Is running photoshop off an SDHC faster than my 4200 rpm?

Hey,
I was wondering if anyone knew if it would be faster to run Photoshop or Eclipse off an SDHC instead of on my main 4200 RPM hard drive. I'm looking in the Class 6 SDHC range.

Anyone have experience with this?

THanks

 

The best SD cards I've ever seen top out at around 20MB/s, and I'm guessing that you do not have something that high speed. 4200RPM drives start around 20MB/s and get faster.

Seems like 4200RPM would be better.

 

Most likely a 266x (35mb/sec) sd card is faster than a 4200rpm harddrive, but it will run horrible over SDHC, as SDHC can only understand 4 and 8 bit operations, while Photoshop is 32 bit. Your card will also burn out pretty quick, as flash memory has limited write/rewrite cycles.

Your best bet is to get a very dense 5400rpm harddrive or a 7200 rpm drive for your laptop.

K-TRON

 

I'm running 1.8HD so i'm limited to my RPM choices.
Guess I'll just have to go SSD soon then. Was hoping to find a cheap alternative -_-;;

 

putting photoshop aside, do you think it would increase performance of eclipse or flash cs3? or are these too demanding as well?

thanks

 

I don't think moving any of these to SDHC will help anything.

 

I'm curious of this as well since my notebook has a 1.8" HDD. What would the performance difference of an external 5400rpm HDD vs an internal one be?

I know Photoshop wouldn't be the best to run regularly on an ultraportable, but if running occasionally, would an external 5400rpm+ HDD would be the best?

 

Maybe if you connected it via eSATA or Firewire, as USB 2.0 can get up there in transfer speeds as far as burst speeds, but actual sustained data transfer of USB 2.0 is wayyy behind that of the other two options.

 

Contrary to previous posts, you will undoubtedly see a performance increase if you move certain apps to an SD card. Class 6 SDHD guarantees only 6MB/sec read rates, but good ones will top out at 15MB/sec or higher.

Putting those figures aside, your slow loading times are not caused by how fast your HD can transfer data (which will probably be upward of 20MB/sec) but how fast it can seek the data in the first place.

The rotational latency of a 4200RPM drive is awful (it takes a long time to spin the disc around to the point where the data is). Photoshop isn't just one big file that gets loaded. If it were, you would hardly hear your hard drive doing anything when it was loading.

When you load Photoshop (or most other large applications), it will actually load a few hundred or few thousand small files. Jumping from one file to the next is what causes the long loading times.

If you move the installation to an SD card, jumping from one file to the next is many times faster than when using a hard drive.

You will eventually wear out the SD card, but it would take you loading Photoshop 27 times a day, every day for a year to even come close to doing so. By which time, you would either A) be fed up of Photoshop or B) have upgraded the SD card!

 

could you tell us how much faster it is? oh wait, you didn't actually DO IT, you're just making assumptions and talking about it, right?

 

interesting idea re: photoshop.

how about installing it on an SSD via expresscard?

 

No. Having a 4 or 8 bit interface is meaningless to how well Photoshop (or any other application) runs.