Rapid Storage 9.5.4.1001 and performance is just the same, no change at all. Index in Windows experience 5.9. In the Intel Rapid control panel is strange that my SSD has in details "not system drive" even when it is my boot system drive and "data cache is on" while is off in device manager in disk properties..

Anyway, Rapid works but for me same way as with original Intel Storage manager or even as with basic MS drivers.

I tried to use additional host adapter (Adaptec 2405) with SAS-4x SATA cable, what is not easy to get over here, but it does not boot at all. I see drive in DOS listed but it does not even try to boot from it..

[idata]

Hi Davem and all,

Finally got my Intel 160GB SSD in yesterday and just started messing around. Base firmware was 02C5 I think and I updated it to the current 02HD without any issue at all. The CD gave me three errors when reading sectors but after that it just continued to the FreeDOS and patched everything successfully. I'm also guessing it didn't at first like my installing Windows 7 on it because I had it on SATA Port # 5 on my system. I changed it to Port # 4 and then bam, smooth as silk!

Anyway while I'm learning about using the SSD toolbox and getting it all good to go here, I tried this Crystal Disk HDD tool that everyone else's posted about. Numbers seem great to me. From a base install with the old firmware and the drive fresh from box, it only really took maybe 15 min at most to install Windows 7 - very fast. Aftwards once I know it worked, I just cloned my 150GB Raptor installation (about 110GB used only), onto the SSD's profile and it transferred / booted totally fine without any issues whatsoever. Yay.

Now that the basic issues are out of the way on this thing, I'll gladly re-run the photo benchmarks for you. Here's hoping they do what I'm thinking they'll do... But first, the Crystal Disk HDD test is below.

Edit** Ran the Intel SSD Toolbox to optimize the drive and after an hour or so it finally finished. Re ran the above tests and numbers are about the same with a range of +/-5-10MB or so on each field at random. Basically it's showing me that the drive is working great.

Oh and TRIM seems to be working just as expected too. I created about 70MB of photos... Drive went from 42.7GB free to 42.6GB. Deleted the folder and the space went back up like any normal HDD. Awesome!