SSD and workflow
Oso3D
Posts: 15,085
in The Commons
New machine will have a 128 gb ssd. I'm not sure my entire library will fit on that...
Anyone care to pipe up about how best to make use of SSD and Studio?
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Keep your content off your pc and use an external hard drive. If you have an unrecoverable computer crash you don't want all your libraries gone for good.
128 GB is too small for content; best bet is to put the Poatgres database on it. You might also use it for the Windows swap file.
I would use the SSD for the OS only.
If you can afford it and the desktop can take it I would get a 1TB and a 2TB hard drive. Use the 1TB for the DAZ Studio library and partition the 2TB to 500GB and use that for programs, and use the 1.5TB that is left for data, images, emails, documents etc., and use that partition for the swap file. Using the SSD for the swap file, if it is used a lot, will potentially burn out the solid state components quicker.
I use my SSD for OS although I do have a few other programs there that I added before I realised it was best to install those on D Drive - I keep most Daz Content on an external hard drive as its easier to move it to a new PC that way
I actually have one machine with a 128 GB SSD in it. I use it as a boot drive with Windows 7 installed, plus all the applications. I have a 1 TB WD Black as a data drive for my content and other data. No data other than the OS and programs goes on the SSD and so far it suffices. However, to keep useable disk space from declining, I also have a 160 GB WD Velociraptor installed as a swap drive. It contains all of the Windows paging file as well as all the various caches and temp files used by the OS and various applications to minimize writes to the SSD. These last measures take some time and effort to configure for both the OS and especially the graphics apps, but I felt it necessary to reduce the load on the SSD. I would recommend that you look at doing something similar if using the SSD as a boot drive.
Although adequate, I believe that any SSD I would consider now would have a little more overhead built in - at least a 256 GB model. On the other hand, although I have not had any problems or complaints with the SSD (apart from more rigamarole setting it up compared to a hard drive), I have several velociraptors in use as boot drives on other machines that I am quite happy with, in addition to several waiting in the wings if needed. I am content to adopt a wait and see approach before investing more in an SSD in the hopes that they come up with a real solution to the problem with NAND flash beyond the current kludges of wear levelling and over provisioning.
Techreport ran a sample of SSD drives to destruction - short form, your workstation will probably die of motherboard failure before the SSD fails (google "SSD Endurance Experiment"). The first failure of note was at 300 TB of writes and after that the majority went on past a petabyte (1,000 TB) of writes. Put your high-use smaller files on the SSD for optimum performance. For Studio, that is primarily the smart content database. Depending on the RAM on the system, the other good candidate is the swap file.
My new Windows 980TI box has a 960GB SSD for primary and a 4TB 7600rpm spindle drive for storage. I've been using an SSD in my Macbook day in day out since 2011, and I'm very please in general with their speed, reliability and robustness. I certainly have no qualms about using them as primary in any new build.
Now if only I had the guts to unstick my iMac and replace the awful "green" drive with an SSD . . . The one thing I've learnt about "green" drives is: don't!
I'm obviously behind the times with SSD as I haven't rebuilt my desktop in five years, although it will get a re-make this winter if I have time (that will be its fourth re-incarnation in twenty years :) )
Make sure you disable the windows drive optimizing for the ssd.
And yes, just keep your OS and programs on there. You will need a secondary harddrive. I recommend the Western Digital 4TB hdds and the StarTech USB 3.1 (gen2) external housings.
I've used a 128gb SSD for a couple of years now. I keep my DAZ content on a 1TB HD as well as all other program documents and photos. Most of my programs are also installed to the HD. I end up with about 20 GB of free space on the SSD which is manageable. You'll likely need to check free memory on the SSD every few days to be sure it doesn't get used up by downloads or photos that end up on your boot drive. You also want DIM to download your zip files to the HD, otherwise you need to manually move them over from the SSD as they use up a lot of space. I just bought a 500 gb SSD yesterday as I'm going to swap that in as my boot drive. The best part of a SSD is the few seconds boot time.
I primarily use SAS drives on a RAID. While the drives themselves are not as fast as a SSD, the combination of the RAID controller's huge cache along with striping to very fast SAS drives make this as fast-in-practice as a SSD. In some cases, this setup is more responsive than a SSD on SATA -- especially on data that are still in RAID cache.
I see the rush to SSD as another case of people following hype and not evaluating the situation for the best solution. In some cases a SSD is absoutely the best solution, in many others it is not.
EDIT: One thing to keep in mind is that SATA RAID cards are not that expensive. In some cases, using a RAID with large drives can lead to extremely fast storage along with large capacities.
Kendall
Just out of curiosity, what sort of extra setup issues are there? I've not looked into SSDs yet, but would have assumed they would install similar to any other drive.
I would go for at least 250gb if you can, they've come down so much now. You'll be stunned how quickly you fill up that 128gb, even if you only use it for the OS and important programs.
Aren't there some Daz plugins that have issues with content not installed on the main drive? I thought GenX could have errors with content in different locations?
At any rate, I do have Daz on my main SSD, which is 500gb, but I also keep a lot of content on a 4tb external drive. My rule is characters on ssd (because I thought they needed to be for GenX if I use it) and environments and shaders on the external.
Add my vote to the "128 GB is too small" pile.
It's too small for ANYTHING of import, be it your OS, applications, or DAZ libraries. I filled one up and finally upgraded to a 2TB SSD.
You should have assessed your drive requirements a little better before you put money on this machine. Maybe you don't need a 2TB SSD like I do, but...
Oh and don't go messing around trying to eliminate, control, or relocate your swap/paging files to some other drive. People are doing way too much fine-tuning these days, and an SSD is best suited for the types of reads and writes that the Windows OS does to virtual memory.
Oh yeah, and I hope you said you're going to Windows 10.
I thought that too until I upgraded a year back. But now Windows loads in less than 10 seconds from startup, and the SSD is so quiet it's hard to hear if my PC is on or off. Then I do have very quiet fans. No more clicking and spinning noises or vibration, no moving parts to wear out and very nice read/write speeds. Not that any of this makes any technical difference when you're hammering out renders. It's just a more pleasurable experience when you sitting at you PC for hours and hours on end.
I have a rack full of machines that sound like an airport.
Boot time comparisons I find useless, how often do most people boot their machines? Once, maybe twice a day? My machines stay on and running for months and sometimes years before having to restart.
I can see the sound issue for libraries, but the average residence's background noise is significantly louder than even several HD's. Considering that modern PC's spin down the platters during idle times and use onboard memory to handle requests until spinup, the sound from the HD's is zero for a lot of the time.
As I mentioned before, speed is a red herring, since putting a SATA HD onto a capable RAID controller will negate the difference and possibly be less expensive.
So that leaves a decrease in storage capacity. For the average household, the size of modern HDDs is ridiculous. So a decrease to more realistic sizes is possibly a "good thing". For people with huge runtimes and data, the small SSD just adds headaches. Putting in a RAID controller gives both speed and capacity, while adding in error fault tolerance, adding additional storage easily, and insome cases, onboard means to perform backups.
In some cases, SSD's make perfect sense: businesses that boot just enough windows to shift to a Primary Domain Controller, people who run only as terminals (RDP/Citrix) or only do "webbing", ultra small "book" PCs, extremely thin laptops or laptops with limited battery life.
Kendall
Very good points Kendall. I resatart my PC before each render and "it seems" to make a difference to my render times. So a quick restart is important for me. Windows does a backup of the registry on each boot. It is this "system snapshot" that is used in the event you need to do a system restore. Reboot everyday and you potentially lose only one day's worth of system changes versus the guy who hasn't rebooted since George Bush Sr. was in office is doomed.
If you're restarting Windows before each render, you're wasting a lot of time. If your computer "needs it", then something is badly wrong. Very badly.
You can back up your system drive with a competent backup program which will keep versions for you and won't require that you boot several times each day; that's just crazy and unnecessary.
I currently have 3TB worth of SSDs in my laptop - two 512GB drives and two 1TB drives. Longer term, I plan on swapping out my 512GB drives for 1TB cards, and getting another 2TB SSD.
Then I will be emptying my NAS and never touching platter drives again. Ever.
When starting from scratch for full support of SSD make sure HDDs in BIOS are set to AHCI mode, not IDE. But don't change later if you want to keep an existing OS or it might not boot anymore.
If you have a recent mainboard with Intel chipset and RAID support, you have another option: Using the SSD as intelligent cache drive for HDD, which is an option in Intel RST drivers. Set BIOS to RAID (RAID is like AHCI mode + Raid option), install Windows to HDD and leave SSD untouched and unpartitioned. When Windows is up install latest Intel RST drivers, fire them up and check for 'HDD acceleration' option, it should offer SSD caching up to 64GB (if not available there is one more step to do). As the SSD cache works intelligent it learns what you start or load often and then keeps a copy of those files on SSD, this configuration gives you (almost) full SSD speed when booting into Windows, opening regulary used programs and even works for your often used runtime files (64GB can hold a LOT of cache data). Drawback is that *write* access times are still only hdd speed, as everything is written to the hdd as well. The unused 64GB from SSD will be available for partitioning and using too (e.g. for DIM manifest files and thumbnails, temp files, etc).
I use two SSDs
One for docs that are currently in use; it's 1TB, and a 500GB for the system.
They are very quiet, which is why I don't mind the slight premium I'm paying.
I'd love one of these, but they are kinda pricey. http://www.anandtech.com/show/10481/the-samsung-850-evo-4tb-ssd-review
... Yes a 4TB SSD. :)
Put studio files on the drive you use for storage, Studio doesn't care where everything is as you point to it in the preferences.
This looks interesting.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=1174416&gclid=CKbN8ITe_M0CFRYTGwod--4BIw&is=REG&Q=&A=details
"what sort of extra setup issues are there?"
Sorry, I wasn't keeping on top of this thread, Sean. To answer your question, in my case I had a lot of caches and temp folders I wanted off the drive and hunting them all down took a bit of time and effort as I mentioned in my earlier post. That may or may not be an issue for others. Another factor is whether you are doing a clean installation or cloning an existing drive. With hard drives the latter is pretty straightforward - you simply clone one drive to the other and the only catch is if you need to do some partition management if the drives are not the same capacity. But there are several additional considerations when cloning a hard drive to an SSD. Most of the manufacturers provide instructions on the necessary procedures and usually software to handle the process as well. It is something that you need to research a bit before you forge ahead because the SSDs are not the same as hard drives. For example, you might want to run a disk defragmenter on your hard drive if Windows is not set up to do this automatically, since you will not be able to do this after the migration (disk defragmenting must be turned off for SSDs, and, although Windows should ensure that it is turned off upon recognizing the SSD, it is worth verifying). Another example is that SSDs also need to be correctly aligned prior to use, although the cloning software should provide this option prior to beginning the operation. Then, once you boot to the new drive, you need to check and ensure the system has enabled the TRIM algorithym. All of this is documented elsewhere on the net. Just be aware that it isn't exactly the same as swapping in/out hard drives.
Just as a note, SSD drive prices have come down considerably in the last year. 120GB is around $40, 240GB is around $60, 480GB is around $120, 960GB is around $250.
For HDD reliability, I always recommend the top dog currently. HGST. The HGST 4TB UltraStar NAS drives have the all-time lowest failure rates. WD and Samsung have the worst. The research comes from data centers that use huge arrays of drives, and actually track failure rates and average time until first failure. BackBlaze blogs their results regularly. Here's the Q1 2016 stats, along with cumulative over the last few years: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
Paying extra for that kind of reliability (in my books) is money well spent. The really good HGST drives aren't cheap. But they aren't THAT much more than the competitors. Definitely worth the extra $30 or so.
I'd like to emphasise ensuring defrag is turned off for SSDs; your SSD will quickly fail if its left on.
A note about an SSD failure versus a mechanical failure.
A mechanical failure means recovering some or all of the data may be impossible.
A failure on an SSD generally means that data can be no longer written to it. Expected life for accessing data from SSDs is considered to be many years, with 50 years being a number I've often seen.