SSD for nodes?

[danio]

Hello all,

I have been ordering parts for building myself a little render farm. The only piece I'm missing are the hard drives. I haven't decided if it's worth it to use a SSD or not?

Is it typical to use a NAS and store project\textures on one hard drive via the network? In this case would the speed benefits of local node-based SSDs even help? Would it be reasonable to have the NAS drive be SSD and the node drives be normal HDD? Or is it better to have all project files and textures be local to each node? I'm trying to keep costs minimal since I'm just a student prepping for thesis work but I would hate for every render to have a long delay thanks to either network bandwidth limitations or slow HDD.

Thanks for any info!

Dan

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

I do stick SSD for render nodes. It speed up render times because when render run out of ram it will turn to windows page file and tmp files to store data and so on. This is where fast SSD kick in. Also 128gb SSD are around 50-60£ so just go for it...

As to managing nodes with NAS. How fast can your NAS save and load files?

Think of it this way.

Render project = 300mb worth of files.
Lan speed =1 gb/s = 100mb/s
Takes 3 second to upload all files from master HDD to a slave assuming their both HDDs can run read/write data at 100mb/s.
U have 5 nodes = 5x300mb=1500mb to transfer / 100mb/s = 15 second to transfer all data to each of node.
If your NAS has SSD in it and can read/writer full SSD speed around 500mb/s u need 5gb/s = 500mb/s network at home... for that u need a 5gb/10gb network card for each of nodes and very fast for NAS.... There are ways to optimize with managed switch and so on so that switch divided data and send to each node but that is more difficult...

it get complicated... basically go with SSD as it will speed up render times once nodes run out of ram....

good luck.

[joconnell]

Same - we also restart the render nodes every now and then to unclog memory that windows has kept after max opens and closes, so the ssd makes windows restart rather quickly.

[danio]

ok that makes sense. The only thing is I'm going with 32gb of ram for each node and most renders of mine fall well below that. Still, it sounds like SSD is worth it.