Cache drive location

[fixeighted]

Is there any great speed increase if simming to C rather than any other SSD drive?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

No, there shouldn't be any difference whether it's C or something else, unless there are more factors involved, e.g. some other software constantly reading and writing huge amounts of data from/to the same drive. Hardware matters a lot though, especially if you are writing/reading large cache files.

There is an interesting tradeoff you can control - if you have an SSD or some other fast drive, and you can afford to use up more space for caches, you could try and turn off the compression of the grid and the particle data (Storage Quality and Compress Particles here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...Output-General); This way Phoenix will not have to compress and decompress the data and the simulation might work significantly faster this way. The opposite goes for slow drives though, or writing/reading caches on the network - it's would be better to have the data compressed, so you'd wait less for the hardware.

[fixeighted]

Good to know all that, thx; I'll test this. SSDs are so cheap - I have 4 already but they are filling up so another 1+tb for sims wouldn't be excessive

[fixeighted]

Well this was a revelation and I'm glad I asked now.
I was accidentally simming to my non-SSD drive before, so when I switched to SSD the time basically halved, which is fantastic, plus turning off compression etc. saved roughly another 3rd.
I'm assuming that if I acquire an M2 SSD then those times should further improve dramatically...

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Woohoo! This is Some speed improvement indeed

[fixeighted]

Am I correct about the M2 speed, or is it all about RAM mainly?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

I've never had one of these to test, so I hope someone else can share real-life info...

[fixeighted]

Yeah would be interesting to know.