effect of ' SSD ' on 3D Works and Rendering !?

[gabmass]

could adding a SSD Drive decrease render time (3Ds Max & Vray) ? or does it help at all to speed up my 3D works?

[AJLynn]

No, an SSD only helps speed up reading from and writing to had drives. So the initial few seconds where it's loading the bitmaps and the program files would be sped up, but there would be no improvement in the actual render speed.

[beestee]

I am afraid that it is not nearly that cut and dry.

 

Here is a discussion that I had on chaosgroup about one of the many aspects of this topic:

 

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?72577-How-is-image-data-transfer-handled-during-rendering

[AJLynn]

Right. As Vlado says, "loading of the textures" - that happens when you hit start and if the textures are on your hard drive it takes a few seconds. An SSD could save you a single digit number of seconds at the beginning, and a single digit number of seconds at the end when it saves the render result, but in the middle there's no data being read from or written to the disk.

[gabmass]

so having it added or not, you may not feel it at all !? right?

[AJLynn]

You'd notice it at other times, like when you're loading programs.

[RyderSK]

Adding SSD definitely helps decrease overall stress from life though. I can't work on computer without one not wanting to throw it out of windows in mere seconds now. Faster cpus and gpus every year has been cool and nice, but SSD is the single revolutionary thing I can't live without, the very best investment one can make. I have SSDs in workstations, nodes, fileserver.. everything fast and silent.

 

I would wager to say though that SSD can make renderings faster for those whose computers swap data during render due to small amount of ram. But if someone can afford SSD, they can afford more ram as well, so this is mute argument.

[unrinoceronte]

Adding SSD definitely helps decrease overall stress from life though. I can't work on computer without one not wanting to throw it out of windows in mere seconds now. Faster cpus and gpus every year has been cool and nice, but SSD is the single revolutionary thing I can't live without, the very best investment one can make. I have SSDs in workstations, nodes, fileserver.. everything fast and silent.

 

This is the best argument for an SSD... i am convinced now to get one...

 

JURAJ:

- I am curious, do you store all your data in the fileserver in one big SSD/several SSDs, or do you have one SSD for the fileserver OS and normal HDDs for the data on it?

- Do you temporary store your assets and texture in each render node SSD´s sometimes, or everything straight from the fileserver?

[Dimitris Tolios]

For someone who "follows" the scene and upgrades his PC every 2-3 years (i.e. doesn't have a very outdated PC to work with), the switch to an SSD is the most impressive upgrade: everything starts much faster, searches are much faster etc: things you do multiple times per day - much more times than when you hit "render".

 

Thus the overall impression is that of a snappier system.

Fast, 1TB/platter HDDs are also amazingly fast compared with old, slower disks (even if we are talking 5400rpm 1TB/platter disks vs. small 7200 or faster), and a properly defragged drive is far from a hindrance. But the SSD is notably faster - unlike small upgrades in CPU power etc - in all the minor stuff here and there.

 

That said, I also believe that the difference between launching render sessions is too small to matter...same goes for all people that keep repeating how fast the system reboots with an SSD - who cares? How often do you reboot? One a day? Twice?

 

You will gain more by waiting less for Photoshop to launch for you to edit that bump map or tweak this and that, than transferring your uber textures with 400MB/s instead of 120MB/s i.e. those 2 seconds or less of a difference for a rendering that will last minutes maybe, was rarely the make it or break it improvement.

Edited October 19, 2013 by dtolios

[beestee]

...but in the middle there's no data being read from or written to the disk.

 

How much RAM does it take to ensure that this is the case?

 

You would have to be certain that nothing that the renderer needs is caching to disk to say that it has no effect other than buffering textures at the beginning and end of the render. Anything caching to a local traditional hard disk due to overrun of the RAM will affect the speed of a rendering.

 

This could include but is not limited to:

 

Scene geometry

Textures

Frame buffer

Displacement geometry

Proxy geometry

Pre-calculated lighting

 

And there are outside factors that can affect available RAM. Just because you put 24 GB of RAM in there doesn't mean you have 24 GB available for rendering. And (finally!) SSDs are reasonably priced, so it could make sense on a budget build to avoid gobs of large, expensive RAM modules in favor of an adequate SSD for a node build.

 

I honestly do not do enough rendering now to really worry about it, but I would be very interested in seeing two computers with the same configuration with the exception of SSD vs HDD for render speed comparisons.