Performance when working with large images in Photoshop

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I'm looking for a bit of advice on improving the performance of my computer when working with large images in Photoshop. For example, trying to stitch a panorama from 12 or so images takes over 15 minutes. Looking at the resource monitor during the operation shows the 12Gb of RAM being quickly consumed and then lots of reading and writing from pagefile.sys and the Photoshop scratch folder, both of which are currently on my boot ssd which is about 85-90% full.

I'm thinking more RAM would be nice, but I'll wind up hitting the page file no matter how much I add. So, I'm consisting getting a new ssd. I'm trying to decide if it would be worth it to get 2 small ssds, one for the page file and one for the Photoshop scratch disk. Or, if that money world be better spent on one big drive to upgrade the size of my boot drive so it's not so close to being full. Then I would use the old boot drive as the scratch disk for Photoshop.

Basically, would having the extra disk for the page file help enough to be noticeable? I'm also open to other suggestions. Thanks.

Dominic P

Posted 2013-11-27T07:21:11.797

Reputation: 391

Answers

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When looking for SSD drives and how many etc. ... ask yourself how many MB/sec will you be writing? If Photoshop will be writing say 200MB to its scratch file, and the OS is writing the same amount then you have 400MB and are about to hit the SATA III limit. In that instance two drives would be better.

P.S. A new PC that can support 32GB of RAM are pretty cheap these days ... cheaper than two 512GB SSD drives.

pcunite

Posted 2013-11-27T07:21:11.797

Reputation: 1 126

Thanks for the insightful answer. After looking at the throughput numbers, I think one additional drive should be plenty. I should just need a 120GB drive, so that will probably be cheaper than a RAM upgrade for now. Thanks again. – Dominic P – 2013-11-28T04:35:59.663

Asked: 2013-11-27T07:21:11.797

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Active: 2013-11-27T21:59:38.247