I’m finally installing a solid state drive on my Zbrush machine, but am concerned about the effects of Zbrush’s constant writing to disk on the drive in terms of the SSD’s finite write limits. What are people’s experiences with this? Anything I should be aware of? Could Zbrush single-handedly shorten the lifespan of the drive? Should I use the old HDD to handle all of Zbrush’s virtual memory functions?
Thanks for any advice!
[re-posted from Q&T board due to lack of response]
I use an ssd (256gb) as system disk (windows and softs) for 2 years,
no problems so far.
All other stuff (caches, data, document, zbrush projects, etc.) are on other drives in my system (an other 128gb ssd mainly used for caches from adobe after effects, and 2 3terrabyte hd’s),
or on my nas.
Why you think zbrush is constantly writing to disk?
how much ram you have in your system?
Thanks for the response. I was speaking to Zbrush’s Compact memory functions which cause Zbrush to set up a page file on disk after certain thresholds are reached. Admittedly its not as much of an issue now that theres finally a 64 bit program version, but it still seems to be quite active on large project files. I have 16 GB of Ram.
So you use a HDD for scratch disk functions? Wouldnt that lose some of the performance benefits from using a SSD in the first place? My understanding was that SSDs can improve the performance of programs like photoshop or zbrush that read and write to scratch disks frequently. I’m just concerned that so much activity will shorten the lifespan of the drive.
Thats why I use a dedicated ssd drive as my scratchdisk, and not my system disk.
you can change the location of your scratchdisk by editing a txt file.
look here: http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/customizing-zbrush/scratch-disk-location/
I also have 64gb of ram in my main machine, so there is not that much mem swapping.
Ok, thanks for the tip!