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This is 100% true!
And really...how often do we access content compared to how often we boot or launch applications? If this is an active hobby or money-making venture for people here (and I know it is for a lot of members here), I'd venture to say we don't boot all THAT often!
Back to my audio examples, because the concept of "content loading" applies there just as it does in the 3D world: My VST libraries contain banks of instrumental sound samples from numerous different makers. Some of them can be quite big; several hundred MB just for one violin section bowing articulation, say for Martelle, or Detache (elastic, dragged, etc). There may be (usually are) different sets of samples for downbowing vs. upbowing, because the sound is ever so subtly different (I know, I've played). All of these and more might be replicated by numerous sets of sound samples (depends on the library and how it was built).
So just loading a project file with only a few instrument sections and selected articulations could require as much as a gigabyte or more to be loaded into memory when you account for two violin sections, a viola section, some cellos, a couple of bowed basses, and then solo instruments if the piece calls for one! And we haven't even talked about the brass, woodwinds, pianos, and percussion instruments!
Hard drive delays when loading big audio project content into a music application is quite noticeable, and can have subtle or obvious impact to workflow and that ever-fickle Lady Muse. Similar, I'd expect, to delays experienced in DAZ when loading a big scene file with lots of objects and textures.
So yeah, putting some of that "content" stuff on an SSD may result in significantly faster workflow, and depending on your system and use-case, it may not be a bad idea to prioritize your content before your OS. That's for each person to decide for himself/herself, but I say anyway one can do it, I'm all for it!
This is 100% true!
And really...how often do we access content compared to how often we boot or launch applications? If this is an active hobby or money-making venture for people here (and I know it is for a lot of members here), I'd venture to say we don't boot all THAT often!
Back to my audio examples, because the concept of "content loading" applies there just as it does in the 3D world: My VST libraries contain banks of instrumental sound samples from numerous different makers. Some of them can be quite big; several hundred MB just for one violin section bowing articulation, say for Martelle, or Detache (elastic, dragged, etc). There may be (usually are) different sets of samples for downbowing vs. upbowing, because the sound is ever so subtly different (I know, I've played). All of these and more might be replicated by numerous sets of sound samples (depends on the library and how it was built).
So just loading a project file with only a few instrument sections and selected articulations could require as much as a gigabyte or more to be loaded into memory when you account for two violin sections, a viola section, some cellos, a couple of bowed basses, and then solo instruments if the piece calls for one! And we haven't even talked about the brass, woodwinds, pianos, and percussion instruments!
Hard drive delays when loading big audio project content into a music application is quite noticeable, and can have subtle or obvious impact to workflow and that ever-fickle Lady Muse. Similar, I'd expect, to delays experienced in DAZ when loading a big scene file with lots of objects and textures.
So yeah, putting some of that "content" stuff on an SSD may result in significantly faster workflow, and depending on your system and use-case, it may not be a bad idea to prioritize your content before your OS. That's for each person to decide for himself/herself, but I say anyway one can do it, I'm all for it!
Without trying to sound like an Apple shill (I'm not, honest), Apple's Fusion system does seem to answer some of the problem of balancing data and application. By letting the system decide what's being used, the operating system is usually automatically moved to the SSD drive, then the most often-used applications, then whatever data or media is seeing the most current use. I can't move too much of my content/runtime folder over and make it fit, but I'm usually using the same characters or settings for a few days on end. The OS sees that I bought the Anubis and Mintotaur characters and started using them (with the textures, etc.). As I spend the next few days testing them, they'll be moved onto the SSD in the background during idle moments. The result is that my characters and scenes start loading and saving faster, until I stop using them and start using something else more often, in which case these characters get moved back to the main drive and the new stuff moves over. I assume it would be the same with sound and other media files; as large as our libraries are, we're usually only using a small portion of it at one time. It would be a pain to manually move these things back and forth, but the OS does it incrementally in the background during idle process, so it's invisible. All of the benefits and none of the pain... so far. ;-)
I don't know how well these will continue to work, but I've been using matching systems at work and at home for about 18 months, and so far they've been flawless. At work, I'm running Windows 7 under VM Fusion 24/7, so I assume my Windows OS and the Windows partition are moved over, and no problems there either.
Not as ideal as having a few terabytes of pure SSDs, but a decent compromise so far.
-- Walt Sterdan
...however a lot of us here are PC based.
Once I can afford to swap my 1 TB HDD for a 1 TB SSD, then it will be worth upgrading the boot drive as well
Is disk speed really that important when it comes to content files? In my experience it's more the speed of the 3D programs that is the bottleneck here. V4 morphs++ for example take a long time to load, but the time it takes loading the files from HDD probably amounts to less than a second of that time.
I notice a big difference loading stuff into DAZ on my laptop (all HDD) compared to my desktop (all DAZ on SSD). It's a bit of an "apples to oranges" comparison, because the laptop is a couple years old. But it is still an i7 (4 core compared to 6 core) and has good memory (12 GB compared to 64 GB). Okay, maybe it's an "oranges to tangerines" comparison...
For me, I notice when the VST instruments load; the laptop can be slow coming from HDD due to the size of the sound samples. The DAZ content is not so painful, but still noticable.
And two questions for wsterdan: Does Apple still offer their hybrid solution? I haven't seen it. Also, do you know the throughput and spindle speed of the HDD portion?
Well file size is the primary factor here of course, and I think you have to measure file I/O separately to determine what it actually is that's slowing things down most. Fragmentation and file locations (which are irrelevant on SSD's AFAIK) also play as role with HDDs. I've seen files of a few GB being fragmented into over 50.000 parts (NTFS drive on XP), and if these part are spread all over the disk it will increase the load time significantly (I've tested it). Same with small files even though they're generally not very fragmented - loading a set of say 300 morph files will take longer if they are spread all over the disk.
Just analyzed a 1 TB HDD I haven't defragmented for a long time, as you can see there are many heavily fragmented files here (these are the most fragmented):
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Sorry to take so long to reply (working way, way, way too late); the fusion drives are still a build-in option for the iMac and Mac Mini, except now they're PCIe-based (theoretically 1.5x as fast for read/writes); haven't looked at the spec's for the latest HDDs, but I *think* they're still 5400s (probably to keep the heat down on their thin case). I'll try and track down the info on the throughput and to confirm the RPMs.
You might try a search for "make your own fusion drives" as well; I've heard of people using the newer OSs's built-in code to enable their own Fusions, but I've seen conflicting reports (on at least the earlier attempts).
-- Walt Sterdan