Author Topic: Hardware / Which type of disk to use?  (Read 2426 times)

2022-01-11, 16:49:14

Joris

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Hi all,

I have a question about which hard disk to choose, for the moment I'm using these:
A/ 1x SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus - 2 TB SSD (read/speed 3500 MB/sec - write/speed 3300 MB/sec)
B/ 1x SAMSUNG 870 EVO - 4 TB SSD (read/speed 560 MB/sec - write/speed 530 MB/sec)
In addition to these two, there's another dedicated windows disk.

So if I'm using disk (B) (4TB Samsung) for both assets (textures, 3D-models, HDRI's...) and projects (3DsMax files), will that be ok? Or will this drive be a bottleneck for speed / performance somehow?
If so, are there advantages in choosing the faster disk (A), for example:
- when caching data
- while starting / running the interactive render
- while starting / running the production render
- when opening / saving 3DsMax or CIE files
- any or other (dis)advantages?

Or should I use disk (A) for assets and disk (B) for projects or better the way around?
Another option is to replace disk A with a 4TB version, but is that worth the price and would I really notice a difference?

I guess most of this depends on how the data and assets (3D-models, proxies, textures, forest pack assets, ...)  are accessed, stored, written, cached, ... and it would be helpful if you could give some guidance.
I guess it's always best to use the fastest medium, but will the difference in read/write speed be really noticeable?

By the way I got this reply from Corona Support, but they also guided me here to ask for your experience ;)

As you've mentioned, it boils down to using the fastest medium as your repository, you shouldn't notice any significant slowdowns even on an (read/speed 560 MB/sec - write/speed 530 MB/sec), anything bellow 210 MB/sec should have an obvious effect in scenes that use really heavy assets, textures or metadata.

Do note that it became somewhat harder to quantify certain things with regards to loading, caching since Corona now utilizes asynchronous loading, this makes things way more complicated but quite more optimized for loading times. The biggest difference you would notice on a slow vs. fast drives is when opening a heavy scene (1+ GB of associated asset data), saving it, utilization of non-memory loaded proxies, loading or calling heavy HDRIs, STL files etc. (this doesn't include the slowdowns introduced by excess in startup scripts, user macros and high face viewport count).


Regarding the asynchronous loading of textures they suggested to wait for a dev. answer first as they are in a better position to explain what is happening.

Thanks!

2022-01-24, 19:27:44
Reply #1

Joris

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Hi,

No answer yet... Is there anything I could do to help?
I found some similar topics, but it's not very clear to me what the best approach would be.

Any help would be appreciated ;)

Joris

2022-01-25, 00:07:48
Reply #2

clemens_at

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Drive A for assets is a bit overkill in my opinion.
Your system should run very fast even with your assets on Drive B.

2022-01-30, 19:51:30
Reply #3

Joris

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Thanks!

I'll do it this way then ;)