I almost got a new laptop this week. Instead I opted for a much cheaper option. I picked up a Samsung 512GB SSD FOR $560

Expensive but not nearly as much as they were a year ago. The capacity on it made it practical too. It came with Norton ghost and a cable to replicate my old drive. What was nice is all of this actually worked right. Everything booted and was exactly as it was on the old drive. Pretty painless!

Did it help? Yep. Even though my computer is only SATAii there is a huge difference in the response running windows 7 and LR4

Did it fix slow LR4? It helped a lot. How much? I will know after this weekends MX races. But old pics seem to render faster.

Hey There Zero

Could you give a few specs of your laptop ? I am also considering either the cheaper SSD upgrade vs the full -on Laptop upgrade ! Reason .. Just to compare specs !

And also ... I see that you didnt come back and give your thoughts on "Did it fix slow LR4" ? If you are able to give your opinion the the matter !

Thanks
Tom

Is it the 830 series?
I just ordered one also, but for my desktop..
I'm hoping it'll help my computer boot/response to programs and files!

Glad to hear the update. And yeah. $560 isn't cheap but it's much cheaper than the alternative, a new laptop.

Looking forward to your findings after this weekend.

Dunno about speeding up LR4.. It's a pure processor PIG more than anything else.

I have SSD's setup in a double stripe (a Stripe on top of a stripe) and I'm getting 400MB+/sec Seq-R/W and LR is still slow. This is on a SATA II system that'd 5+ years old. Processor means a LOT with LR4, Ii've learned that.... Everytime I open LR4 and start working I see if not all 8 cores of my processors jump to 100%...

Originally Posted by TMill2030 Hey There Zero Could you give a few specs of your laptop ? I am also considering either the cheaper SSD upgrade vs the full -on Laptop upgrade ! Reason .. Just to compare specs ! And also ... I see that you didnt come back and give your thoughts on "Did it fix slow LR4" ? If you are able to give your opinion the the matter ! Thanks Tom

Tom here you go

Lenovo X201
Win 7 home
i5 forget which one. It was the top tier one about 2 years ago when I got the laptop.
8gb ram
500 gb HD

The SSD was a HUGE improvement for what we did this weekend. I shot a motocross. The LR catalog built from it was about 5000 pictures. I applied absolutely no presets on import. So minimal rendering was needed to view in the library module. Images loaded very quickly with almost no lag to view the images. This was what I really needed for our workflow. Sorting and keywording was much quicker for my wife and she was able to rip through this catalog with ease. The whole computer is just snappy.

I wonder if because this is my working drive in the computer that this is aiding the speed. Programs and Data on same drive?

The develop module is still a bit slow. I believe it is a marginal improvement over the HD here. But not nearly the improvement seen in the library module. Another area of improvement is battery life. I think I might have gained a few hrs of battery for easy stuff. And probably another hr for heavy use.

I am a happy guy. Like I said it was expensive, but not nearly as pricey as the $3000 I was ready to pull the trigger on for the W530. So that is relative. I would do it again in a heartbeat. I might be able to milk another year out of this system now.

With the work you're doing it's mostly sequential reads and writes which is why you would see such a huge improvement. The latency is also key. As others have said though if you're someone who will work on 1 photo at a time and spends a decent amount of time processing each photo a SSD won't help you much there. It's all RAM and Processor at that point. Batch work and moving files around, loading lots of files at once will rock with a SSD.

I use 2x Samsung 830 128GB drives in RAID0 as my primary OS/Apps drives with a 60GB Mushkin SSD for my page file and temp directories and another 60GB... don't remember what brand for my import directory. I found splitting the data up helped quite a bit. Obviously useless info for laptop users.

Originally Posted by babowc Is it the 830 series? I just ordered one also, but for my desktop.. I'm hoping it'll help my computer boot/response to programs and files!

Yep this is the 830 512GB. Ordered from New Egg. Got it next day and had it running the next morning. Amazing it all worked. I am always afraid with stuff like this. It is never as easy or as smooth as it would seem. This time, it worked perfectly.

Oh my god.
I feel like I bought a new computer..
I did a clean OS install on the SSD and PS/LR4 loads up in fraction of the time it took with my HDD.

I still kept both 500GB HDD to supplement as data storage, though.

I love it! I'm installing all of the essential things, and I'll be ready to format one of the 2 HDD for just pictures!

Samsung 830er series SSD's kick butt. I upgraded my 3 year old 2.26Ghz Core2Duo laptop with a 256GB version ... it is so responsive now it's like I have a new machine. Highly recommended!