Solid State Hard Drive
petes images
Posts: 213
Hi, sorry for what may seem a ridiculous question, this is to do with Daz, but i have to ask so hope you can help. I am looking at upgrading my present 1tb hard drive to a 1tb solid state hard drive, I know my operating system will load and work faster, but does it effect the speed of Daz? as at the moment it is very slow, not just in starting up but also using. thanks in advance
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The only effect it will have is that programs will open faster, but the viewport, render speed, etc won't change. But I'd definitely recommend an SSD. It makes a big difference in many ways.
The best way to speed up DAZ Studio is to upgrade your graphics card.
Thanks, budget at the moment will only stretch to the hard drive
so that will be next 
Dont get rid of the other 1tb drive as you can use that for storing files on it that dont need to be on C Drive
thanks, already thought of that one, use it also as a scratch disk for Photoshop
Depends on what you render with.
TBH, if budget is tight, and you are saving for a graphics card, I'd consider passing on an SSD.
Sure they help everything feel snappier, but they are not essential. (I only use SSDs, but I do that due to noise, I hate it.)
The one thing about them that is nice, copying large amounts of files is noticeably faster, but is also dependent on the source disk.
I've been using mechanical drives since the 386 days and was happy to do so. But, I just added an SSD as my new C: drive and wow! What a huge difference. Programs such as Daz used to take forever to open and use but now it's a pleasure. Go ahead and buy. My only question: do you really need a 1tb drive? You can use a smaller SSD as your C: drive and have a large mechanical drive(s) to store datqa, games, music, whatever. This way, you have some extra cash to put towards a new GPU.
I use an SSD for my system drive. The time savings is enormous when it comes to Windows and loading your software. I can reboot my Windows 10 computer in under 30 seconds.
But my content is all on traditional mechanical hard drives. The time to load the files is very small compared to the time it takes to process the data once it is loaded; so I don't see a lot of benefit in having it on the more expensive storage.
Also, in most computer setups, separating your system drive from your data will make the system faster as well. Even if you went full SSD, two 512 GB drives should be faster than one 1TB drive because you have more data I/O channels operating at once. With everything on one drive, you're constantantly contending for that one resource.
I'd echo this for one simple reason. If an SSD fails, you'll lose everything. No way to get anything off it at all (unless there's been some new development I'm not aware of).
I have an SSD for the OS and programs, and 3 HDDs for all my content and backups. I haven't seen any slowdowns with the content on an HDD (although I have Raptor 10,000rpms), and I feel a lot safer knowing I have multiple copies of everything.
Daz3D may load a bit faster, as well as the OS, but any hybrid-drive would also do that. Even the new HDDs use a form of fast-loading, for most-used content. Though, at the end of the day, the greater majority of your time will be using Daz3D to create a scene, which an SSD will not have an impact on.
As for the "If your SSD fails"... They are easier to recover than a failed HDD, and cheaper to recover too. However, your personal files should all be backed-up on some form of free cloud-service. Few people have a TB of personal data. Maybe 1-2GB, at the most. (Photographs and actual personal documents that can't be restored by reinstalling a program.) Like in Daz, you wouldn't backup your whole Daz3D library, only your tiny daz-project-files and associated images that are actually unique.
I have a super-computer, best of the best, and Daz3D still takes a while to load. The only reason it runs faster, is due to my video-cards.
Just for the record, the cheap SSDs are as slow as the faster HDDs. Yet, they are still selling for 2x-5x the price, for the same space and no speed-gains. (However, SSDs do have great and better power-savings, so even they are worth it. More power left for your video-cards.)
It's probably an academic discussion because, as you say, you should always back up everything, but I can't find any evidence whatsoever that it's easier to recover data from a failed SSD. Everything I've read says the opposite. However, I'm quite happy to be proved wrong.
SSDs seem to be reliable; failure - when talked about with SSDs - largely relates to when they have been written to more than they should and they start to fail.
This does NOT mean they can't be read, only that they can't be written to.
If it fails completely, like any component can, it is a different matter; I still have my first SSD, a 120GB drive; it still works, both for reading and writing.
If it fails, use backups; if you're not backing up, why not? I don't really have much patience with folks when they don't.