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Speed up VW2017 with SSD


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My new VW2017 is a lot slower than VW2016 – especially when working with textures. So I figured, I needed more RAM in my iMac from 2015.

 

To my horror, I discovered, that new iMacs cannot be upgraded with RAM – at all. Seems like an important thing to tell a prospective buyer.

 

So I purchased a somewhat expensive external 500Gb thunderbolt SSD drive.

 

I installed it as my startup drive today – and placed everything relevant to VectorWorks on it. Other programs and files are still on the internal disc.

 

Wheeeeeehe – that thing runs like the wind!

 

I may be the last person to know about this, but if I am not, I highly recommend it.

Edited by Kaare Baekgaard
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

A Solid State Drive is one of the best computer upgrades you can buy! Not just for Vectorworks, but the quality of life improvement it provides to all interactions with your machine is amazing. I'm glad you are enjoying it and I highly recommend it for anyone whose machine still uses a spinning platter HDD.

(Note on external SSDs - Most likely Kaare connected this via Thunderbolt or USB 3.1 if he is seeing excellent speeds. Make sure to use at least USB 3.1 or a faster connection for an external drive or your speed will be bottlenecked by the connection to your machine. Installing the SSD internally also gets around this bottleneck.)

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Kaare can of course answer also, but FireWire is likely too slow to get the real benefit. Even FireWire 1600 is only something like twice as fast as USB 2, which is generally slower than a regular HDD if you hooked it up externally. But I think on the 2009 MacBook Pros replacing the HDD with an SSD is doable internally with only a few screws.

This is a decent chart showing approximate connection speeds, you will want to use a connection that is at least as fast as eSATA (SATA300):

Screen Shot 2016-11-03 at 3.11.04 PM.png

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
1 hour ago, Phil hunt said:

I run vw on iMac would an external hard drive speed things up my end with the spec of my machine.   Thanks 

 

External only if you installed the operating system and Vectorworks on it generally as described above. I think the 27in iMacs had Thunderbolt 1 or 2 which should work well with a Thunderbolt external drive bay with an SSD installed in it. (external Thunderbolt drive bays are a bit pricey compared to external USB drive bays but MUCH faster, going with USB 1 or 2 might actually make it even slower than the original HDD.)

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Any advice on using ssd on desktop pc? I currently run 2x hdd wth Vw on one of them (no usb3). It's pretty good, but I 've noticed that my Lenovo laptop with sdd seems to run nice & smoothly (albeit I only use it to view files).

Likely upgrading my pc in next year, maybe one sdd drive and one hdd? Have seen VW suggested system requirements, but any advice on creating 'the best' vw machine would be fantastic!

thanks

Mark

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/5/2016 at 5:07 AM, MRD2016A said:

Any advice on using ssd on desktop pc? I currently run 2x hdd wth Vw on one of them (no usb3). It's pretty good, but I 've noticed that my Lenovo laptop with sdd seems to run nice & smoothly (albeit I only use it to view files).

Likely upgrading my pc in next year, maybe one sdd drive and one hdd? Have seen VW suggested system requirements, but any advice on creating 'the best' vw machine would be fantastic!

thanks

Mark

 

 

Get the biggest SSD you can afford.  My current laptop, which is long in the tooth, has a split 256SSD/1TB HD - I thought that would be plenty - you end up wanting to put everything on the fast drive - you run out of space real quick.  They are still crazy expensive - but I in two years you will have wished you put down the extra 300 bucks for the 1TB...

Or as discussed above - make sure you have a Thunderbolt - and then you can expand if needed.

Make sure to get one of the new generation GPUs.  They seem to be a big jump over the previous generation and are well priced.  

 

@JimW- Would you still see a performance boost if your OS and VW were installed on an internal SSD and your files are on an external SSD via Thunderbolt?  Or is best practice to have the program and files on the same disk?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

You'd see an improvement in speed vs a spinning platter HDD but not likely against another SSD of comparable speed.

 

Storing files on external storage is fine as long as you aren't disconnecting the external storage without saying and closing first. The speed of this external storage vs the speed of your internal SSD is what would determine a performance difference.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Generally as long as Vectorworks can have 6GB to 8GB all to itself you will not hit any limits even when rendering. Usually this means having 12-16GB total on the machine if you regularly keep any other heavy applications open all at the same time (or even dozens of browser tabs in some cases) is plenty. 

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