Speed Up Photoshop (and Everything) With SSD

Question

'Tis the season to spend money.
FYI, today on Amazon.com you can get a ridiculously fast 256GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD drive for only $159.99, which is an unprecedented low price for a drive of this capacity.
http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-2-5-Inch-Industrys-Warranty/dp/B007RARHSO/ref=sr_1_1? ie=UTF8&qid=1353689009&sr=8-1&keywords=vertex+4
It's hard to find one thing besides SSD that can so radically speed up a computer system in general, especially for applications that do a lot of I/O like Photoshop.
No doubt prices will be dropping more in the future, but at this price I suggest ordering 2 or more of these drives and setting up a RAID 0 array from which to run everything.  I just ordered one as a gift.
-Noel

Answer 1

I'd look at Resource Monitor and your drive activity light to see if Bridge seems to be heavy on the disk.  Do you hear it madly accessing the hard drive(s)?
A system run from SSD runs faster at just about everything.  HDDs, especially with lots of small and relatively random I/O operations, are not at all efficient, as the seek times really add up.  Plus, in the cases where there actually IS a big contiguous block of data - e.g., a big raw file on a defragged disk, an HDD still can't even come close to using all the bandwidth of a SATAII link, let alone a modern 6 gigabit SATAIII link.
Just to give an idea, some disk benchmark programs offer what's called a "Random 4K" test, which means the benchmark will generate random small I/O requests to/from various parts of the drive.  An SSD-equipped system may be able to sustain tens of megabytes/second of actual data throughput with random 4K operations.  By contrast a hard drive may achieve only a twentieth of that or less.  That's the difference between something taking 1 second or 20 seconds.
Here's an identical benchmark run on my SSD array vs. my Hitachi 1TB hard drive (which I use for internal backup).  Note that the difference is more like 30 to 1.
-Noel