magneto Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 Hi, This might be a stupid idea but is it a good idea to use 2 M.2 SSDs in raid 0 for temporary caching? http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-sm951-m2-pcie-ssds-raid0-performance_161753 I don't know if 4.5GB/s is real but if it's, I can only imagine it helping to read big cache files very fast, right? I notice it takes a lot of time to read the cache files of off disks when playing an animation in Houdini, even for 100MB files I think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukeiamyourfather Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 No, it's not smart in my opinion to ever use RAID 0 for any reason. Though I'm a little biased when comes to data storage leaning towards data integrity and redundancy. Throughput is one factor of many that determines performance. Even if the storage can provide thousands of megabytes a seconds doesn't mean Houdini can process it that quickly. A good test would be to use system memory for a temporary drive and compare that to a single hard drive (best case versus worst case) to get an idea of how much of a factor the storage really is. Then make a decision based on that. My guess is you'll find spending $1,000+ on storage for simulation caching won't be worth it, but a single SSD might be worth it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 (edited) I would only Raid 0 to get speed out of cheaper platter disks. SSDs already are quite fast, and with .bgeo.gz/sc cache files being compressed by default it may be CPU bound more than disk speed too. Edited September 17, 2015 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itriix Posted September 18, 2015 Share Posted September 18, 2015 I was wondering the same thing. Glad to hear I don't need to buy 2 m.2s for raid 0! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malexander Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 I would use a PCI-Express x4 SSD card if you need very fast caching, such as the Intel 750 series SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167300. Not all RAID controllers support trim in RAID mode. Trim helps keep SSD performance at peak levels and without it performance will degrade over time. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magneto Posted September 21, 2015 Author Share Posted September 21, 2015 I would use a PCI-Express x4 SSD card if you need very fast caching, such as the Intel 750 series SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167300. Not all RAID controllers support trim in RAID mode. Trim helps keep SSD performance at peak levels and without it performance will degrade over time. Wow, those are NVMe devices? Would Houdini be able keep up with these read speeds? It would be really awesome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itriix Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 Wow, those are NVMe devices? Would Houdini be able keep up with these read speeds? It would be really awesome. I hope Houdini can keep up! I want to use one NVMe for os/apps and one for cache/sims i/o. Samsung will release their 950 pro's in October supposedly: (right now, you have to check the actual part number in order to determine if a SM951 is NVMe or not)! http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/samsung-launches-nvme-m-2-950-pro-ssd-for-the-masses Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magneto Posted September 22, 2015 Author Share Posted September 22, 2015 I hope Houdini can keep up! I want to use one NVMe for os/apps and one for cache/sims i/o. Samsung will release their 950 pro's in October supposedly: (right now, you have to check the actual part number in order to determine if a SM951 is NVMe or not)! http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/samsung-launches-nvme-m-2-950-pro-ssd-for-the-masses I read for i7 CPUs, using 2 of these with a grapnics card will hinder of the cards' PCI lanes. I will check for samsung too. I thought they only had SM951 which says AHCI. It says it's much faster and the price is cheaper for 512 too. Worth to wait I think unless Mark can chime in http://www.techpowerup.com/216209/samsung-announces-the-950-pro-consumer-m-2-pcie-ssd.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) I'm seeing almost no difference between a Ram disk and an SSD in loading ~350MB bgeo/.sc takes ~4secs to load into Houdini. Disk speed tests results: Using Black Magic Disk Speed Test: Ram Disk DDR3 1066MHz 2.3 GB/s SSD 'INTEL SSDSC2BP240G4 Media' 0.25 GB/s OSX 10.10.4, H 14.0.453, 2 x 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon X5680 Edited September 22, 2015 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukeiamyourfather Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 Nice test. I'm curious about much larger caches, like flip booking a simulation that's 20GB or something like that where it loads a much larger data set. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted September 23, 2015 Share Posted September 23, 2015 (edited) We'll have to come up with a good test. Packing some 35MB files, for a 1.5GB sequence, made no difference - thought I could bypass Houdini and display it direct to the GPU via a packed bgeo. A lightweight particle sim was essentially the same read speed @ 27fps. Edited September 23, 2015 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magneto Posted September 23, 2015 Author Share Posted September 23, 2015 So no need to jump on these fancy drives for Houdini usage? It would also be interesting to try these ideas in other apps like Maya, but also compositing apps, where I read that they benefit hugely for playback of high res image sequences. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted September 23, 2015 Share Posted September 23, 2015 (edited) At this stage in testing I would say SSD is good enough, read/write speed may be different though for different things - particles vs vdb etc that is yet to be tested. 2d comp apps are similar to Houdini, they have a limit, but 2d editing apps can really benefit as they don't need to cross reference other pixels in general AFAIK. Edit: A few more tests and thus far it appears on this computer Houdini can load and display at ~100MB/sec Edited September 23, 2015 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malexander Posted September 25, 2015 Share Posted September 25, 2015 While manufacturers tout the sequential read and write speeds of SSDs, where you see the real difference between an SSD and a HD RAID0 setup is random read and write speed. Random reads occur when a lot of small files are accessed, or a few large files are randomly seeked (ie, Alembic, RAT). HD performance falls through the floor in this case, handling barely 1MB/s in the 4K random read test. SSDs can often do almost 100MB/s in this test, especially the high-end ones. But before dropping a lot of money on a big SSD for caching, try a small SSD (if you have one around) and see if disk access is a bottleneck for you. I have a 256GB system SSD, and a small 64GB SSD that I use for my swap partition and /tmp (really nice when my mem gets full, the system doesn't grind to a screeching halt as it swaps). The HD still does all the heavy lifting of test cases & data. I've found that yes, the SSD does load some scenes a bit faster, and is faster for Alembic and image reading, but not so significantly so that I'd pony up for a 1TB SSD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukeiamyourfather Posted September 25, 2015 Share Posted September 25, 2015 While manufacturers tout the sequential read and write speeds of SSDs, where you see the real difference between an SSD and a HD RAID0 setup is random read and write speed. Random reads occur when a lot of small files are accessed, or a few large files are randomly seeked (ie, Alembic, RAT). HD performance falls through the floor in this case, handling barely 1MB/s in the 4K random read test. SSDs can often do almost 100MB/s in this test, especially the high-end ones. Another factor is what the application does with the data. Does it have to decompress it, does it have to reorganize or process it, does it have to cull it, etc. The processing of the data before the user can do something with it might take far longer than any disk IO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magneto Posted September 26, 2015 Author Share Posted September 26, 2015 While manufacturers tout the sequential read and write speeds of SSDs, where you see the real difference between an SSD and a HD RAID0 setup is random read and write speed. Random reads occur when a lot of small files are accessed, or a few large files are randomly seeked (ie, Alembic, RAT). HD performance falls through the floor in this case, handling barely 1MB/s in the 4K random read test. SSDs can often do almost 100MB/s in this test, especially the high-end ones. But before dropping a lot of money on a big SSD for caching, try a small SSD (if you have one around) and see if disk access is a bottleneck for you. I have a 256GB system SSD, and a small 64GB SSD that I use for my swap partition and /tmp (really nice when my mem gets full, the system doesn't grind to a screeching halt as it swaps). The HD still does all the heavy lifting of test cases & data. I've found that yes, the SSD does load some scenes a bit faster, and is faster for Alembic and image reading, but not so significantly so that I'd pony up for a 1TB SSD. I read that Samsung 950 Pro is gonna have better random read than Intel 750 that focuses on sequential I think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted September 27, 2015 Share Posted September 27, 2015 For SSDs I didn't know how accurate the reports that 'trim' was important but OsX has shown it is. ~8 months of usage has dropped the Write speed from 230MB/s to ~110MB/s. Read speed is the same at ~265MB/s. Luckily the latest OsX now support it for non-apple branded disks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 (edited) While manufacturers tout the sequential read and write speeds of SSDs, where you see the real difference between an SSD and a HD RAID0 setup is random read and write speed. Random reads occur when a lot of small files are accessed, or a few large files are randomly seeked (ie, Alembic, RAT). HD performance falls through the floor in this case, handling barely 1MB/s in the 4K random read test. SSDs can often do almost 100MB/s in this test, especially the high-end ones. This pretty much bears out in a recent test: LaCie 4Big striped as Raid 5+1(6), eSata card to Mac Pro Cheesegratter. OsX 10.10.5 Read: 214 MB/s Write: 227 MB/s Rewrite 67.9 MB/s Read latency: 427 ms Write latency: 112ms Rewrite latency: 436 ms Intel SSD sata 3Gb/s connection. Trim just enabled. Read: 269 MB/s Write: 91.3 MB/s Rewrite 89.4 MB/s Read latency: 13 ms Write latency: 154 ms Rewrite latency: 86 ms Edited September 28, 2015 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
magneto Posted October 1, 2015 Author Share Posted October 1, 2015 http://www.computerworld.com/article/2987956/solid-state-drives/intel-samsung-launch-their-fastest-ssds-with-up-to-5gbps-speeds.html "Intel's new P3608 Series PCIe SSD comes in 1.6TB, 3.2TB and 4GTB capacities and delivers up to 850,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) random reads and 150,000 random writes. The drive has a sequential read/write speed of up to 5,000MBps (5Gbps) and 3,000MBps (3Gbps), respectively. Intel did not offer pricing for either of its new SSDs." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted October 1, 2015 Share Posted October 1, 2015 (edited) The drive has a sequential read/write speed of up to 5,000MBps (5Gbps) and 3,000MBps (3Gbps), respectively. That's not amazing though - in MegaBytes it's read 625, write 375 EDIT: Oh I see - the Bytes and Bits are mixed up. Not sure what the real data is. One is amazing, the other is okay. Edited October 1, 2015 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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