SSD and workflow

nonesuch00

I actually have my DAZ Studio & Poser content amoung other things entirely on a 128 USB Flash drive because the 223 GB SSD system drive kept running low on space. It took a while to copy to it but since once it's loaded all the working is done in memory or a swap file on SSD disk it works out fine.

TangoAlpha

The two times I've had a spindle drive die, they basically turned into a brick. Thankfully everything on them I wanted to keep was backed up, so I didn't lose anything, but there's no way I could have got anything off those drives (at least not without paying $$$ to a data recovery company, assuming there was something they could do). Not had an SSD fail yet...

Daywalker Designs

Kendall Sears said:

fred9803 said:

Kendall Sears said:

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.

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

You forgot the folks that build "CarPC's" and others, like me that want to minimize our power footprint as much as possible when not rendering. SSD's for everything keeps the system from having to spin up from an idle state and reduces the overall load on the power supply. Heck, I can barely hear the 650 Watt supply I just put in my tower case, and it has a fairly good sized fan in it (XFX brand PSU).

Kendall Sears

It is not axiomatic that SSDs use less power than HDD.  Here are some numbers:

• WD Blue, 500G 2.5", average R/W 1.4W, idle 55mW, sleep .13mW
• Toshiba MK1235GSL (120Gb, 4200 RPM HDD) average 1.0-1.1W, Idle - 0.40mW,  .18mW sleep

 

• Samsung 850 EVO, 500G 2.5", average power 4.7W, idle 50mW

Note that the drives listed are not "green" drives, nor are they the newest available (hence more efficient).  They ARE however 2.5" drives and not 3.5".  It should be noted that most of my server SAS drives are also 2.5" format and not 3.5".

When one takes into account the "green" modes of these HDD drives, their power usage (outside of spinup) is on par, or less than the SSD with larger capacities on the drives.  Also keep in mind that many SSDs require a supplemental draw while in operating mode(s) to handle electronics bookkeeping and refresh of tables that increases the *constant* draw on the 5V rail while the machine is in use.  The larger the SSD the more supplemental draw that is required to handle the requirements.

Kendall