Solid State Drive vs. Crucial Adrenaline (SSD Cache)?

[minilogoguy18]

Anyone out there rocking either solution? The chache drive is far cheaper than the actual permanate drive but with not as fast performance but still blows HDD's out of the water. SSD's seem to only come in 512GB currently which could easily be maxed out if I installed everything I had onto it (have 2 HDD's laying around from old PC that I randomly raid for files) and they currently are over $400 USD where as the cache drive is only $89 USD. The cache drive though is only 50GB and does what is sounds like it does, caches regularly used files so that load times are increased with limit since 50 GB is only a fraction of my 1 TB HDD.

 

Thoughts?

 

Seems to be one of the biggest performance enhancers for a PC only limited by processing speed, data access seems instant, boot times on newer PC's like mine is in like the 10 second range.

[spior]

You're trying to pick between having an SSD as a main drive over having a cache drive + HDD as a main drive, right?

I'd go with the second option, really. SSDs are generally used for just keeping your OS and other programs that you use regularly (e.g Skype).

Other than that, does one really need THAT fast r/w speeds ? I've also heard that SSDs aren't that reliable, but that might be paranoia talking.

[minilogoguy18]

You'd be suprised at just how big of a speed increase a SSD can make.

 

Also judging by what I've seen you may not feel the need for it but if you had Softimage, Photoshop and going in and out of a game that you're modding you find yourself being slowed down by load times. Right now even with the scene that I've been compiling of all of the _huamnoid animations the save load times are getting long with thousands of frames of animation and there isn't even any 3d information in the scene yet since I haven't taken the time to rig a model to the animated skeleton.

[spior]

Well like I said, the 'cache drive' is for the OS AND programs you use really often. That includes games.

Unless you mod for a lot of games (I'm assuming only jka here, but I'm probably wrong) then I guess you could just get a 128GB SDD.

And if even THAT'S not enough, then get a bigger one.

But definitely keep an HDD lying around for other stuff and backups.

Like I said, SSDs may or may not be unreliable.

 

Just for the record, I have never owned an SSD. I'm talking from theory. Don't feel the need to take my word for it. Ask someone who does indeed own one.

I can think of @@Caelum off the top of my head.

[minilogoguy18]

Yeah, I'm really looking for someone who's used both.

 

I mainly mod JA but I've fondled a few other games, one other though that sometimes get caught up in when I'm feeling it is SW Battlefront 2, proud to say with that game I got the first animated anything in it included characters and even caught the attention of the developers to work on mod projects but that's another story. Modding that game requires quite a bit of storage since it doesn't have the great system that JA has where you can drag/drop small things like characters and weapons into a base folder. Everything that you add is only usable with the map that it is compiled with, so you essentially release your asseets to be used in peoples maps or learn to map yourself although the mapping is much easier since everything but the terrain is modeled in Softimage. By the terrain I mean the actual ground, plains, hills and bodies of water, eveyrthing else is a 3d object like buildings and such.

 

I could see the cache drive possibly being overworked and another thing that was pointed out by my GF's cousin is that write speed may not be increased with it.

 

At the moment I'm leaning toward buying a 512gb SSD and of course keeping the HDD as the secondary backup, will keep it so that if needed I can boot from it.

[spior]

Well if you can afford it, go for it I guess

 

@@Caelum huh, I got the impression you had one. I think you gave someone advice for an SSD on a status. I think it was therfiles

[Mysterious Stranger]

I'm using an SSD and it's supremely fast. But shitty thing as you said the storage aint enough.

[minilogoguy18]

Well a 512gb could be enough if I only installed what I use regularly which is why I'm curious about the cache drive. The PC itself has it's own cache for quick loading of thigs, the SSD will replace it and a program is installed to tell the PC to use the SSD rather than the conventional cache that is stored on a HDD.

 

So hard to choose, SSD for top speed or cache for a balance of speed and storage space since the 1TB HDD will stay as the primary drive.

[minilogoguy18]

Just have to bump this, think I may have found a solution that is free...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAdRsQJBEBE

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbknnDxhmwo

[Raz0r]

Just make sure you know the downsides of a RAM disk, most notably it is temporary storage and prone to data loss.

The huge benefit lies in that memory IO is extremely fast compared to regular disk IO. See this

[eezstreet]

Frankly, I'd prefer using a HDD over an SSD any day of the week. Sure, the performance is better, but I'd like to be able to store as much crap as I want on my drive. The data loss issues of an SSD are not something I can afford to deal with either, so it really just comes down to whether you prefer speed over stability/size. HDD is also cheaper, so it really just kinda seals the deal for me. Though I'm sure that with time, the only thing that you'll be comparing to between SSD and HDD is stability/speed.

[minilogoguy18]

Just make sure you know the downsides of a RAM disk, most notably it is temporary storage and prone to data loss.

The huge benefit lies in that memory IO is extremely fast compared to regular disk IO. See this

 

Well I'm actually not going to use it like the top video shows, going to create a 4gb ramdisk and allocate it to the paging file for speed up, similar to the SSD cache drive.

 

Both posts above mainly seem aimed at data loss from storing on either a SSD or RAMdisk but what about using either as a cache that would just hold the temp files for fast read/write of frequently used files? The risk of data loss on these methods seems small.

 

I'm no programmer but from an artist stand point the save/load times of huge Softimage, Photoshop and Mudbox scenes seems like a worthy thing to address since no amount of physical mem, video card or processor speed can fix, HDD is a 7200 rpm 1tb SATA 2 drive. I know there's SATA 3 but most say the difference isn't very noticeable and I definitely don't need anything larger than what I have.