Solid State Drive (SSD) or a regular Hard Disk for working with DAZ / Poser ?
linvanchene
Posts: 1,382
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I recently put in an SSD (512Gb) for my machine. I am a MAC user though. My system specs are:
OSx 10.6.8
Quad Core 2.8 Ghz
16 Gb RAM
1 Gb Video Card
512 SSD (main drive)
4x 1Tb internal backup drives.
In addition to DAZ and Photoshop stuff, I do a lot of video editing with Final Cut and music editing with Logic. I haven't noticed a tremendous difference in anything but system and application loading times from the switch to SSD from my 10K rpm drive. System is definitely quieter though.
From what I understand in terms of rendering speed, you get more mileage out of higher end video cards and even dual video card setups than faster hard drives. That and just faster processors.
I've looked at SSDs for a while now, but I'm still slightly suspicious of them.
I've had a 10,000rpm Western Digital drive for 3 years now as my primary system HDD, with a 7200rpm as the back-up drive. Performance is excellent. In fact, I've just ordered another two. I want to replace both HDDs with new 10,000 rpms. (I know this is slightly paranoid. The drives I have probably still have years of life, but I prefer not to take the chance of a crash).
If space is an issue, 10,000rpm might be a good alternative. They're fast, reasonably cheap, and way larger than SSDs.
mac
Not wanting to confuse the issue, I have both an SSD as my primary boot drive, and a big fat HD where all my content resides, so really, you want to go with both for the best of both worlds :)
But yes, SSD's are lightning fast.
I built my pc a couple of months ago. I went with a regular 2Tb hd, caus i didn't have the money to go for an SSD and i read that SSD's are not as durable as regular HD's. Later I got a 500Gb SSD and installed it as boot drive, partitioned the 2Tb HD in 1Tb for automated backup of the SSD and the other 1Tb is used for storage.
I keep my runtimes both on the ssd and on the storage hd. I haven't noticed a lot of difference between loading content from the ssd or from the HD, prolly caus they are such small files. But the SSD is SO MUCH FASTER for startup, launching programs, files... I'm really glad I got it.
PS:you'll want to connect the ssd to the fastest port on you motherboard... Both my hd's are connected to the 6Gb/s inputs and the DVD writer is on the 3Gb/s. (been a while since i built it, the numbers might be off :) )
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I'm just starting the route you are talking about, SSD and Hard drive. It's going to be a while before I know anything about load times, but the only thing I expect to NOTICE, might be V4 and all her morphs on a hard drive took forever, MAY be better on a SSD.
There is a way to put your USER dirrectories on a different drive, at least 2, but I'm still working on it.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/20063/
That is the link to my thread on the subject. I hope the link works as this is my first time posting one.
With that small a case, have you considered useing external hard drives? I have 4 conected to my system using 2 USB ports, I'm trying to get one drive to work with USB3. The other three are on a hub. Externals aren't very expensive anymore, you can get a 3TB one for less the $150 in the US.
Also, if you are careful about what you install on your SSD, you should be able to get a very big runtime on a 500GB one. My runtime is, at a guess, less than 100GB. My necessary programs are less than that. Also, you can usually mount 2 SSDs in one 3.5 inch hard drive bay, so in your example, it could be :
For example:
SSD (512GB)
C:\Program Files
SSD (512GB)
runtime
in combination with
HDD (3TB)
D:\Users\UserName\Documents\DAZ 3D\Studio\My DAZ 3D Library
Gus
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I would second this suggestion. Studio doesn't really hammer the HD. It does some directory scans the first time you visit a directory in the content library, and it has HD access when it loads content for the first time. But it doesn't constantly access the HD. So having all your DAZ content on a SSD won't really make a massive difference in performance.
Whereas having the system itself on the SSD makes a marked difference in overall system performance. So a small/medium SSD for the system drive with an HD for all your content/data is really the most economical bang for the buck right now.
I'm going to third the SSD/HDD combo. I just built my computer & bought a 120GB SSD to go with my 360GB & 1TB HDDs. I put Windows 7 & DS4.5 on the SSD and kept my content on the HDDs. DS loads much faster & while there is a bit of a lag accessing my runtimes (probably because of the size of them); it seems to work well.
Theoretically; a SSD full of content should last forever; since the information would only be read from it and nothing would be written to it. No sure how that would work in practice though.
Fourth-ing the SD/HD set. I've got DS4.5 and Poser Pro 2012 on the same 228 SSD drive as my OS (Windows 7 Ultimate 64,) plus a 6TB raid-5 and a couple of e-sata and usb 3.0 external drives where all the content that I'm not using immediately resides. But as nice as those are, the real key to speed is the 3.50 GHz I7-3770k processor and 32 GBs of RAM. There are faster workstations out there, but with a Windows experience index of 7.7, I'm not complaining. :)
"That is great news. I was not aware at all that one can mount 2 SSDs in one 3.5 inch hard drive bay,
I see that I will have to look into SSD further."
Just make sure your motherboard has enough ports and your power supply enough power.
Gus
Why don't you just get your SSD and a plugin drive for files? I don't see why you couldn't use a 512Gig SSD with D|S. I only have 100gigs left, and have for months... it seems like, if this was not my only machine, I'd be able to get by just fine with 512 gigs.
I use a SSD for all the programs I run (including DS and Poser) and have all my content (runtime, new models, textures) on an external network HD. Like Geminii23 stated, the machines run a lot quieter. It also runs a lot cooler, extending the life of your computer. Render speeds are about the same as this is dependent on cores and memory. The one thing I do like is Poser and DS tend to pop open instantly when I start them up. The same goes for modeling, there is very little lag time during auto saves.
Just to be clear, a couple of posts have mentioned rendering speed, your type of hard drive will do nothing one way or the other to your rendering speed, with the one exception that if you don't have enough physical memory and have to swap to the hard drive, if that's the case, buy more RAM, since it is so darn cheap these days. Hard drive type will affect how fast your content loads into memory, how long a scene takes to load or save, etc. But the actual rendering will be dependent on your CPU if you are using something like 3Delight, or Firefly. Your video card will only come into it if you are using either a hybrid render mode in something like LuxRender, or a dedicated GPU solution like SmallLux or Octane.
Textures will get spooled when rendering, so your temp directory on a fast drive will increase render speed. Nothing else needs to be on an ssd for render speed.
If you only get two drives you can always get two SSH Drives. Bigger and cheaper than SSD Drives, and significantly faster than traditional Hard Drives. (17" Laptops generally have two drive bays and this is a great solution for them.)
An SSH drive is a hybrid Traditional and SSD Drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340 is an example. Note that in a Desktop Computer 3.5" Bay you could fit 2 of these, so in your 2 drive bay scenario, you can fit 4.