I have watched this movie from CES 2012 where they comparing the rendertime versus a standard drive…
the whole post: CES 2012 Roll-Up: HH Features From CES | HotHardware
why is the rendering faster? Is this similar when rendering with vray?
if it’s similar I know what’s next on my shopping list. 
thanks.
best regards
themaxxer
It would be useful to know the spec of the machines and see the ram usage in task manager. We have recenly built new workstations with SSD main drives and SSD-accelerated ‘spare’ drives. Obviously, we don’t have anything to compare them to, but they are fast. They also have 16GB RAM, so I guess unless the scene is using more than that, it isn’t going to be caching back to a hard disk anyway, so having an SSD would make no difference.
The other thing that will affect rendering speed is where the assets (textures/proxies etc) are coming from. If they are coming from a local SSD drive, then access time will be faster than if they were coming from a normal hard drive. In our situation, all assets are coming over a gigabit network, so that will be a serious bottle neck to rendering I suppose.
you are right. If you want to get the full power then you have to get rid of any LAN and that’s not possible. I haven’t thought about that.
best regards
themaxxer
I dont buy this ces example. Looks like scam to me. The only time when max use hdd in renders is when it saves the file to hdd, load proxy or load textures as far as I know. So either they had 1 gb ram machine there and were loading all stuff from ssd via proxy textures this test is funky and kinky to me…
I’ve been using an ssd to hold my Phoenix cache.
the company i used to work for had a vbasic (iirc) script to copy the resources needed for a job onto a c:\temp folder on each renderbox prior to submitting a load of cameras. took a while to sync everything up but then all rendering avoids the network bottleneck.
in that case an ssd in each machine would make a big difference i guess.. trouble is they had not been invented back then.