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I was thinking about getting an SSD drive and was wondering if it made sense for my purposes.

As I understand SSD drives are significantly faster than regular hard disks but are still a lot more expensive per GB.

I´d be using it for the following purpose:
Sometimes I have to work on 3D scenes which are several gigabytes large. If I save them to a regular drive it can take up to 10 minutes to save or to load.
I have to save on a pretty regular base because 3D programs are rather instable, especially when working with large scenes.
So even if I only save the scene once an hour I waste 80 minutes on saving on a regular working day.

The idea would be do use the SSD for saving scenes during the day. As soon as they are finished I´d save them to the regular hard disk drive, so that the fact that the SSD is rather small wouldn´t matter that much.

Can it be estimated how much time it would save for saving and loading a file that takes 10 minutes to save on a regular HD?
Would I have to install the OS in the SSD to make saving the files faster or is it sufficient to simply save the file to the SSD (I guess the latter but am rather clue less).
Would this work or are there any problems with SSD that I don´t know of that would make this whole plan nonsense?

If we're talking multi-gigabyte files, yes, an SSD should speed up the process to a fairly significant degree, unless the save speed of your 3D program is bottlenecked by inefficient code. What you don't want to do is skimp and buy a cheap, small SSD, because they actually have lower write speeds than mechanical hard drives (though much higher read speeds); you'll want a reasonably good one, probably in the 120GB+ area.

The best bet would probably be to have your OS, programs and working copy of your scenes on an SSD, and use a mechanical hard drive for storage purposes. Having the OS and rendering program on a mechanical drive wouldn't be a performance killer by any means (unless your program makes heavy use of the swap file, in which case it could become a serious bottleneck), but it won't be an optimal setup.

As for the speedup, absolute best case would probably be a factor of between four to eight times, depending on whether your motherboard supports SATA 3G or SATA 6G. It really depends on the specific SSD, though.

The performance advantage of an SSD is more evident when you're doing random access reads or writes, as opposed to sequential reads or writes. The reason traditional hard drives are so slow is because of seek time and rotational latency: the time required for the disk head to mechanically move from one location to another on the platter. So, an SSD will almost always outperform a traditional hard drive for use cases which involve lots of random access.

But if you're doing lots of sequential access, the benefits of an SSD might be less apparent, and in fact certain configurations of traditional hard drives (RAID arrays) will outperform an SSD for sequential reads/writes.

Using your SSD as an OS-drive usually provides a noticeable speedup for typical computer usage activities, because a lot of the performance problems people experience typically has to do with the OS page-cache mechanism, which swaps commonly used applications/files in and out of memory. Since this typically involves a lot of random access, an SSD can really help.

But in your case, where you're simply talking about writing a single large file to disk over and over again, it's less clear how much of a performance improvement you'll get from an SSD, as opposed to a RAID array of higher end hard drives.

salm wrote:Can it be estimated how much time it would save for saving and loading a file that takes 10 minutes to save on a regular HD?

High-end consumer SSDs have approximately three times the sequential write performance of decent consumer HDs (e.g. OCZ Vertex 3 will sustain approx 370 MB/s, typical Western Digital 7200 RPM drive will do about 120 MB/s), and that's when writing to an empty drive. When the filesystem is fragmented the lead usually widens; HD performance craters when you have to do random seeks, although SSDs do suffer from write amplification. Frankly if you do this for a living this is a no-brainer, in fact if your time is $50/hour then a mid-range $2000 RAID array will pay for itself inside three months (possibly sooner if you regularly lose work due to not saving).

Would I have to install the OS in the SSD to make saving the files faster or is it sufficient to simply save the file to the SSD (I guess the latter but am rather clue less).

Installing the OS to the SSD mostly just makes your PC boot faster.

Would this work or are there any problems with SSD that I don´t know of that would make this whole plan nonsense?

Frankly I'm surprised that you work in content creation and don't already have one.

Channel72 wrote:and in fact certain configurations of traditional hard drives (RAID arrays) will outperform an SSD for sequential reads/writes.

SSDs in RAID will destroy any equivalent HD RAID setup. It was true for a while that a HD array could beat a single SSD of the same cost, but with SSDs below $1/GB I think we're past that point now.

Thanks for all the quick answers:

All in all, what I got from your answers is that:

SSD would be faster for my purposes
It would be even better when used in RAID
It would not be necessary to install the OS on the SSD
It would be necessary to install the 3d program on the SSD

Frankly I'm surprised that you work in content creation and don't already have one.

Well, i´ve never needed this up to now. Up till now when working on files as large as that it usually was at companies that specialize on things like that and already have good rigs.
However, my current customer is a smaller company and they don´t have specialized work stations because they didn´t have to handle files of that size up to now. My own work station at home hasn´t needed it yet because i´ve never had to handle files like that before, either. And probably won´t have to in the near future. File sizes like that are usually CAD data from car companies and they don´t outsource work to single freelancers.