Use system M.2 NVMe drive for photo storage and scratch space or add a second drive?

[Amin S]

I'm doing photo editing using Capture One and Photoshop CC.  My system drive is a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 1TB SSD.  Right now, my photo editing apps are on the system drive, and my photos themselves as well as designated scratch space are also on the system drive.  I have plenty of space since I only keep recent photos there.

 

Back when I was using spinning hard drives, I was told to keep the photos themselves and the scratch space on a different drives from the apps.  Is that still the case with SSDs?  My motherboard can use two NVMe M.2 SSD drives.  If there would be a performance boost from adding one designated for photos and scratch?

[limegorilla]

I'm by no means an expert but from my point of view, no, there would not be a performance change. As your on a NVME SSD, your most likely not even hitting the top read/write speeds at all time for your drives so you shouldn't get any slowdowns. I would check (using task manager) what your drive utilization is like.

 

Again, no expert, but I would assume the advice given to you about keeping everything on separate drives would most likely be motivated by redundancy and the fact that it is much easier to saturate the read/write speeds on a HDD than an SSD

[jj9987]

HDDs have very low speeds (both sequential as well as IOPS) compared to NVMe drives, that's why it was recommended so as it was very easy that your HDD was bottlenecking your process. Nowadays, using NVMe drives, you're not going to spot a difference.

 

What you can do, if you are too worried about SSD life and you have extra RAM - you can set up a RAMDisk and set up the scratch space there. Do take note, that RAMDisk contents will disappear whenever the RAM loses power (so, shutdown, hibernation)

[Amin S]

Thanks, @jj9987 and @limegorilla.  So probably no noticeable performance gain.  I'm not too worried about SSD life :).