Hans Peter Posted July 7, 2017 Share Posted July 7, 2017 (edited) Hey, currently I'm caching my sim stuff out to a 7200 rpm HDD. Loading times can get pretty heavy from time to time - depending on the scene. I guess saving times are also pretty high which can strech simming times a bit. I want a SSD drive with up to 2 TB. Maybe you have some experience you wanna share. My boot drive is an M2 SSD with 512 GB. Really fast but to smal for caching out bigger sims to disk. Gracias! Edited July 7, 2017 by Heraklit Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 7, 2017 Share Posted July 7, 2017 it depends what you are caching - the compressed cache for flips takes quite a bit to decompress and produce useable data - so its more cpu bound than other types of caches. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hans Peter Posted July 7, 2017 Author Share Posted July 7, 2017 (edited) FLIP, PYRO, Whitewater, RBD etc. Whitewater caches for example take really long to load when being beyond 30 million. CPU is a 6950X @ 4 to 4.2 GHZ. I did some tests with caching out a few 100 GB to my SSD. Its just faster to work with and feels much more comfortable. Can happen that I have to wait 30 sec for a scene to load a new frame. Of course I don't want an SSD with 2 TB with the same speed. Something intermediate... Edited July 7, 2017 by Heraklit Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nigelgardiner Posted July 18, 2017 Share Posted July 18, 2017 Will you get fast enough bus speed to an external drive to warrant it being an ssd? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 18, 2017 Share Posted July 18, 2017 SSDs are great for random access too, also USB 3.1 is incredible fast and should be fine for connecting externally along with eSATA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nigelgardiner Posted July 19, 2017 Share Posted July 19, 2017 ah right usb3, wondered about that. i tested speeds with an external ssd recently and the results were too slow, older motherboard tho so only usb2 I guess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hans Peter Posted July 23, 2017 Author Share Posted July 23, 2017 (edited) Still didn't buy a new one but using the inbuild SSD. Man, its just awesome. 30 million particles are loading on no time. That just took forever with a 7500 RPM drive. About 20 sec to load a frame vs. around 2 sec. Also the simming process is much faster due to the faster writing. Just about everything is getting boosted. Even flipbooking of heavy scenes took too long with normal HDDs. Since the new flip tools are just saving a thin layer of fuid I can easily save a 100x100 m flip sim with around 120 GB + 100 GB whitewater and still have room left. Of course only during one project. would delete everything again when not used anamore. I surely will buy a bigger SSD soon. Love it. Edited July 23, 2017 by Heraklit Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 23, 2017 Share Posted July 23, 2017 Nice to hear! Is there any delay with the CPU rebuilding the compressed particles? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hans Peter Posted July 24, 2017 Author Share Posted July 24, 2017 (edited) May be that its delaying the whole stuff but in the end there will be data to load from and write to disk. Didn't thought the HDD could be such a big bottle neck. when a ww sim takes 40 sec per frame and more than half of it consists out of saving stuff to disk you can easily see whats the difference. Just made a test. Copied one ww frame from the ssd to the hard drive. that alone took 23 seconds. Copying directly to the ssd pretty much isn't taking time at all. Edited July 24, 2017 by Heraklit Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukeiamyourfather Posted July 24, 2017 Share Posted July 24, 2017 20 hours ago, marty said: Is there any delay with the CPU rebuilding the compressed particles? If I recall correctly Houdini is using LZ4 now which on a modern CPU can handle many gigabytes per second of throughput. The bottleneck here is going to be the storage device. I'm familiar with LZ4 when used with ZFS where reading and writing data that's compressed is actually faster than working with uncompressed data. This is very different from the old Gzip compression which has a slightly better compression ratio but is horrifically slow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted July 24, 2017 Share Posted July 24, 2017 (edited) NVMe sounds incredibly useful! What a nice addition to the Performance Monitor that would be - disk read/write times! Edited July 24, 2017 by tar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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