solid state hard drive

[Steve Hattori]

A couple people here have expressed interest in SSD's and how they may affect performance in Mcam, so I will relate my experience. I just got a laptop with Intel's X25M 80gig solid state drive, a Xeon 3370 3.0ghz quad cpu, 4g Hyper-X ram, Vista64. It runs the benchmark in X3mu1 in 3m49s..

 

For comparison, my desktop is an E6600 oc'd to 3.2ghz, 10k w/d raptor drives in raid 0, 4g Hyper-x ram, XP64. Benchmark is 4m40s...

 

Since X3 still only uses ONE core (#@!$$$!!), the 6600 at 3.2ghz I think should be about as fast as the quad cpu with no overclock.

 

Seems like it makes a notable difference- I noticed a bigger difference on 5axis processes- I just had one take 9m56s on the desktop, same one ran in 6m23s on the laptop! Also, everythhing starts and runs quicker on this drive- X3 starts in about 2 seconds! It boots into Vista in 9 sec..

 

 

I did some research before getting the Intel drive because it is more expensive than a Samsung-based ssd. Anandtech did really good test with these drives, showing that Intel's first shot at ssd technology blows away the competition. Do a search on the X25m on anadtech's site if you are interested.

All in all, if you are doing a lot of toolpaths that take forever to calculate, it may be worthwhile to look into it, it really does make difference, and if your time is worth money, you will see payback pretty quickly.

[BernieT]

That's very impressive Steve!!

 

I was wondering if you can get big gains using two hard drives, one disk type and one SSD. Put the OS on the standard disk and Mcam on the SSD. Save the MC files to the std disk.

 

Just curious.....

 

 

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[Steve Hattori]

Bernie I think you want the OS and Mcam both on the ssd for best performance. I have a 500G secondary drive that has all data and extraneous crap on it. My next desktop will definitely have one or two of these ssd's in a raid to make it as quick as possible...

[MotorCityMinion]

Speaking of SSDs, isn't this basically the same technology that USB flash drives use? Has anybody tried loading MC on a flash drive and/or perhaps the OS on a second flash drive then running the benchmark? I'm thinking the bus speed would then be the bottle neck. Maybe I'm way off here but it sounds interesting.

[Rob @ Target Machine]

I have run Mcam9 from a usb drive. It works, but sloooooow. Portable though. Usb 2.0 isn't fast enough for running apps.