I'm looking to work on some really big photos soon and might be in the need of a fast drive for my Boot OS + Windows Virtual Memory + Photoshop Scratch disk use.
I've upgraded to Win 7 64-bit and will be upgrading to 6GB RAM as well (from 4GB). My current HDD is a 2 year old Maxtor 500GB (equiv to Seagate 7200.10).
What is the fastest HDD/SSD that can I get for around Rs.3000?
- Space is not a concern
- Speed at reasonable price is the target
- Should I just buy a 7200.12 500GB 2nd hand on the Market here?
what type of work are you planning to do? just cropping and colour touching of raw and jpeg files?
will you be applying a lot of filter effects to a file?
then any normal hdd should do. also photoshop cs4 (if you are using that) has gpu acceleration in it (nvidia cards)
i work on cs2. since you are going to get 6gb ram, you can safely allocate 3-4gb to photoshop and also in preferences give photoshop a seperate (20-50gb) free volume as primary scratch partition. this is sure to speed things up a lot.
if money was not a concern i would have told you to get the cheapest mac available. all the macs i used opened photoshop in 2-3 seconds and even a 300mb photoshop file always opened in a second.
edit: seems even cs2 has that gpu settings option. lol.
@6pack: This is broadly what I'm likely to be doing
- Editing of 24MP RAW files - each one around 40MB in size at the beginning
- No filters, but definitely 3-4 adjustment layers and masks per file
- On top of that, I like to work on 8-10 files at once or run batch operations regularly
- I need CS4 (64-bit) to be able to open these files quickly and not run of steam
- I'll try out what you said, sure looks tempting
@Sabby That's outta my budget. I'm already spending tons on new camera system and I'd have to save somewhere!
SSDs are out of question, at least for that budget - perhaps by 2012 3k should fetch us a superfast SSD!
The fastest drive 3k could fetch you would be the WD 640 AAKS - actually a bit more than 3k. This drive is considerably faster than most 500GB drives available in the Indian market as of now. The WD5001AALS (posted above) is faster than this drive but not available anywhere in India ATM. Sourcing it from KMD is the best option if you could wait but IMO paying 4.5k for that drive isn't justified.
