[brodie_geers]

I'm looking to upgrade my rendering computer and the boss is footing the bill so money's secondary as far as concerns go (the main concern is that it has to be good at both modeling AND rendering as it'll be an all-around computer). At first I dismissed the idea of a solid state drive as they still feel sort of new and underdeveloped. However, upon thinking further I wonder if a solid state drive may indeed be a significant help. After all, the rendering doesn't begin until the full MXI is written to the hard drive and then it has to rewrite it at every update. So in theory with the increased write speeds, I'd get a much quicker start to the render and subsequently the updates would be much faster.

Am I missing anything here? Do any of you have a SSD and have you noticed any difference regarding Maxwell in particular?

-Brodie

[Half Life]

Read speed is a bigger deal with Solid State Drives than Write speed -- write speeds tend to be only slightly faster in most SSD.

Maxwell will launch faster and your files will open quicker -- quickly enough that if you find yourself waiting around for things to open it may be worth the money.

Best,
Jason.

[Bubbaloo]

I run Windows on an SSD drive. But it's not large enough to put much more programs on it. But Windows boots up FAST. 10 seconds... As soon as it's in the budget, I'll upgrade to a larger one to run Maxwell and RF simulations on. I'd say go for it.

[brodie_geers]

Have you ever had any issues with it at all? I've heard occasional horror stories that make me skiddish about using it in a workstation environment.

-Brodie

[Bubbaloo]

So far, it's great. (about 6 months)

[JDHill]

Something like a year and a half now on my two 80GB Intels. Can't say much about MXI-writing though; I never specifically tried to measure that.

[brodie_geers]

JD, well that's good to know. If it's not terribly noticeable then that may help the decision. I was considering a 160 gb intel SSD. May still do it as I go back and forth a lot between AutoCAD, photoshop and 3ds Max which are all beastly to open. Should help that arena. I'm also thinking the intel 980x which seems to be the best you can get before going to something like a Xeon which then becomes a trade off - render speed for modeling (OpenGL) speed as well as other single threaded tasks. And one of the new nVidia Fermi cards, the 4000 looks nice but may be overkill as I don't do video editing very often.

-Brodie

[numerobis]

i have just build a new sys with sandforce ssd 120gb (285MB/s read, 275MB/s write) and i have to say as system drive the ssd it's really nice but in maxwell the ssd is slower than my 1TB 7200rpm Samsung F3 hdd in RAID1!

I have done some testing with the benchwell scene at 10000x8000px (2,38GB mxi file) with a target sl of 5 and here is the (quite disappointing) result:

ssd__sl5___14m04s___benchmark 1249.26
ssd__sl5___14m13s___benchmark 1236.09

hdd__sl5___13m48s___benchmark 1273.39

i have done 2 runs for both setups and i got different result for the ssd and 100% the same for the hdd, so that's why i post 2 results for the ssd. maybe it's a problem that the system (win7 x64) is on the ssd too, i don't know...

the normal benchwell result is

ssd___4m44s__bm2248.61
hdd___4m45s__bm2240.79

In AS SSD benchmark from the great 285MB/s read, 275MB/s write you only get 207MB/s read, 130MB/s write. And these are normal values... i don't know what these 275MB/s should mean... but in real life you don't see them.

The samsung F3 has a max write transfer rate of ~150MB/s. So when it's empty (what it is in my case) then it has a higher transfer rate than the ssd. But it will go down to 75MB/s on the inner end and has only an average write transfer rate of ~110MB/s. The ssd will have nearly constant 130MB/s.

I think the best option for rendering speed on big mxi files is still a RAID0 with two or more fast hhd's. My rendernodes have 2 samsung F4 320GB (one platter and only 35€!) in RAID0 - cheap and fast! ...but quite unsave compared to ssd or raid1 - i use it only for the nodes, where no data is stored.

I have chosen the ssd for my workstation because it speeds up the system and it's totally quiet. I think it's still too early to get much better results from ssd's around 150-250€ but i think with the next generation and sata 6G it will become better.

btw. there has been a price drop for sandforce ssd's in the last weeks... ~200€ for 120GB! i have bought mine 6 weeks ago for 250€!

[brodie_geers]

wow, great info. Interesting results from your tests. I'm glad I found these things out ahead of time so I didn't factor in render times to heavily into my equation.

-Brodie