Hard drives for SW purposes

I doubt you don't want to hear it but perhaps the real solution to
bleeding edge hardware is a program that doesn't need to regenerate
the entire model / assembly. If Siemens does the proper job of
marketing, SolidWorks will have no choice but to go in this direction
maybe as soon as SolidWorks 2010.

In any case, the technology for drives seems to be a moving very fast
now. Perhaps the best thing to do is buy cheap drives and upgrade them
in 6 months or when it's clear that a huge benefit can be had for a
very reasonable price. I wouldn't pay a premium for a SSD right now.
You have suffered for a while. Why not suffer a little longer rather
than paying a premium to be on the cutting edge?

Jon Banquer
San Diego, CA
http://jonbanquer.blogspot.com/

 

IF you could assign swap files to applications and use one drive & control
card & swap/page file for the OS & another for SW (or the application of
your choice) ....
IIRC This is possible on some systems. Did not research MS Windows ..

 

Your mirrored set failed as well?

Non-redundant stripsets fail if one drive fails.
And you'll probably not be able to recover that one drive
(though somtimes it's maker can help I gather). But even
then your data is at risk as they don't have the full stripeset.

 

BTW you haven't said what your other disk(s) are?

Whatever is the chipset and smallest HD that comes with dell precision T5400 (sorry but don't have time to look it up)

We have all our files running over the networks so I don't care much about the HD, after watching the bandwidth for
years now I can say that it is not the bottleneck it is just a ~50% spike per file compared to minutes of CPU time ,
plus keeping files locally wouldn't work in our company setup

And btw with the I-RAM I don't see / hear that much HD activity



I hope that helps.

 

The third generation Western Digitial VelociRaptors are just beginning
to ship. These are 10k rpm SATA drives in a 2.5" form factor. The
160GB model is priced about $35 below the previous generation model.
A 300GB model is also available. http://www.3dprofessor.org/ tested
them on the SPECapc for SolidWorks benchmark.

 

I have run HD Tach test on my I-RAM, here are the numbers

http://www.serfilco.com/images/products/i-ramtest.jpg

this is with swap on this drive (if it makes any difference)



I'm still looking for some good and free benchmark test to check for any performance gain from running swap file on this
drive related to SolidWorks

Any recommendations?

 

That's the same test I used to establish my old PATA RAID0 numbers.
My figures average 90mb/s but the access time is more like 15ms (15! yeah I
know..)
There is a very similar one called HDTune http://www.hdtune.com/ that has a
listing of results and Tom's Hardware have some charts here
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-disks/average-read-transfer-performance,658.html
you can compare numbers with.

I think that a couple of new generation 7200 in RAID0 would be up there with
the 130mb/s of the I-RAM but of course nothing like 0.1ms.

The lack of info or a SW based test for various drive configurations and
solutions is what prompted me to ask the group about their own seat of the
pants experience.

If someone could come up with a SW macro that would distinguish the
contribution of hard drive performance in come meaningful way it would be
great.

 

thanks -...a 6-9% improvement over a 1TB WD for that platform.. not a lot..