RAM Disk vs SSD vs Hard Disk – The Photoshop Test
A few weeks ago I posted the Macintosh version of ‘rdmanage’, my super-simple Unix RAM disk creation tool, as well as stacking the volatile disks up against fixed hard drives in a Linux I/O benchmark shootout. One thing which has always bothered me about synthetic benchmarking, however, is how far removed it is from most real-life computing contexts.
In order to realistically demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the three main types of disk – RAM drive, hard drive and solid state – I’ve prepared a short video of a basic Photoshop loading test, embedded after the break.
I’m a huge fan of solid state disks (the X25-M is one of my all time favourite pieces of computer hardware), but due to their high price and limited capacity they aren’t a complete no-brainer just yet. Using something like ‘rdmanage’ to easily create RAM disks, users of machines with hard disk drives can get a serious boost in application load time (as demonstrated in this Photoshop loading test) without having to spend a dime extra on hardware. The SSD is still the winner in my book, but if you can spare a couple of hundred meg of RAM you can get some of the perks with zero additional cost.
