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Best M.2 SSD configuration for Photoshop

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Karl_Guttag

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First, I want to thank everyone for their help on my basic configuration (https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66534152). I've decided on an ASUS Z790-F with the Stix board with the 13700CPU. The board will be in stock in a couple of weeks.

The Z790-F board supports four M.2 MVME gen 4 drives. As best I can tell, I can populate all four without hurting the graphics card performance. I thinking about getting three M.2 MVME drives:
  1. 1TB Main Program storage (C: drive)
  2. 1 or 2 TB Photoshop cache drive (1 TB may be enough but I might get 2 TB for extra disk space)
  3. 2TB Working picture drive (camera RAW and PSDs will stay here while editing).
I will save the 4th slot for later (hopefully for a bigger M.2 MVME drive as the prices come down.

I then figure I will have about an 8 TB SATA SSD archive drive (2TB of which will be for very important stuff and auto-backed up to the cloud). I will have another 8TB of hard drive that will back up the SSD.

I would download new raw files to the Working Drive and the SATA SSD (I always like to immediately back up stuff in case I screw up during Culling/Editing). Once the culling/editing is done, the result will be archived on the SSD Hard Drive, an external USB Hard Drive, and, for important pictures, the Cloud.

My main question is the current best practice strategy for optimizing Photoshop performance with the various drives. My current PC has all SATA SSD in similar places to the M.2s outlined above. Is it still best to have a separate Photoshop Cache/Temp drive even with M.2 MVME 4 SSD drives?
 
The M.2_1 slot on the Z790-F motherboard gets its PCIE lanes from the CPU.

I have a Z690-E, which I think is the same. When an M.2 card is used in that slot, the GPU slot drops form X16 to X8.

The Gen12 and Gen13 CPUS have the same number of PCIE lanes. That's 20, but I believe that 4 are used to communicate with the MB, leaving 16 free. There is no mention of the issue in the Z790-F manual, but I presume that the limitation exists for that as well. The higher-end MBs have two PCIE X16 slots, but they run at X8 if both are used, and if M.2_1 is populated, the second X16 slot is disabled entirely.

(Incidentally: apparently even high-end graphics cards are not seriously hobbled by running at PCIE 4.0 X8.)

I use a separate M.2 card for my Photoshop cache, but I haven't experimented to see whether there is any gain with that.
 
I just use a pair of M.2 drives, plus an 8TB HDD for long-term photo storage.

Programs go on the C: drive, a 1TB NVME. My D: drive is a 2TB NVME, and I put my files there while I work on them. Once done processing them, I move them to the 8TB HDD E: drive.

The data on both D and E drives is backed up each night to a NAS, which is backed up by another NAS.

This is the second PC like this I've built. The previous one had a 2TB SATA SDD for the working drive, and frankly I can't see any speed difference to the NVME. Both are very fast.

I've also got 32GB of RAM, which seems enough for me. I mostly use Lightroom rather than Photoshop though.
 
BobKnDP said:
The M.2_1 slot on the Z790-F motherboard gets its PCIE lanes from the CPU.

I have a Z690-E, which I think is the same. When an M.2 card is used in that slot, the GPU slot drops form X16 to X8.

The Gen12 and Gen13 CPUS have the same number of PCIE lanes. That's 20, but I believe that 4 are used to communicate with the MB, leaving 16 free. There is no mention of the issue in the Z790-F manual, but I presume that the limitation exists for that as well. The higher-end MBs have two PCIE X16 slots, but they run at X8 if both are used, and if M.2_1 is populated, the second X16 slot is disabled entirely.

(Incidentally: apparently even high-end graphics cards are not seriously hobbled by running at PCIE 4.0 X8.)

I use a separate M.2 card for my Photoshop cache, but I haven't experimented to see whether there is any gain with that.
Click to expand...
I don't fully understand PCIe lanes and how they are allocated. But on the ASUS Z690-E and Z790-E, the first M.2 slot is PCIe-5 (the other M.2slots are PCIe-4). I understood that the M.2 slot being PCIe-5 causes the drop from x16 to x8 on the graphics card.

The Z790-F has four M.2 slots, all with PCIe-4 and none that are PCIe-5.

Crudely put, ASUS, to get the M.2 slot to be PCIe-5, had to "steal" from the graphics card (I could be wrong, but based on what I have seen so far).
 
PHXAZCRAIG said:
This is the second PC like this I've built. The previous one had a 2TB SATA SDD for the working drive, and frankly I can't see any speed difference to the NVME. Both are very fast.
Click to expand...
Right. SATA, NVMe, PCIe3, 4, 5... when it comes to static image editing (and most real-world tasks), it's all a wash.

--
Sometimes I look at posts from people I've placed on my IGNORE list. When I do, I'm quickly reminded of why I chose to ignore them in the first place.
 
Last edited:
Ho72 said:
If your concern is PS scratch performance, just know that it will be abysmal no matter what type of SSD you have it hosted on. The cure for this is sufficient RAM.
Click to expand...
I'm planning on 64GB. Hopefully, that is enough. Would 128GB help much?
 
Karl_Guttag said:
Ho72 said:
If your concern is PS scratch performance, just know that it will be abysmal no matter what type of SSD you have it hosted on. The cure for this is sufficient RAM.
Click to expand...
I'm planning on 64GB. Hopefully, that is enough. Would 128GB help much?
Click to expand...
Unlikely, unless you're working with ultra-uber large files like mural sized panos. I think 64 is a safe choice.

--
Sometimes I look at posts from people I've placed on my IGNORE list. When I do, I'm quickly reminded of why I chose to ignore them in the first place.
 
Last edited:
Karl_Guttag said:
BobKnDP said:
The M.2_1 slot on the Z790-F motherboard gets its PCIE lanes from the CPU.

I have a Z690-E, which I think is the same. When an M.2 card is used in that slot, the GPU slot drops form X16 to X8.

The Gen12 and Gen13 CPUS have the same number of PCIE lanes. That's 20, but I believe that 4 are used to communicate with the MB, leaving 16 free. There is no mention of the issue in the Z790-F manual, but I presume that the limitation exists for that as well. The higher-end MBs have two PCIE X16 slots, but they run at X8 if both are used, and if M.2_1 is populated, the second X16 slot is disabled entirely.

(Incidentally: apparently even high-end graphics cards are not seriously hobbled by running at PCIE 4.0 X8.)

I use a separate M.2 card for my Photoshop cache, but I haven't experimented to see whether there is any gain with that.
Click to expand...
I don't fully understand PCIe lanes and how they are allocated. But on the ASUS Z690-E and Z790-E, the first M.2 slot is PCIe-5 (the other M.2slots are PCIe-4). I understood that the M.2 slot being PCIe-5 causes the drop from x16 to x8 on the graphics card.

The Z790-F has four M.2 slots, all with PCIe-4 and none that are PCIe-5.

Crudely put, ASUS, to get the M.2 slot to be PCIe-5, had to "steal" from the graphics card (I could be wrong, but based on what I have seen so far).
Click to expand...
I'm not expert on PCIE, but I believe that's incorrect.

I think that the issue is the number of PCIE lanes, not the revision number. If I'm mistaken about that, corrections would be welcome.

I'm surprised that the Z790-F doesn't offer any PCIE 5.0 M.2 slots, although that would be pointless at the moment.
 
Karl_Guttag said:
First, I want to thank everyone for their help on my basic configuration (https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66534152). I've decided on an ASUS Z790-F with the Stix board with the 13700CPU. The board will be in stock in a couple of weeks.

The Z790-F board supports four M.2 MVME gen 4 drives. As best I can tell, I can populate all four without hurting the graphics card performance. I thinking about getting three M.2 MVME drives:
  1. 1TB Main Program storage (C: drive)
  2. 1 or 2 TB Photoshop cache drive (1 TB may be enough but I might get 2 TB for extra disk space)
  3. 2TB Working picture drive (camera RAW and PSDs will stay here while editing).
I will save the 4th slot for later (hopefully for a bigger M.2 MVME drive as the prices come down.

I then figure I will have about an 8 TB SATA SSD archive drive (2TB of which will be for very important stuff and auto-backed up to the cloud). I will have another 8TB of hard drive that will back up the SSD.

I would download new raw files to the Working Drive and the SATA SSD (I always like to immediately back up stuff in case I screw up during Culling/Editing). Once the culling/editing is done, the result will be archived on the SSD Hard Drive, an external USB Hard Drive, and, for important pictures, the Cloud.

My main question is the current best practice strategy for optimizing Photoshop performance with the various drives. My current PC has all SATA SSD in similar places to the M.2s outlined above. Is it still best to have a separate Photoshop Cache/Temp drive even with M.2 MVME 4 SSD drives?
Click to expand...
Aside from understanding the allocation of PCIe lanes and making sure that you're matching speed of the M.2 drives to the PCIe4 x 4 capabilities of the slots, it looks like you're heading the right direction by having:

1. Separate M.2 for the OS

2. Separate M.2 for images

3. Separate M.2 for image cache (or catalog if using LR).

This gives your system the opportunity for more parallelism in reading/writing the various pieces.
 
BobKnDP said:
Karl_Guttag said:
BobKnDP said:
The M.2_1 slot on the Z790-F motherboard gets its PCIE lanes from the CPU.

I have a Z690-E, which I think is the same. When an M.2 card is used in that slot, the GPU slot drops form X16 to X8.

The Gen12 and Gen13 CPUS have the same number of PCIE lanes. That's 20, but I believe that 4 are used to communicate with the MB, leaving 16 free. There is no mention of the issue in the Z790-F manual, but I presume that the limitation exists for that as well. The higher-end MBs have two PCIE X16 slots, but they run at X8 if both are used, and if M.2_1 is populated, the second X16 slot is disabled entirely.

(Incidentally: apparently even high-end graphics cards are not seriously hobbled by running at PCIE 4.0 X8.)

I use a separate M.2 card for my Photoshop cache, but I haven't experimented to see whether there is any gain with that.
Click to expand...
I don't fully understand PCIe lanes and how they are allocated. But on the ASUS Z690-E and Z790-E, the first M.2 slot is PCIe-5 (the other M.2slots are PCIe-4). I understood that the M.2 slot being PCIe-5 causes the drop from x16 to x8 on the graphics card.

The Z790-F has four M.2 slots, all with PCIe-4 and none that are PCIe-5.

Crudely put, ASUS, to get the M.2 slot to be PCIe-5, had to "steal" from the graphics card (I could be wrong, but based on what I have seen so far).
Click to expand...
I'm not expert on PCIE, but I believe that's incorrect.

I think that the issue is the number of PCIE lanes, not the revision number. If I'm mistaken about that, corrections would be welcome.

I'm surprised that the Z790-F doesn't offer any PCIE 5.0 M.2 slots, although that would be pointless at the moment.
Click to expand...
I found this discussion in an Internet search where it discusses how ASUS used the GPU lanes to give M.2 PCIe 5: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?130630-Z790-ROG-Strix-E-Gen-5-M-2&p=874293#post874293

The figure below seems to suggest that you can have a single PCIe-5 x16 or a dual PCIe-5 x8 plus up to 4 PCIe lanes(?) 4.0 (assumed x4 and thus only one as a Intel 13th gen chip only has 20 lanes). I'm still trying to figure out if, on the ASUS board, M.2 drives get their PCIe-4 directly from the CPU or via the Chipset or if one of the lanes is direct (or whatever). Nothing seems to add up without more information.

42d87084368a4185aad3a56be419115b.jpg.png
 
Karl_Guttag said:
. Is it still best to have a separate Photoshop Cache/Temp drive even with M.2 MVME 4 SSD drives?
Click to expand...
There is no need for a separate cache drive for any sort of SSD. This was a benefit back in the hard drive era, where a single drive could do 100 or 200 IOPS. The lamest of SSDs can do 10,000. The high end push 100k.

As noted, 64 gb removes most of the use for caching at all, so I don't see a reason it can't be part of the data or application drive, if disk space isn't at capacity. If 4tb drives were better priced, it would be the route to go over two 2tbs doing different roles.
 
kelpdiver said:
Karl_Guttag said:
. Is it still best to have a separate Photoshop Cache/Temp drive even with M.2 MVME 4 SSD drives?
Click to expand...
There is no need for a separate cache drive for any sort of SSD. This was a benefit back in the hard drive era, where a single drive could do 100 or 200 IOPS. The lamest of SSDs can do 10,000. The high end push 100k.

As noted, 64 gb removes most of the use for caching at all, so I don't see a reason it can't be part of the data or application drive, if disk space isn't at capacity. If 4tb drives were better priced, it would be the route to go over two 2tbs doing different roles.
Click to expand...
If one is processing RAW files, there is the ACR RAW cache which is on disk and doesn't go away just because you have 64GB of DRAM.
 
I finally found the ASUS Manual for the Z790-F board and it spells out the the PCIe usage with the memory.

It looks like the first M.2 slot gets the direct connection to the CPU. The other three M.2 slots go through the Chipset and seem to be limited to 6GB/s (per the Intel diagram.

Finally things seem to add up. The 20 lanes on the 13th-gen chip are allocated PCIe-5 x16 and a single high speed M.2 PCIe-4 x4 port.

This now leaves me wondering if it is worth paying for faster M.2 memory if it is going to run at SATA-type speeds (per the second diagram).

04f71799a00f4bc9827cc6616af44c31.jpg.png

e6ca24b4dc30401c8b1c22da94a68030.jpg.png
BobKnDP said:
Karl_Guttag said:
BobKnDP said:
The M.2_1 slot on the Z790-F motherboard gets its PCIE lanes from the CPU.

I have a Z690-E, which I think is the same. When an M.2 card is used in that slot, the GPU slot drops form X16 to X8.

The Gen12 and Gen13 CPUS have the same number of PCIE lanes. That's 20, but I believe that 4 are used to communicate with the MB, leaving 16 free. There is no mention of the issue in the Z790-F manual, but I presume that the limitation exists for that as well. The higher-end MBs have two PCIE X16 slots, but they run at X8 if both are used, and if M.2_1 is populated, the second X16 slot is disabled entirely.

(Incidentally: apparently even high-end graphics cards are not seriously hobbled by running at PCIE 4.0 X8.)

I use a separate M.2 card for my Photoshop cache, but I haven't experimented to see whether there is any gain with that.
Click to expand...
I don't fully understand PCIe lanes and how they are allocated. But on the ASUS Z690-E and Z790-E, the first M.2 slot is PCIe-5 (the other M.2slots are PCIe-4). I understood that the M.2 slot being PCIe-5 causes the drop from x16 to x8 on the graphics card.

The Z790-F has four M.2 slots, all with PCIe-4 and none that are PCIe-5.

Crudely put, ASUS, to get the M.2 slot to be PCIe-5, had to "steal" from the graphics card (I could be wrong, but based on what I have seen so far).
Click to expand...
I'm not expert on PCIE, but I believe that's incorrect.

I think that the issue is the number of PCIE lanes, not the revision number. If I'm mistaken about that, corrections would be welcome.

I'm surprised that the Z790-F doesn't offer any PCIE 5.0 M.2 slots, although that would be pointless at the moment.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
I thought that 4 PCIE lanes were dedicated to communication between the CPU and the motherboard, but it appears that may have been false.

If you get 16 lanes for the PCIE X16 slot and four for the M.2_1 slot (NVME is X4), that'd be good.
 
Karl_Guttag said:
I finally found the ASUS Manual for the Z790-F board and it spells out the the PCIe usage with the memory.

It looks like the first M.2 slot gets the direct connection to the CPU. The other three M.2 slots go through the Chipset and seem to be limited to 6GB/s (per the Intel diagram.
Click to expand...
I don't share such a pessimistic reading. What would be the point in supplying extra M2 slots if they were bound to 6Gb/s speeds? The Asus reference says PCIE4 4x for all 4 of them.

On a now 2 year old chipset for the AMD 3000 series, I have two PCIE4 SSDs and both are getting their 3-5k speeds. If the intel 790 were truly so limited, it would be mocked.
 
jfriend00 said:
kelpdiver said:
Karl_Guttag said:
. Is it still best to have a separate Photoshop Cache/Temp drive even with M.2 MVME 4 SSD drives?
Click to expand...
There is no need for a separate cache drive for any sort of SSD. This was a benefit back in the hard drive era, where a single drive could do 100 or 200 IOPS. The lamest of SSDs can do 10,000. The high end push 100k.

As noted, 64 gb removes most of the use for caching at all, so I don't see a reason it can't be part of the data or application drive, if disk space isn't at capacity. If 4tb drives were better priced, it would be the route to go over two 2tbs doing different roles.
Click to expand...
If one is processing RAW files, there is the ACR RAW cache which is on disk and doesn't go away just because you have 64GB of DRAM.
Click to expand...
But it isn't IOPS limited, and reading 100MB files is trivial compared to the CPU effort required by ACR to process them, so transfer speeds aren't going to be compromise sharing the load either.
 
kelpdiver said:
jfriend00 said:
kelpdiver said:
Karl_Guttag said:
. Is it still best to have a separate Photoshop Cache/Temp drive even with M.2 MVME 4 SSD drives?
Click to expand...
There is no need for a separate cache drive for any sort of SSD. This was a benefit back in the hard drive era, where a single drive could do 100 or 200 IOPS. The lamest of SSDs can do 10,000. The high end push 100k.

As noted, 64 gb removes most of the use for caching at all, so I don't see a reason it can't be part of the data or application drive, if disk space isn't at capacity. If 4tb drives were better priced, it would be the route to go over two 2tbs doing different roles.
Click to expand...
If one is processing RAW files, there is the ACR RAW cache which is on disk and doesn't go away just because you have 64GB of DRAM.
Click to expand...
But it isn't IOPS limited, and reading 100MB files is trivial compared to the CPU effort required by ACR to process them, so transfer speeds aren't going to be compromise sharing the load either.
Click to expand...
You seem to be making the case that disk speed is completely irrelevant when processing large RAW files. How can that be? However long the time is, it's still in the series of events that must happen one at a time before seeing an image rendered. All I'm saying is that putting the ACR cache on a fast SSD is useful. It doesn't have to be on its own SSD - I put mine on the same SSD that holds my LR catalog.
 
jfriend00 said:
kelpdiver said:
jfriend00 said:
kelpdiver said:
Karl_Guttag said:
. Is it still best to have a separate Photoshop Cache/Temp drive even with M.2 MVME 4 SSD drives?
Click to expand...
There is no need for a separate cache drive for any sort of SSD. This was a benefit back in the hard drive era, where a single drive could do 100 or 200 IOPS. The lamest of SSDs can do 10,000. The high end push 100k.

As noted, 64 gb removes most of the use for caching at all, so I don't see a reason it can't be part of the data or application drive, if disk space isn't at capacity. If 4tb drives were better priced, it would be the route to go over two 2tbs doing different roles.
Click to expand...
If one is processing RAW files, there is the ACR RAW cache which is on disk and doesn't go away just because you have 64GB of DRAM.
Click to expand...
But it isn't IOPS limited, and reading 100MB files is trivial compared to the CPU effort required by ACR to process them, so transfer speeds aren't going to be compromise sharing the load either.
Click to expand...
You seem to be making the case that disk speed is completely irrelevant when processing large RAW files. How can that be?
Click to expand...
a) How long would it take to load a 55 MB Z9 raw file using a SATA attached drive?

b) How long would it take to load that same file using an NVME on an M2 connector.?

Sitting there at your PC could you detect the difference between A) and B)? Depends on whether you could tell the difference between 1/3 or 1/60th of a second in the context of you working at your keyboard.

If you're importing a couple thousand raws into LR, that's a different story.
jfriend00 said:
However long the time is, it's still in the series of events that must happen one at a time before seeing an image rendered. All I'm saying is that putting the ACR cache on a fast SSD is useful. It doesn't have to be on its own SSD - I put mine on the same SSD that holds my LR catalog.
Click to expand...
 
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