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SSD vr HD fo Content

LD1LD1 Posts: 139
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

I don’t have an Nvidia card (in my Mac) to speed things up, so I am trying to find other ways to speed up working in DAZ (e.g. for complex scenes, I have to convert the view to bounding boxes to be able to zoom in at a decent rate, etc)

So has anyone used an internal SSD to hold your DAZ content/runtime? If so, do you see any speed increase in using DAZ from an SSD over having your content on a hard drive? -- I don't want to waste the money in getting a 4TB SSD if it won’t speed things up.

Comments

  • TheKDTheKD Posts: 2,696
    edited December 2019

    I didn't notice much of a difference. I have since moved my content to a larger hdd, and use the ssd now for games instead. See a difference in loading times in games at least lol.

    Post edited by TheKD on
  • SixDsSixDs Posts: 2,384

    Although SSD's may be technically faster than hard drives, consumer-grade SSD's are not necessarily the best choice for data drives, IMO. While SSD's may be faster, how much of a speed increase you might notice is another matter, as TheKD pointed out. SSD's are also quieter, not having any moving parts and consume less power, which you probably already know. Nevertheless, I personally prefer hard drives for data storage and retrieval since they are still much less expensive per GB and they are immune to the problems that SSD's have with NAN cell deterioration due to repeated write/erase cycles. Since data drives tend to be subject to such repeated write erase cycles, the fact that this has no effect on a hard drive means you don't need to rely on over-provisioning and wear-levelling algorithyms to protect the drive the way you do with SSD's. Some will point out that such measures ensures that an SSD will probably last longer than most will need it, but only time will tell if that is so. Hard drives can fail, of course, but I have had pretty good luck with them myself. I tend to use faster, higher-end drives, though. To each their own.

  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805

    It is no longer true that SSD's will last longer than most people will care about. QLC NAND, 4 bits written to each cell, which is the standard for all higher capacity SSD's, results in much more wear and tear when exposed to write cycles. wear leveling actually makes this worse. QLC is also slower than TLC or SLC NAND. I do not recommend using SSD's for data at all. Storing programs is one thing. The files are static and unless you install and uninstall stuff frequently QLC won't be an issue for a long time. But for things like WIP you're probably better off with a HDD. 3D assets are very large, I have more than 6Tb of the stuff, so storing it on SSD's, evenm at todays prices, is pretty steep.

    To answer the OP's question you might see a very small increase in scene loading time but none on things like manipulating the viewport. That work is done by the CPU not the GPU. So having an Nvidia card will not help either.

  • LD1LD1 Posts: 139

    Thanks everyone. I think that instead of spending money on an SSD, I am going to spend it on more memory. Hopefully that will help speed things up.

  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805
    LD1 said:

    Thanks everyone. I think that instead of spending money on an SSD, I am going to spend it on more memory. Hopefully that will help speed things up.

    more RAM will only help if your scenes are too big to fit in RAM. Fundamentally your issues are not enough CPU power for DS. I'd suggest saving you money for a newer laptop, and ditching Apple.

  • kobefiverrkobefiverr Posts: 8

    I moved from a 7400 1tb HDD to a PCIe 2tb nvme SSD storage

    load time for g8m on HDD was 1m20s and on the nvme it's about 17seconds for me

    already made characters with hair and clothes usually take longer

  • JD_MortalJD_Mortal Posts: 760

    Honestly, when I tested simple moves from SSD to HDD, the speeds were nearly the same, since Daz has TONS of tiny files. Ultimately though, my SSD reads files faster and writes faster, but that only matters when loading a model and saving a complex scene. That accounted for about 2 seconds, out of the 1.5minutes of my loading time, for a Gen8 empty model. Daz spends more time processing the file than it takes to find the file and load it.

    Same with the rendering... The whole card is filled, nearly instantly, before IRAY actually starts using the data to render. Shaving seconds off an hour-long render is not worth the extra expense. However, having more power available to use for rendering, as opposed to spinning-up a HDD, could be worth it. HDDs are still kind-of power-hungry.

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