Install 3D Coat on an SSD Drive

[AbnRanger]

I had previously installed 3D Coat on a Western Digitial Raptor Hard Drive (10,000RPM's), so I thought that would be close to the same speed, loading the app and all, to what I had heard about SSD drives. Finally bought one of those SSD drives, for not only 3D Coat, but After Effects and Premiere Pro. Dang, folks....if you haven't already made the move to SSD drives, you need to. I can't believe how much faster 3D Coat loads now. Used to have to wait 30-60sec, for it to fully load. Now, it's almost instantaneous. Probably will make Paint Room faster, too...loading textures/layers much faster.

[Carlosan]

nice to know

ty for sharing

[Marc Wakefield]

I have a small ssd on my new Y580. I am moving 3D Coat to it right now.

Thanks for the tip.

[popwfx]

are the WD larger hybrid drives just as good (perceptually? not benchmark-wise)

They are blazing with premiere & photoshop but havent tried them on my 3DC machine. Though I heard Crucial just released a $600 1TB drive ( http://www.extremetech.com/computing/152969-crucial-m500-the-first-1tb-ssd-priced-at-just-0-60gig )

[AbnRanger]

are the WD larger hybrid drives just as good (perceptually? not benchmark-wise)

They are blazing with premiere & photoshop but havent tried them on my 3DC machine. Though I heard Crucial just released a $600 1TB drive ( http://www.extremete...at-just-0-60gig )

I don't know about those, but with RAM being relatively inexpensive these days, you could use AMD's RAMDisk to install your most demanding apps. on it and it would read/write roughly 10x faster than even the fastest SSD drives. It's freeware up to 6GB and if you buy AMD memory they give you larger amounts free.

Basically what it is, is software that allocates a chunk of your RAM and assigns it as a virtual drive for Windows. So, you could load software like 3D Coat, Blender, After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc onto this "virtual drive" and have them load and operate much faster.

http://www.radeonmemory.com/index.php

More Tuts:

http://www.radeonmem...t_tutorials.php

Since a 3D Coat user can get free access to 6GB (and one can unlock up to 64GB for under $20), I wonder if Andrew can tap into that by enabling some sort of cache system for paint layers

[Zeddicus]

Dang, folks....if you haven't already made the move to SSD drives, you need to. I can't believe how much faster 3D Coat loads now.

I upgraded from a 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor as well and it really was a night and day difference, totally worth the investment. I'd stay away from anything less than 128 GB though. The first one I got was 60 GB (more like 52 GB) and between Windows 7 and installing all the necessary apps, there wasn't enough space left over to install even one video game. I'm pretty happy with the pair of 256GB Vertex 4's I have now though.

And that's with TrueCrypt's whole disk encryption too amazingly. Gotta give some of the credit to AES-NI though which really does make a big difference (feels as if it's not encrypted at all compared to my previous PC).

By the way a useful application for the paranoid is SSD Life which helps track reliability. I run it every six months or so and also store a screenshot. I also try to do all the recommended stuff for prolonging their longevity as well, like turning off automatic defragging in the scheduler; anything that involves unnecessary writes basically.

I'll have to play with that RAM-Disk software too as it looks quite intriguing. I may give this one a try as well. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against an SSD and whether the difference is noticeable.

are the WD larger hybrid drives just as good (perceptually? not benchmark-wise)

I've never used a hybrid so I honestly couldn't say. Looking at benchmarks (yeah, I know) of the 8GB one by Seagate shows it falls somewhere between a HDD and SSD, usually leaning more towards the HDD side performance-wise. It's hard to say whether the difference would be noticeable coming from a 7,200 or 10,000 RPM HDD. I have no doubt it would be against a 5400 RPM drive though, like a WD EARS 2TB or similar.

You'll definitely want one of those newer 20GB ones if you plan on putting the bloated Windows Vista/7/8 operating system on it. One down side I can think of might be dual booting another operating system; it probably won't fit on the SSD side if Windows is already on there. I also wonder how being both an SSD and HDD affects latency? This is the reason you never have to defrag an SSD I think. You may lose out on some other SSD benefits by going hybrid too, like the fact they're lighter, have no moving parts, generate less heat, and use less power which could all potentially matter if it's going into a laptop. To be honest though, that's all just guessing on my part.

[philnolan3d]

I'd love to get an SSD drive but really I need a whole news system. I built this in 2007 and It's getting to the point where it's upgraded as far as it will go and is starting to lag behind. Gotta get some bigger jobs in.

[AbnRanger]

I'd love to get an SSD drive but really I need a whole news system. I built this in 2007 and It's getting to the point where it's upgraded as far as it will go and is starting to lag behind. Gotta get some bigger jobs in.

Not really. I was looking on Ebay for another render box, and came across some pretty good deals on used systems. You can get a modest upgrade (and use your current system as an extra render node/box) for a few hundred. This is a good example. The i7 950 is twice as fast as the Core 2 Quad 2.4...higher clock speeds and 8 threads. Should be plenty of punch until Intel or AMD comes out with something truly impressive. CPU development has slowed down to a crawl compared to the pace 5-10yrs ago. So, spending 4-5 times as much for a modest improvement is not too smart, IMHO.

AMD threw in the towel about a year ago, in the high-end market. Their CEO even stated so, publicly. I'm sure Intel suspected well before that point, that AMD was incapable or unwilling to keep up...so they have really throttled the pace of innovation down dramatically. For example, we should have seen an 8-12 core CPU (w/ Hyperthreading that would be 16-24 threads) by now. Even their (soon to be released) 4th gen cpus offer very little performance gain (roughly 10%) over what is currently on the market. Seems Intel...having conquered the high-end market over the past 2-3yrs...is trying to turn it's attention to Graphics capability on the chip (Haswell line), as AMD has done rather successfully, recently. But that's catering to the (low-end) value and mobile markets. The enthusiasts are left hanging...with nothing ground-breaking for the past 2yrs or so.

The Phenom X6 (1090t) CPU is over 2yrs old now, and the best CPU AMD makes now is the FX 8350....which only offers about 15-20% improvement. That i7 950 I mentioned is the closest competitor to my 1090t, and it does have better rendering benchmarks. The current line of i7's are not a major improvement, except the 6 core i7 3930 ($600+). So, I would recommend finding a steal on a used kit, like this, maybe:

http://www.ebay.com/...E:B:WNA:US:3160

One just like it, went yesterday for $275

CPUboss.com is a good resource to compare CPU models to each other

Conversely, the GPU arms race is alive and well. This is why I keep trying to push Andrew to shift to GPU reliance rather than CPU reliance. VRay RT has both OpenCL and CUDA options, as well as CPU. In my tests, CUDA spanks both, handily.

[philnolan3d]

Well I'm glad it won't cost a fortune at least. I will need to get in some bigger jobs though. Got a lot of other bills lately.