braddewald Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 Is there a generally accepted best practice for which files and programs to store on the limited space that SSD's have when doing 3d work? I'm assuming you would want to install windows, 3ds max, vray, etc on the SSD and keep your current scene files on there as well? Is there any other trick to it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 If I could have 100% of my working files & libraries on SSD storage, I would. There are no downsides to it other than cost, performance is notably better and the latter is sustained regardless of maintenance (e.g. no regular defragmentation is needed) and reliability is far far higher than with HDDs - at least when you go with drives that have a decent track record. Samsung, Crucial, Sandisk and "almost" Intel have a nearly perfect track record. No tricks, it just works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
braddewald Posted October 27, 2014 Author Share Posted October 27, 2014 Right, my question though is whether or not there are certain things that you should put on the SSD since it obviously won't all fit and some of it will have to go on the HDD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joel Gray Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 I'm not sure if there's such thing as a 'best practice' but I generally have the OS and program files located on my C: SSD and all project files and supporting files located on higher capacity SATA HDDs. When the capacity and price point of SSDs get close to matching that of regular HDDs you'll probably see a change. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 Things that get used more often should be on the SSD - if possible. That can be anything from libraries, to scratch disk space to games. This varies depending on personal preferences. Almost everybody puts at least the OS on the SSD and builts out. It is almost a given that once you start using an SSD, you get spoiled and you will want more and more on it, eventually forcing you to up your available SSD capacity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amitgedia Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 i had read that you should keep the windows temp files path and all the other temp file paths in other partition other than SSD for it to work fast and efficiently.. this keeps much free space in the SSD for our regular work and it also maintains the efficiency of the SSD... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted October 27, 2014 Share Posted October 27, 2014 (edited) i had read that you should keep the windows temp files path and all the other temp file paths in other partition other than SSD for it to work fast and efficiently.. this keeps much free space in the SSD for our regular work and it also maintains the efficiency of the SSD... You should try to maintain a 20-25% of your SSD free for it to work as fast as possible, but that is true with all media, HDDs included. In reality the performance hit going to higher utilization than 75-80% is far-far smaller and less noticeable than going above 50% utilization with HDDs in real life scenarios. Having temp files on the SSD is a non-issue with OSs that facilitate a TRIM function (e.g. Windows 7 or newer, OSX 10.7 or newer with supported utilities). The drives are designed to clean up redundant cells restoring performance and do it pretty successfully given there is enough free space. Many of those "shoulds" are dated quite a few years back, when SSDs were young and had some teething issues that are solved for quite some time. Again, given you have a SSD "aware" OS and a SSD drive that is less than 2-3 years old, there are no "tricks and secrets". SSDs just work better, more reliably and more consistently than HDDs all the time with less maintenance in every possible way. Edited October 27, 2014 by dtolios Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frog_a_lot Posted October 28, 2014 Share Posted October 28, 2014 I have heard it is bad practice to let photoshop or other similar programs use the SSD as a scratch disk.. ie; any program that is constantly reading/writing to an SSD will shorten its lifespan significantly. Im not sure if this is the case with all SSDs or just older ones. Max/Vray doesn't need to write very often so your textures and scene files would be fine to store on a SSD if you have the room. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
braddewald Posted October 28, 2014 Author Share Posted October 28, 2014 I have heard it is bad practice to let photoshop or other similar programs use the SSD as a scratch disk Wouldn't that negate any sort of increased speeds you'd hope to see using an SSD? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted October 28, 2014 Share Posted October 28, 2014 (edited) I have heard it is bad practice to let photoshop or other similar programs use the SSD as a scratch disk.. ie; any program that is constantly reading/writing to an SSD will shorten its lifespan significantly. Im not sure if this is the case with all SSDs or just older ones. Max/Vray doesn't need to write very often so your textures and scene files would be fine to store on a SSD if you have the room. Again, this is dated (by quite a few years, like 5+) or misinformed rumors for anyone refering to modern SSDs. Modern SSDs are so realiable and durable, that no HDD could ever dream to come close to. And I don't recall anyone advising against using HDDs for scratch disks - am I wrong? Take a look at this very well known and documented endurance test by the tech report. This is the last portion of it, with only a couple of drives surpassing 1.5 Penta Bytes of writes. That is 1.5 Million Gigabytes of writes, that equals more than 50,000 days or 137 years of writing 30GiB a day. And that is an above average workload, most users won't be writing more than 10GiB a day... MLC drives like the Samsung 840 Pro / 830 Pro series already are proven to exceed 6-10 times what the manufacturer promises through the given SMART values. TLC drives like the Samsung 840 EVO are promised to last around 28 years @ 10GiB / day writes, or 9+ @ 30GiB / day. So that's the conservative estimate, while for HDDs the conservative estimates are around 4 years of life in a heavy workload, at 1/5 to 1/10th the performance. During those endurance test, no SSD (and we are talking 3-4yo designs already) died before achieving 700TB or writes. That is 63 years of 30GiB/day writes - again, an above average workload for any HDD. Moreover, HDDs usually die suddenly and catastrophically, while most of those SSDs warn you in advance and just retire their cells that are diagnosed as running low in endurance, maintaining read-only capabilities for all your data - i.e. when your SSD "dies", it usually doesn't lose its data, it just denies you to write more stuff on it. Edited October 28, 2014 by dtolios Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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