Increasing RAM with USB thumb-drive

[glussier]

Then, except for a small ssd, there is no way you will dramatically increase the speed of this computer.

[Rex A. Butcher]

In which case, there is a reasonable chance that it is running as fast as it will go. But it 100 mb image files with five filters probably puts a lot of processing load on the processor.

[Rex A. Butcher]

May be I'm clutching at straws but ......... I don't specifically need a faster computer but it would be nice if the processing of *.tif files wihtin PhotoShop with filters, etc, was faster. If the timed 1m40 secs could be brought down to 1m or 30s. Probably not likely, however.

I was browsing a photo mag today and there was an article about speeding up image processing. One suggestion was to install a small SSD, dedicated as the PhotoShop scratch disk. Does that seem reasonable? I currently have three HDD installed, with the second one having a 12gb first partition as the PS scratch. If I could install a SSD with two partitions, one for PS scratch, the other for XP page file, is that a/ possible and b/ likely to make a significant improvement?

Thanks

Rex

[Train]

Now that should be worth while.

Actually C drive and that would speed things up.

DRAM-based SSD is the faster of the two but NAND is faster than hard drives by a range of 80-87% -- a very narrow range between low-end consumer SSDs and high-end enterprise SSDs. The root of the faster performance lies in how quickly SSDs and HDDs can access and move data: SSDs have no physical tracks or sectors and thus no physical seek limits. The SSD can reach memory addresses much faster than the HDD can move its heads.

Now the final storage, you will want that on a regular hdd.

Worth reading
http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

[glussier]

You can get a 120gB ssd drive for next to nothing now (roughly $60.00). Just install winxp on it and leave the pagefile and Photoshop scratch pace on the same drive. There will be no benefit in partitioning the drive.

And, ssd are as reliable as normal hard-drive. I still have Intel G1 80GB drives still going strong after 5 years of use.

[Train]

240 GB SSD, I paid $80 for it.

[Shinma]

• Gavotte RAMdisk

[Derp]

Your computer will only be as fast as its weakest link. Due to the limitations of your aging computer you won't even get close to full speed out of a new SSD no matter what you do. I build A/V production & gaming computers and have a fairly good working knowledge from 15+ of hands-on experience of what's needed to get the absolute most performance out of hardware. If your time is worth money to you then you're going to have to upgrade to much newer and faster hardware. I have customers that ask for magic solutions to make their old computers do things they weren't designed to do and my answer to them is there is no magic solution, they'll have to upgrade to get their desired results. The Intel i7 4790K & Z97 platform is my current recommendation for budget customers and the 5930K or 5960X & X99 platform for those who can afford them.