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ender78

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 9, 2005
663
431
I just bought a OCZ Vertex 4 and a Samsung 830 [one for the Mac Pro] and another for a USB 3 enclosure that will be used with my new MacBook air. Is there any real world speed that I would see between SATA II/III when using Lightroom and Photoshop? If so, is there any reason to get a USB3 card for the Mac Pro and just mount the drive in an external enclosure versus on the native bus?
 
Not sure. Case electronics and drivers have a bunch to do with actual speeds you end up with. Be careful in what PCI card and case you buy.
Theoretically a USB 3 external would be faster.
Roughly:
USB 3 = 5000Mb/s
vs.
SATA2 = 3000Mb/s (Mac Pro Internal bus)

Boot off the Samsung 830 on the Mac Pro 3G internal bus (any bay). If you need more speed then I'd actually get an eSATA 6Gb PCI card. Less issues from a driver standpoint. Then mount the SSD in an eSATA enclosure.
 
Hello,

I've done a few tests in Photoshop comparing an Intel G2 (sata2 drive, was plugged on sata3 for best results) and a vertex 4 (using a sata3 PCIe card). As it turns out, loading and saving files in PS is bottlenecked by the CPU more than the drives, and the difference was only significant on huge (many hundreds of MB or a couple of GB) 8 bit files. For 16 bit files, the difference was negligible.

Here are some results:
ssdtest.png


I didn't do the 1.75GB 16 bit file because I just got bored after 5 minutes of waiting on the Intel drive... :)

All in all, I wouldn't expect a big difference for PS unless you work on huge files very often.

Loa
 
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