HDD OR SSD?

[michael john williams]

VW is running slow on my PC and 'not responding' quite frequently and takes time to start. 3 minutes to open up. At times several minutes to render simple 3D viewports in HL. The pc is taking time to start up. Can crash at times especially with renderworks. My IT adviser says a new SSD of 500GB or 1TB would improve performance. The existing drive is a HDD. The existing c drive 500 GB HDD may be coming to iyts end of life. So what's best for VW and rendering - HDD or SSD?

[nca777]

What are the rest of your pc specs?

 

ssd's are generally faster, but this sounds more like ram or processor issues.

[PVA - Admin]

1 hour ago, michael john williams said:

So what's best for VW and rendering - HDD or SSD?

An SSD is superior in all ways other than total storage capacity for the price.

However, as far as Vectorworks is concerned; Application load time, file open, file save, and file referencing or other operations where objects or resources are read from one location and written to another (copy/pasting from one file to another, mainly) are the only things that would see speed increases. Geometry calculation and rendering do not do a huge amount of disk read/write in Vectorworks so they won't see much of a performance change.
 

[MRD Mark Ridgewell]

Recently installed one of these,

 

1tb SSD (crucial). UK product link:

http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/ct1050mx300ssd1

 

Performance wise, 100% recommend an SDD ; reinvigorated my pc!

 

[P Retondo]

Jim is correct.  I installed an SSD on my tower computer over a year ago, and boot time for 2017 VW Designer with Renderworks is now 32 seconds - authentication is the one thing that remains slow.  But SSD is just a disk storage device, it doesn't improve the speed with which the computer handles operations.  That depends on the speed of your processor, and the amount and speed of your RAM - the dynamic memory into which the disk storage loads your program.  I have an Intel Xeon processor at 3.47 Ghz, with 6 parallel processors, 6 GB RAM, and (also important) an nvidia Quaddro 4000 graphics card.  I highly recommend this set of hardware for speed.

[michael john williams]

Thank you or your replies. The pc is a Dell Precision T5610 with 64 bit operating system and has 16GB RAM, 2.10GHz processor and 500GB HDD [50% used]. NVIDIA Quadro K40000 graphics. Perhaps and if there is a slot available, I add a 1TB SDD to run alongside the existing HDD?

[PVA - Admin]

You CAN but the main benefit from an SSD is the speed gained from having your operating system and all applications stored on it. If your OS and apps are still on the old HDD, it wont be any faster.

[nca777]

6 hours ago, michael john williams said:

Thank you or your replies. The pc is a Dell Precision T5610 with 64 bit operating system and has 16GB RAM, 2.10GHz processor and 500GB HDD [50% used]. NVIDIA Quadro K40000 graphics. Perhaps and if there is a slot available, I add a 1TB SDD to run alongside the existing HDD?

Your ram is good.

 

It sounds like your processor might barely meet the minimum rec'd spec to run vw. Your graphics card is also on the slower side based on the pass mark scores. How much vram? It's pretty common to run an ssd along with an hdd--put all of your programs on the hdd and operating system only on the ssd. 

 

Our studio machines all fly with 

core I-7 3.0+ ghz processors

16gb + ram 

~120-500gb ssd's and 1tb hdd's

Gtx 970 980 cards 3-4gb vram

 

You might only see minimal success with only upgrading to ssd 

[MRD Mark Ridgewell]

VW aside, an SSD may improve performance of PC in general use/ other software. With HDD my PC took an age to start, now a matter of seconds. That alone made it worth the investment for me. If money no object, then new PC!