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NVMe RAID 0 and DAZ Studio

Deadly BudaDeadly Buda Posts: 155
edited November 2019 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

When working on big scenes (like 300MB scene files for timeline animation work), I have noticed a huge speed increase by switching my content drive from SATA to NVMe. Not only does the scene load faster, working in the viewport also seems to have a speed increase as well. I am not sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with mesh smoothing and Daz3D referring to a bunch of little files for that information to then calculate. On SATA the lag was very annoying. On the NVMe, there was no discernible lag, though the mesh smoothing progress bar does appear. I saw no real difference in rendering, though maybe iRays initial calculations are sped up by the NVMes?

Anyway, this got me thinking, what if I got 2 NVMe drives and put them in RAID 0. Would that increase my workflow speed? Or, maybe NVMe is overkill. Maybe just a regular SSD would be just as fast as an NVMe drive?

 

 

Post edited by Deadly Buda on

Comments

  • magog_a4eb71abmagog_a4eb71ab Posts: 769

    Depends on the SSDs. Some of the Samsung M.2 SSDs have read/write speeds of like 1-3 Gbps while others only have around 0.3-0.5 Gbps(or 300-500 Mbps). No experience with RAID myself, but I do know that it can be a real hassle if something goes wrong with a RAID 0 configuration if its not backed up on a regular basis. Depending on how much content you like to keep in your library, it might not be feasible unless you have deep pockets filled with money.

  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805

    Sata is limited to 6 Gb/sec. A NVME drive can get 16 Gb/sec (theoretically 10 is more achievable) on PCIE gen 3 and PCIE gen 4 could theoretically get 32 but I have seen no testing of actual throughput that can be achieved.

    Using NVME in Raid 0 might or might not get you better performance. 

    1) It might not even be possible on your CPU/motherboard. You'd want all the Raid drives connected to the CPU directly not through the chipset, the chipset generally connects to the CPU by 4 PCIE lanes so having 2 NVME drives each saturating 4 PCIE lanes would be bottlenecked by the chipset. IIRC you'd need a HEDT CPU to get enough PCIE lanes off the CPU directly to really make this work.

    2) Whether Daz would really benefit that much I have no idea. I do know that fast storage is one of the big things in animation render boxes but I have no experience trying what you want.

  • Deadly BudaDeadly Buda Posts: 155
    edited October 2019

    The NVMe drives would be connected to a DIMM.2 slot on an Asus Zenith Extreme motherboard with a Threadripper processor.

    Apparently the mesh smoothing can be turned on and off with script. So, maybe that delay can be offset just in the software.

    I guess the question is: when does Daz access the hard drive that can cause workflow delays?

    Post edited by Deadly Buda on
  • onixonix Posts: 282

    I think that will have no effect at all because NVMe is already super-fast on sequential reads, while random reads will not improve by connecting them in the raid.

    the amount which gets loaded from the disk is minuscule in comparison to the amount of processing done to set it up.

    You can check it by looking at your CPU and HDD load curves.

    As I noticed Daz loads everything in one thread saturating one CPU core to the max. So that is your bottleneck for load times. Any more than dual-core CPU is pretty much useless for DAZ

    Once the scene is loaded, you do not need any drive anymore so it should not affect performance. If HDD does affect your performance you probably have low RAM and rely on the swap file 

    In that situation, fast SSD makes extreme improvement.

     

     

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604

    I assume that your are talking about Daz Studio (DS), whxih is the flagship program    Daz 3d is the Company name, and they do have other titles in their stable of programs.

     

  • Deadly BudaDeadly Buda Posts: 155

    @onix @Chohole thanks for the insight. So really an overclocked Intel processor is probably the best for scene loading. I guess I can overclock my Threadripper a bit and that could help.

    As for HDD and low RAM... though the NVMe is now much faster, maybe I am having a swap file issue. I have 128GB of memory in this computer, so I wonder if my swap file settings are wrong... I guess my first question is... what swap file are we talking about? Do you mean Windows virtual memory, or is this a swap file for Daz?

  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805

    Unless you're heavily multitasking you aren't using the Windows swap file with 128Gb.

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