Poser takes a long time to load and a long time to load characters and materials. I'm thinking if you ran it from an SSD drive which typically loads info from a disk about ~5 times faster, that Poser would run much better orf snappier. I realize it wouldn't speed up renders, but would make the loading and modification of characters and materials much faster. Even when I render, I watch the screen as it loads the textures for all the individual parts of the figure and this takes some time.

Has anyone ever tried this or any information about using SSD drives this way? Perhaps just loading the runtimes into the SSD drive? They're expensive, but prices are coming down.

Thanks,

Mike

I never knew seconds loading constituted a long time. LOL. Do you use Poser for a living that you need great speed?

Laurie

Are you kidding...I live for speed. :)

Of course it's all relative, but I recently got my wife a new computer, and though it's not the fastest, it's so much faster for everyday tasks than the 4 or 5 year old one that it's a pleasure to use. She is very excited and I like it too. But you're right it's only seconds I'm talking about here but if a program runs "snappier" it's more fun to use.  Seems like people are always going on about render times, so I'd thought I'd join in :)))

Mike

On my recent build I used an SSD for the C drive which holds the operating system and the main Poser program.  My runtimes are on a seperate conventional hard drive but this is also accelrated using a second SSD plugged into the mSata port on the motherboard.  

The launch of Poser is indeed much faster which should be down to the SSD as I am using Windows 7 exactly the same as the system it replaces.  The library is also much quicker thanks to the acceleration.  

As you say it does nothing to change the render time and as Laurie stated the time saving is minimal in the great scheme of things.  That said, it does make Poser a pelasure to use, but then it always was.

Poser creates its RenderCache, TextureCache and its UndoCache (and more) in Temp. One should never have temps on SSD, as these drives favor write once read many situations (so my Program Files are on SSD). My Temp folder is on a RAM drive, I dedicated 4Gb out of my 24Gb RAM pool for that. One can''t beat RAM drives on speed. My Libraries are on normal HDs, as are my project files. These drives have large buffers nowadays, and can read/write fast enough.

Unfortunately, AFAIK, one cannot alter the cache file destination for the Queue Manager, it is always on your main drive. So if this is a SSD, the QM may well kill it.

Uhm, I have 2 SSD's in a Raid 0.

I can saturate the SATA II bus.

Is it fast?  Yes, but EVERYTHING is fast on an SSD.

SSDs will make it faster, but not as much as you might first think.

SSDs are really fast at access speed, and small reads and writes.

Large read speed depends on the drive, it can be much faster than a single hard drive. But not worlds faster than a good high rpm raid setup. Unless you go PCIe.

There are different breeds of SSDs. Sata/SAS, (200-500+MB/sec read) and ones that absolutely scream, Enterprise PCIexpress. (2000-2400+MB/sec read)

You get what you pay for, along with guaranteed failure.... They are getting better, better bios to keep from killing sector rows, only erase when needed, etc. (you can only read and write to them so many times, and then they die.) But in the end, it will die. When it does, your not getting anything off of it either....

3 things to remember with an SSD. Backup, Backup, and Backup....

I will wait a few more seconds on my raid array. A drive can die and I just pull it out and put another drive in it. And no data is lost. I don't even have to turn it off to do it...

 @CaptainMarc one cannot alter the cache file destination for the Queue Manager, it is always on your main drive

No, it's not. Launching QM creates folders QueueManager and QueueManagerSingleInstanceCheck in my Temp folder. In Windows System settings (not in Poser) I've directed the TMP and TEMP variables to B: which is my RAMdrive. My startup script creates a AppdataTemp folder in there, some programs cannot do that themselves (eg PhotoShop)

First this gets temp data away from my SSD, second the RAM drive is always dumped at shutdown/startup, so it saves me a lot of cleaning up. Speed bonus comes as an extra.

 @shvrdavid: SSD's have infinite read capacity, and handle 10.000 writes to the same spot. But as long as you don't use them for temps and continuously written log files, all is fine.

My 256GB Crucial M4 gives me a 200MB-write 500MB-read, my 2TB HDD's give a 125MB-w/r each (got about 9 of them).

have fun.

I did quite a few experiments with this as my runtime(s) are pretty huge (400 GB uncompressed) and waiting for the libary to refresh drives me crazy. For a long time, I was working with the Poser program and any commonly used geometries installed on the boot drive SSD; with all the other runtimes on a portable HDD (I work on multiple rendering PCs, so I favor the 2.5 inch drives for portablitiy). I tried to speed it up a bit by compressing the runtimes (to get them to fit) then moving them to a RAID 0 SSD array and found it really didn't change a thing as far as responsiveness. Next I tried the uncompressed runtimes on a hybrid hard drive (Seagate Momentus XT) and found that it didn't matter much either, then, I tired it on a normal "speedy" HDD (WD Scorpio black) with an SSD cache on the motherboard and found it didn't do much at all. Poser's library seems to hit a wall at some point where it is not the disk drive bottlenecking it. 

So the conclusion I came to, is that as long as you have a decent SSD that Poser resides on and a good HDD for content, that is probably your best bet.

Quote - So if this is a SSD, the QM may well kill it.

Like "burn in" on a plasma television, this is a first generation problem which has become an unquestioned urban legend.

If QM kills an SSD manufactured in 2012, it won't be in my lifetime.

Klebnor

Most also have 3 year warranties and are cheap enough to have a spare if you are that worried.  As long as you have backed up an image of the 'C' drive it should take minutes to swap.

As to the one on the motherboard I have found it does make a difference but if it fails all I lose is the acceraltion on the hard drive storing my runtimes.

Well it seems like a good idea, but it also seems like there are potential trouble spots in the installation process. I would use it to as a boot drive and I'm not sure if putting the poser program or runtime is best, my runtimes are big.

Thanks for all the challenging feedback. If I was getting a new computer I would defintitely get one. I see there a lot of things to find out.

Mike

Hi 

The performace of Poser is very dependent on your computers performance.

A lot more then other software I run.

One of the problems with running Poser on a SSD is that it takes a lot of space.

It seems like moving all the stuff that comes and accumulates, off the SSD would defeat the whole process because it would still take a long time to load.

But it's going to take a lot of space on your SSD.

It sounds like it might be time to bite the bullet and buy a new computer.

I just did, not because I wanted to my old one got hit by lightning.

But on a new fast computer Poser is really pretty quick.

I never thougt 6 years ago I'd have a 4ghz processor, and 32 gigs of ram, or 2,000,000 megabytes of disk space.

But I sure don't want to go back.

Mike 

Best way to speed up library access is of course to ensure there is less need for storage access:

First: Make references correct so there is no need for 'deep' file searches. 

Second: disconnect libraries you do not use.

Third: The graphics also have a large influence on load times. Switch off he shadows and see what effect that has. 

Loading only the Poser progam on the boot drive takes less than 2.5Gb for Poser 2012 (64bit) which is not too much considering a 250Gb SSD is not that expensive these days.

Most peoples runtimes would be far to big for an SSD but a large number of users have external runtimes anyway.  My runtimes are sat on a conventional 1Tb drive which is the one accelerated by the second SSD.  Each drive is backed individually to a second PC and a another 2Tb external drive allowing either the boot image of full runtime to be copied to another drive with realtive ease.  The full runtime backup also helps when building or buying a new computer.

SSDs are still expensive compared with conventional drives but I bet it is only a small cost compared with what some Poser users spend on content in a year.

Quote - @shvrdavid: SSD's have infinite read capacity...

Ok, sure they do..... I guess thats why companies are still investing billions into self healing Nand technology to try and stop read degradation. And I am not confusing it with erase damage.

Now that HFC chips are coming into play, the healing will have to be redesigned again.

Mikegg - not sure if you got the answer you were looking for but SSDs are very fast. In my newest PC I installed a 250 GB Samsung 840 drive as the C drive where the OS and my primary apps live. Poser 9 loads and exits much quicker but, in my experience, the greatest hurdle is that it's still a 32bit app. I received out of memory errors several times this weekend working on Poser files that, in my opinion, weren't too complicated.  This PC has 24gb of RAM. Tomshardware dot com website has several good articles on SSD tech and reviews on the latest drives. Honestly, the only drawback to these drives IMHO is that are are too small and still a little expensive.

I'm running Poser 7(!) on an external SSD (obviously not my primary drive). It works great.  Loads of up fast, but seems to work about the same as before. Had it on my primary (C) SSD drive, but that got crowded because of so many other programs so I put it on an external SSD. No problems whatsoever. Still running Poser 7 because I'm focusing more on stuff like After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, using Poser mostly as an accessory now.

True, SSDs have been more expensive even at smaller capacity, but the size/price ratio is getting better. The 80 GB external I got was about half what I paid for the internal 80 GB 2 years ago. Of course, quality is an issue, so careful shopping is a definite prerequisite to buying one.