SSD (solid state drives) for scratch drives?

[signs2trade]

has any one ever used SSD's for scratch drives. SSd's are hard drives that use MVRAM for storage instead of magnetic spinning platters. Access times are anywhere from 20x to 80x faster than the fastest hard disk drives and have sustainted write rates of 300MB/sec for some models.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

Have experimented with this... was not cost effective. A RAID array of 10k or 15 drives was nearly as effective and cost less.

 

[signs2trade]

Casey,
Which SSD drive did you try? Model,manuf.,size etc.
Thank You

 

[signs2trade]

10,000 RPM drives have avg access times of 3.0ms. SSD drives of average acecss times of .1ms.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

We played around with a couple different manufacturers... Samsung and Sandisk are among them. The fact was that they weren't big enough and we would have to RAID several together to have a large enough scratch disk for even medium size photoshop (wrap) files. It was very problematic at best.

In time, this will change. When I can get my hands on a 300GB-500GB (the size of some of our Photoshop temp files on our scratch disk) SSD drive for a reasonable price, we will look at it again.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

The access time is much lower on the SSD, but read / writes should be faster on the SAS or VelociRaptor RAID setups.

And you have to look at the software you are using... it is able to take advantage of the increased access time.

Like I said, aside from the performance aspects, size (capacity) becomes an issue. It just isn't looking good for SSD scratch disks for large Photshop files right now.