Solid State Drives

[Devin Johnston]

Just curious if anyone is using these drives yes and what you think about them. They aren't that big yet but for storing and running programs they would probably be big enough. I'm wondering if the speed difference between them and a 10,000RMP SATA is really worth the price.

[AJLynn]

What I saw a while back was:

 

-They are a lot faster for non-sequential access - e.g., since there are no parts that need to move to get from one part of the disk to another, they don't lose time in doing so, so if you've got a fragmented file or a lot of small files, it's faster.

-They are slower at sequential access. If you keep your disk reasonably well defragged and you are dealing with large files, the conventional hard drives are faster.

[Devin Johnston]

That's disappointing

[Hazdaz]

I don't do enough heavy HDD reading and writing to really make them useful - even when editing video, I haven't really run into a problem where the the HDD was he bottleneck.

 

SDD are indeed the future, but right now they seem to be purely a luxury.

On an interesting side note, I predict that even though SDD would make the most sense in heavy duty server applications, I actually think they are going to make the biggest change in the laptop world because of their low power demands.

[cadmunkey]

Hi Maxer, the new Intel SSD is a big improvement over earlier models, you may want to check it out. The read access is very fast, but as usual it is slightly slower at writing data to the drive. Personally I think it's worth the trade off. I think I will be going for one of these myself as I'm tired of having hard drive failures these days due to manufacturers cheap components.

[visual3d]

SSD are mainly for laptop but still slower than raptor series

[AJLynn]

Hi Maxer, the new Intel SSD is a big improvement over earlier models, you may want to check it out. The read access is very fast, but as usual it is slightly slower at writing data to the drive. Personally I think it's worth the trade off. I think I will be going for one of these myself as I'm tired of having hard drive failures these days due to manufacturers cheap components.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4

 

I think the 100GB/day target is more reasonable than the 20GB/day for anybody doing animation. The 5 year figure is good, but remember that they calculate these things not as an absolute guarantee that it will last that long, but as a figure at which the loss rate is acceptable to them in terms of their needing to replace units under warranty. So using one of these does not make regular backups any less important.

 

SSD are mainly for laptop but still slower than raptor series

 

In that same article there are a bunch of speed tests. The new generation SSDs beat the crap out of everything including Raptor drives at tasks like loading apps, but the fast hard drives beat the SSDs in tasks on large files (video file tests and archive file tests) but there's an OCZ SSD drive that wins some of those, so it looks what I said before still applies, but the non-sequential performance difference is now so pronounced that maybe the sequential performance doesn't seem as important anymore.

 

The things are still expensive.

[cadmunkey]

If you are bothered over a few milliseconds then

Once the price drops a bit more I know I will be buying them to replace my SATA hard drives.

[luckytohaveher]

Not to belabor the point, but the analysis needs to be systemic.

 

Using SSD drives in rendering does have applicability - but not for massive files like video.

 

The best use of SSD drives would be for your system drive and most importantly the paging file. Then, if possible for your library of maps, textures, RPCs, and related repeatedly loaded files.

 

The data files do not need to be on SSD due to their expense and limited capacity.

 

Imagine a Raid 10 setup with four SSDs for the C drive with windows xp, the program files, the libraries, the rendering jobs files, and most importantly, the paging file. It would be beautiful!

Edited November 9, 2008 by luckytohaveher

[Devin Johnston]

So if you used one as your primary C drive where all your programs reside you'd benefit but if you used it for mass storage of large files it wouldn’t really benefit?

[luckytohaveher]

The SSD drives are VERY expensive for larger sizes; therefore, getting a SSD based 2TB raid would cost the GDP of Chile for three years!

 

SSD drives are advantageous because they don't read in a linear fashion as disk based drives normally do. So, when you go to load a windows dll, read the page file, load your 'typical' maps or RPCs, the data is actually read out of many sectors of memory chips in the drive simultaneously. They are perfectly suited for 'read' mostly data.

 

When you have very large files, the only way to go is disk based drives because they are read in a linear fashion (assuming a defrag). Also, when you have very large files, especially with video or 200MB 3DSMax files (with multiple saves {file001, file002, etc}), the only way to afford the space is with disk based drives.

 

Like everything in life, it isn't a question of A or B. It is a question of A AND B, multiplicative, simultaneous, and optimized. Diversity is good, so long as the architecture of the system is tailored for the performance of each piece.

Edited November 9, 2008 by luckytohaveher