Hard Drive

[glorybound]

I finally had time to look into a bluescreen crash that I have been having over the past few months. I called DELL and they told me that my hard drive is failing, so they are sending out a tech to replace it, however, it seems that the drive it was built with, and the one under warranty isn't an SSD, but a regular hard drive. The company I purchased from must have changed it to an SSD. How much will I regret not just getting my own SSD and replace it myself? The replacement from DELL will cost me nothing, so I was going to give it a try to see if I notice anything I can't live with.

[glorybound]

These are the two drives I have in my order, so he is sending out both and the tech is going to replace the boot drive.

HDD, 300GB, 512b, SAS, 15K RPM, 2.5 inch, 64MB, Seagate, Yellowjacket
HDD, 900GB, 512b, SAS6, 10K RPM, 2.5 inch, 64MB, Seagate, Ironman, (Enterprise Class, Jun Block 2013)

The smaller is faster, but my current SSD is 1TB, so I will need the slower one; I currently have 500GB of data on my SSD.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Spinning drives are very slow by the current market standards, even at 15k RPM like the SAS drives you mentioned above.
Your old Sata SSD is faster than these, and you will be able to tell the difference(unless your old SSD had issues)...
I really think that an NVMe SSD for your OS and applications, is very essential. It will make huge difference in Max's autosave, startup of your OS and applications and many other things
An NVMe drive is 7 times faster than a Sata SSD(your old drive) and it is like 20-25 times faster than the SAS drives that they will install in your systems.
1 TB NVMe drive is like 200 pounds or so(definitely worth it).. like this one here,
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-V-N...ywords=970+evo

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Your board doesn't seem to have an NVMe slot, so you will need to use it via PCIe with something like this,
https://www.servethehome.com/the-del...urbo-quad-pro/
Probably better to talk to dell about this.

[glorybound]

Yeah, I am sure they know what they are doing. The Tech will be here in a couple hours.

[glorybound]

I am sure an SSD will be faster, but I am not really concerned about minutes here or there. If it doesn't slow down my renders, I am fine. If I notice a huge difference I'll take action. When the warranty is up, which is soon I think, I'll probably purchase a new workstation.

[Alex_M]

Is it worth replacing HDDs with SSDs for non-boot drives? Currently I have 2 x 2TB HDDs which are ~70% full and contain the projects and assets (models, textures etc.). Are there any benefits to be had? What about downsides?

[Morbid Angel]

Yes its worth using SSD. I had ssds for last 7 years and they work great. New M2 ssds are even faster but you need new mobo for it, and i read they aren't as reliable. I would get a 2-3 tb ssd for primary drive, you won't regret it.

[Alex_M]

Thanks for the reply Dmitry. I already have a super fast NVMe SSD for primary drive (check signature) and My mobo has 8 connectors for SSDs. My question was about replacing the HDDs I save projects and assets on with SATA SSDs.

[Morbid Angel]

I would never recommend to keep projects on any hdd, or ssd. It should be raid or some sort of redundant array. SSD would give you good performance over HDD in any case, but you can't afford to lose any data if one or two fail (and that happens)

[Muhammed_Hamed]

My question was about replacing the HDDs I save projects and assets on with SATA SSDs.

I think it is not worth, unless you are encoding/decoding 4k videos.. In this case your HDD read/write speeds will be bottleneck for your rendering speed and your CPU will be at like 30% utilization.
But for 3D rendering, your HDDs are probably idling most of the time.
I have had few clients interested in going Sata SSDs for their storage drives and I convinced them that this is not worth the money.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

New M2 ssds are even faster but you need new mobo for it, and i read they aren't as reliable

You don't need a new Mobo for an NVMe.. Most if not all X99 boards since 2014 are equipped with NVMe slots. For other platforms that doesn't have an NVMe slot, you should be able to use your drive directly through PCIe slots(x4 at least) and you will not lose any performance.

I would never recommend to keep projects on any hdd

There should be a cloud backup or offline backup.. But I can say that recovering data of a failed HDD is very easy and way cheaper than Sata SSDs.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

I am sure an SSD will be faster, but I am not really concerned about minutes here or there. If it doesn't slow down my renders, I am fine. If I notice a huge difference I'll take action. When the warranty is up, which is soon I think, I'll probably purchase a new workstation.

It is not going to affect your render times.. Let me know how it goes

[glorybound]

I am back up and I am installing Windows updates. Nothing seems slower so far. He put in a 1.2TB HD.

Do you guys install any PC optimizing software or registry cleaners? I have read that they are all a waste, but I always end up buying them. I want to keep this install as simple as it gets. How about virus software? I also read that you are just as likely to get a virus through them, so they are a waste and Windows built-in virus software is all you need, which is all I had for the last four years without an issue.

[glorybound]

There should be a cloud backup or offline backup.. But I can say that recovering data of a failed HDD is very easy and way cheaper than Sata SSDs.

I actually have two external backup drives and I also use Carbonite for cloud backup. I have an insane amount of data on Carbonite, which I just renewed last week.