i know an ssd would speed up boot and application load times, but are they going to speed up everyday working/rendering in blender?
i assume the only improvements would be when the hard drive is a noticeable bottleneck, like if a scene references lots of high resolution texture files, or has a large smoke/fluid cache.
am i overlooking any fundamental benefits? anyone with an ssd have any thoughts?
i’m looking at a new system soon, and trying to do a cost-benefit analysis of hdd vs ssd, sata-2 vs sata-3, etc. the main places i’m looking for performance boosts are in 3d software and motion graphics work.
Exactly as you say, tasks wich normally involves heavy disk load, like caches, compositing when playing back image sequences directly from disk (normally loaded to ram in most compositors anyway), or swapping when you’re out of ram are the areas in wich SSD disk reaps it’s benefints. I mean it’s a storage device and as such a faster storage device is only relevant to disk reading/writing as far as performance is concerned.
When rendering out of renderers wich support streaming alot of things from disk (like Renderman/Reyes and other “production” renderers) it would also be relevant with an SSD.
Video editing applications would probably see large performance gains since those read alot from disk at huge data rates if you’re working with uncompressed data. The same goes for many compsitors, where you often work with image sequences with uncompressed data (but you’ll probably utilise a smaller resolution proxy in most compositors, and/or have a small part of the sequence loaded in RAM).
Then if it has some kind of impact on CPU load I highly doubt, if it would indeed affect CPU load it’s probably nothing noticable, and probably only relevant to disk reading/writing situations anyways
If you’re normally multitasking and have some application in the background doing lots of reading and/or writing to disk wich would normally disturb the performance of your 3d application but as stated, it’s a faster storage device that’s all
