Best SSD Setup for Photoshop & Lightroom

Removing Data Transfer Bottlenecks (RAM)

First, remove any performance bottlenecks by adding enough RAM. Bottlenecks are specific restrictions that slow down the entire workflow. Not having enough RAM is the easiest bottleneck to resolve.

RAM isn’t very expensive today, and having enough RAM can make a huge difference to apps like Photoshop and Lightroom.

When the data that Photoshop needs to process is not found in RAM, but on your HDD (this offloading of RAM data to a drive is called swapping), accessing is much slower, because a ‘read head’ needs to physically move to the spot where your data is written on a magnetic platter, to read the data the data. Then the data is read back into the RAM, while other data is offloaded to the drive to make space for it.

This keeps happening if you have less RAM than needed.

So, Step 1: Get sufficient RAM

Once you have at least 32GB of RAM, remember that any data on a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is many orders of magnitude slower than RAM (references at the end of the article).

Step 2: Ditch the Hard Drive (except for long term storage)

SSDs Are Faster Than Mechanical Drives

Enter, the Solid State Drive (SSD). It stores data on silicon microchips much like your RAM; but unlike RAM, it retains information when power to it is turned off (aka, non-volatile memory). Because there are no physically moving parts while accessing data, information can be read and written much more quickly. Faster access speeds, and more MBs per second can be transferred to RAM.

HDDs can transfer 80-180 MB/s while NvME SSDs can transfer around 6,300 MB/s. That’s a significant difference.

Now, when choosing your SSD, you should know that there are two different types of SSDs: SATA SSDs and NvME SSDs. And they have two different interfaces.

You can read all about SSDs, and more in this article, because it can get confusing.

So, SSDs are quite a bit faster than HDDs, and cheaper than RAM. So, can you make do with less RAM, but a faster SSD? No, because RAM is actually much faster than SSD technology, but expensive.

You can’t afford 1TB of RAM, but you can afford a 1 TB SSD.

Next, we’re going to tell Photoshop to use your SSD instead of your HDD for its scratch disks/paging files.

Our Suggested Optimal SSD Setup

At Beyond Photo Tips, we actually suggest having multiple SSDs for optimal bandwidth usage.

Step 3: Get more than 1 SSD (each one has a different job)

We suggest having one SSD each for each of these purposes:

1. For the OS and programs – 1 SSD (512 to 1TB, depending on your needs)
2. For your Scratch Disk & Caches – 1 SSD (256GB should be enough)
3. For your active project files – 1 SSD (1 TB or more)

Optionally, you can also have a 4TB or 8TB HDD (or NAS) connected, for completed projects and long term storage of your files. These are for files that you don’t use frequently, but can’t offload to an external drive.

Suggested SSDs:

• Samsung 990 PRO 4TB M.2 PCIe 7,450MB/s
• Samsung 990 EVO 1TB M.2 PCIe 5,000MB/s

Now, you have multiple parallel pathways from the processor/RAM to your storage devices with minimal interference and bottlenecking of resources. We go into all this, plus more detail in this article.

Step 4: Configure your computer to take advantage of multiple SSDs

Here’s how you set up your computer for optimal speed and SSD usage.

1. Install Your OS & Programs On 1 SSD

We don’t want requests from the OS to interrupt Photoshop’s Scratch disk reads, or vice versa, so your operating system and apps like Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Capture One, MS Word, etc are going to be on one SSD. Don’t be stingy here. Make sure it’s a fast SSD.

Speeding up your program’s executable files, and access to the various files it needs for its functioning will have an immediate effect on the performance of Photoshop and Lightroom.

2. Set The Photoshop Scratch Disk To Use The Scratch Disk SSD

Setting up Photoshop CC to use your dedicated SSD scratch disk is rather easy. Here are instructions for you whether you use Photoshop on Windows or on an Apple computer.

Setting Photoshop Scratch Disk Drive In Windows:

Setting Photoshop Scratch Disk Drive In macOS:

1. Open Adobe Photoshop CC
2. Click on Photoshop menu, and then Preferences.
3. From Preferences select Scratch Disks…
4. The Preferences dialogue box will open with the Scratch Disks section open. There you will see all your available drives.
5. By default, the primary drive will be selected as the active scratch disk. You will know which one this is, by the small tick (check mark) in the box to the left of the drive letter.
6. Ensure that the box next to the drive letter of your Dedicated Scratch Drive SSD is checked (ticked), and that all the others are not checked.
7. Click OK in the top right-hand corner of the dialogue box.
8. Shut down and then restart your computer and Photoshop. You’re ready to experience the speed boost of using an SSD as your Scratch Disk.

3. Set Up Lightroom Cache & Catalogue files Correctly To Use An SSD

Lightroom Classic requires you to set up two different parts to use your dedicated SSD. The first is your Camera RAW Cache, and the second is your Lightroom Catalogue file (.lrcat file).

Let’s start with the Camera RAW Cache since this offers the most potential for an increase in speed.

What is The Camera RAW Cache?

The Camera RAW cache is where Lightroom stores previews, thumbnails, and Smart Previews for the images in your library. There are hundreds of small files that need to be accessed quickly in order for Lightroom to seem responsive and fast. This definitely needs the power of a speedy SSD.

Your Projects on SSD

Your third SSD can be set up to store your current project files. The SSD gives you the benefit of fast file access. This means that Images and Videos are previewed faster.

However, once you complete a project, you should shift it to a HDD drive (or a safer storage option, such as a NAS) for long term storage and back up. This frees up your SSD for active projects.

While SSDs are cheaper than RAM, they’re still more expensive per GB than HDDs, for long term storage.

With an SSD freed of files, you will be able to work with your current project files quickly, while also reaping the benefits of cost effective HDD storage.

In Summary:

While this kind of hardware setup can be used with multiple drives no matter whether they are SSDs or HDDs, the greatest benefit is derived from using SSDs. Having multiple data streams to handle the throughput from different drives, for different types of data will allow you to improve the performance of Photoshop and Lightroom.

Saving your RAW image files to an SSD will have the most immediate, and greatest impact on their performance, so do remember that.

SSDs will speed up the performance of almost any operation that involves data transfer. Today, their price and capacities are at a place where we can begin using them for daily computing and using the slower, but cheaper HDDs solely for archival and mass data storage.