PC: I have increased my bucket size from 32 to 128 last few days and am getting a full 20% gain on render time. What an idiot i did not try that before.

Mac: I have a super clean G5 Dual 1.8GHz with 2.5G RAM but just the standard 80 gig drive plus one 250G SATA. Will be installing Poser next few days to gain new rendering station and do time trials.

For serious animation workstations...we should all remember that SCSI is still in the picture for either OSX or Win...you just need to throw down the bucks and you can acquire controler cards and a dual drive SCSI subsystem, external, and you can RAID 0 on that. This is very common in the audio world, where high-end PCs and Macs are used for direct-to-HD digital recording of the human voice (AKA singers!).

One interesting way to keep the price down would be to not go for large drives, because you are focused on fast access during render, mostly. Once rendered, final files can be pushed off to a large storage drive. However, the smaller SCSI drives may not have the hardware/buffers/access/drivers as the larger; you might need to buy big drives anyway to get top performance.

I must say I am a little suprised that HD access seems to be so big an issue. Is it really?

And if so, is it access to Poser and OS resources not loaded into RAM that are critical, or the is it the actual write to the file.

Here's why I bring that up. Last night while sleeping I rendered a 10-second animation. I rendered out to separate image files, 300 frames. The individual frames are large .tif files of 1.4MB apiece, 720x405 at 144DPI. This render required about 5.5 hours. The folder at the end was 350MB in size [ended up with beautiful 17MB Quicktime, Sorenson compression]. Now, during 5 hours, really, how much intensity was focused on writing a 'mere' 350MB to disk, and how much on pure processing between the CPU and RAM. At 128K per write, it is only twelve or so burst writes to disk per frame.

I float this not because I have the answer...I am hoping people with more technical knowlege will respond so I/we can gain perspective on the impact of disk access time on such renders. I tend to think it is much more a question of CPU/RAM power and sympatico.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 12/22/2004 10:27

Message edited on: 12/22/2004 10:30