Viewer Installation. Install on SSD or HDD?

[Faubio Alter]

I have the viewer installed on an older slower hard drive and the texture cache installed on a newer quicker hard drive. It does help. If you tp often, this configuration works well and does improve performance. I do not have a SSD drive but did for a time use this.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

This allows the cache to run from the RAM within a PC instead of the hard drive.

It does have risks, by-the-way and should perhaps only be used by "advanced users".

I was very pleases to see that the cache size was increased in the last viewer version. This should help. (See preferences). Now it will be a long time between cache refreshing I hope but it is still to early to tell (texture corruption????)..

[Faubio Alter]

I have the viewer installed on an older slower hard drive and the texture cache installed on a newer quicker hard drive. It does help. If you tp often, this configuration works well and does improve performance. I do not have a SSD drive but did for a time use this.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

This allows the cache to run from the RAM within a PC instead of the hard drive.

It does have risks, by-the-way and should perhaps only be used by "advanced users".

I was very pleases to see that the cache size was increased in the last viewer version. This should help. (See preferences). Now it will be a long time between cache refreshing I hope but it is still to early to tell (texture corruption????)..

[Veritable Quandry]

I have the viewer on my 64GB SSD and my cache on a 7200 RPM HDD.  Works very well.  With all that RAM, you might want to set up a RAM Disc for speed, and then set it to write the contents to your HDD when you shut down.  That would give you the fastest possible cache (but would add a short delay to start-up and shut-down to load and then copy the RAM Disc).

[CorinnePapillon]

I have just reinstalled my Desktop PC with Windows 10 and Firestorm etc on an SSD. I also have other 1TB and 2TB Disks in the system but for now, these are both totally empty. Sadly from having a previously very slow, but reliable system, I now have a system that crashes every time it detects that it is a laggy space!

Does anyone know if there is a known problem with Firestorm and SSD? The Windows 10 element works absolutely fine!

[Chic Aeon]

No issues for me on SSD.  Cache also on SSD. I do NOT clear cache unless there are texture issues or "invisible mesh" problems. 

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz (3298.09 MHz)
Memory: 16286 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 16299)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 980/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 23.21.13.8813
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 388.13

[Lillith Hapmouche]

2011! The SSD from the original post is probably dead by now.

Why is it so hard to open a new topic for a new question?

[Lindal Kidd]

I'm of the school that prefers re-using old questions, Lillith.  Having a forum with ten thousand versions of "Help!  I'm a cloud!" just seems...untidy.

On the other hand, ANSWERING questions that are several years old...well, that's just silly.

[Alwin Alcott]

38 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

I'm of the school that prefers re-using old questions

re using i totally agree.. and use search.. 90% of the most common issues are answered hundreds/thousend times.

if new solutions come up it even can be usefull to place it under older questions....but again... if search is used.

[Whirly Fizzle]

7 hours ago, CorinnePapillon said:

I have just reinstalled my Desktop PC with Windows 10 and Firestorm etc on an SSD. I also have other 1TB and 2TB Disks in the system but for now, these are both totally empty. Sadly from having a previously very slow, but reliable system, I now have a system that crashes every time it detects that it is a laggy space!

Does anyone know if there is a known problem with Firestorm and SSD? The Windows 10 element works absolutely fine!

In the top menu bar of the viewer, go to Help -> About Firestorm, click the "Copy to clipboard" button & paste all your system information here.

[Lindal Kidd]

8 hours ago, CorinnePapillon said:

I have just reinstalled my Desktop PC with Windows 10 and Firestorm etc on an SSD. I also have other 1TB and 2TB Disks in the system but for now, these are both totally empty. Sadly from having a previously very slow, but reliable system, I now have a system that crashes every time it detects that it is a laggy space!

Does anyone know if there is a known problem with Firestorm and SSD? The Windows 10 element works absolutely fine!

I have all my software programs installed on my SSD, including both 32 bit and 64 bit Firestorm.  No issues.  I use my spinning hard drives for data, including Second Life caches.  Be sure your video drivers are up to date.  I had a recent Windows update that resulted in all sorts of problems, both with SL viewers and other programs, until I updated my drivers.

[Nalates Urriah]

If your spend most of your time exploring and shopping you want your cache on the fastest drive. For me that is a RAMDrive. RAM drives are the fastest. Several times faster than an M.2 PCIe connected SSD, which is a few times faster than a HDD.

If you play the inventory and fashion game part of SL and are constantly opening panels and moving inventory, you want the viewer installed on a fast drive too. The UI will be a bit faster.

From limited testing I know having the cache and programs for SL on the same drive does slow things down, but not much. The SSD and RAMDisk are fast enough you can put both on them and still see a significant overall gain. But, I can't see that much improvement in UI performance. So, I have my viewer programs on a slower drive. I do see a difference in performance and scene render time with a cache on the RAMdrive. For the absolute max you want the programs on one drive and the cache on another and each using a separate IO channel.

All of this goes sideways if your PCIe bus gets bottle necked. The newer z170, z270, and z370 motherboards are adding more and more PCIe channels. New boards are less likely to bottleneck. 

There are disk drive... or now storage device... benchmark tools. You can see the speed difference between your storage devices.

[cykarushb]

On 5/19/2018 at 12:49 AM, Nalates Urriah said:

If your spend most of your time exploring and shopping you want your cache on the fastest drive. For me that is a RAMDrive. RAM drives are the fastest. Several times faster than an M.2 PCIe connected SSD, which is a few times faster than a HDD.

The problem there is that almost nobody has enough RAM to make a proper ramdisk out of. Most people are still on 8gb, 16gb is getting more common but its still mainly for people who game a lot.

Even 16gb of ram really isnt enough for a proper ramdisk, especially if you need that 16gb of ram as well. Ive got the xeon system now wtih 32gb of ram so that might be an option but really it gets into the land of diminishing returns, im giving up half my ram for a place for my browser to cram stuff and an SSD would do it just as well, with a near negligible speed loss.

As for this thread from 2011, if anyone cares, stick the viewer cache on the SSD, it doesnt matter where you install the game, the boot time for the game i pretty quick anyway.

[velvetgurl]

my friend has got ssd what he does is he installs to hdd, thus freeing up the ssd to use window programs, so it copes better the the short cut is on the desk top, but games are on hdd

bearing in mind he has a really powerful i7 based pc, i suppose the way forward would be some large ssd disks , but they are really fast drives, one prob was when they first came on the market, he had a spike in the power, shut down his pc, and killed the ssd could not get it to work again but they may have improved on them now

 

[velvetgurl]

On 5/22/2018 at 2:08 AM, cykarushb said:

The problem there is that almost nobody has enough RAM to make a proper ramdisk out of. Most people are still on 8gb, 16gb is getting more common but its still mainly for people who game a lot.

Even 16gb of ram really isnt enough for a proper ramdisk, especially if you need that 16gb of ram as well. Ive got the xeon system now wtih 32gb of ram so that might be an option but really it gets into the land of diminishing returns, im giving up half my ram for a place for my browser to cram stuff and an SSD would do it just as well, with a near negligible speed loss.

As for this thread from 2011, if anyone cares, stick the viewer cache on the SSD, it doesnt matter where you install the game, the boot time for the game i pretty quick anyway.

i tried ramdisk was not very good to be honest

[velvetgurl]

On 5/17/2018 at 8:31 PM, Lindal Kidd said:

I have all my software programs installed on my SSD, including both 32 bit and 64 bit Firestorm.  No issues.  I use my spinning hard drives for data, including Second Life caches.  Be sure your video drivers are up to date.  I had a recent Windows update that resulted in all sorts of problems, both with SL viewers and other programs, until I updated my drivers.

i have been having a few issues with firestorm since the update made me wonder if it need a patch or update may be that it gets very buggy, found it uses a lot of memory as well ,

[Lillith Hapmouche]

1 hour ago, binder59 said:

... he had a spike in the power, shut down his pc, and killed the ssd could not get it to work again ...

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't go cheapskirt on your power supply, the main component that keeps all your other hardware alive and healthy

[Qie Niangao]

2 minutes ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't go cheapskirt on your power supply, the main component that keeps all your other hardware alive and healthy

Right, but that's "all your other hardware" and (as far as the story goes) the machine's mainboard components and other peripheral controller circuits were apparently spared, whilst the SSD fried. Still seems the SSD design might have been more robust.

Really I'm just saying that SSDs have gotten a lot more reliable than when they started to get popular. On my personal machine, for five years I've used a (then fairly high-end) SSD for everything except long term storage of big slow data files (pictures, video, audio, source repositories, ...) that go to the cloud, with nightly backup (to local NAS but could be cloud). I've not had a minute of downtime in five years with that setup.

I know, "knock on wood" because SSDs' NVRAM isn't really supposed to be ideal for constant re-writing such as cache (or swap), but I haven't had a problem. YMMV I guess.

[LittleMe Jewell]

2 hours ago, binder59 said:

he had a spike in the power, shut down his pc, and killed the ssd could not get it to work again

58 minutes ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't go cheapskirt on your power supply, the main component that keeps all your other hardware alive and healthy

And why we use things like surge protectors.

[Nalates Urriah]

1 hour ago, binder59 said:

i tried ramdisk was not very good to be honest

RAMDisks are fast. The faster your memory, the faster the RAMDisk.

For a comparison between Hard disk, SSD, and Ram Disk see: Hardware: Disk Performance Compared (9/2016)

25 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I know, "knock on wood" because SSDs' NVRAM isn't really supposed to be ideal for constant re-writing such as cache (or swap), but I haven't had a problem. YMMV I guess.

The first SSD's had a short life expectancy. The Samsung EVO850 warranty is 10 years with a total expected life cycle of 114 years. The calculated life of it based on writing 2GB/yr is 340+ years. See The life span of an SSD (updated 3/2018).

Life is dependent on write cycles. My SL caches are set to 10GB. I am certain I write way more than 2GB per year to my drives. But, my caches are in a RAMDrive or hard disk. I save the SSD for things where I read the same info often or need the best write speed I can get, i.e., recording video.

[mrwotevaman]

coming from a bit of a computer music/audio background I did a lot of research on ssd and hd and the general consensus in the audio community is that programs go to ssd and data to hd, one of the main reasons being to do with the way in which they mechanically work..its better for a ssd not to be wiping and rewriting all the time, works much more efficiently if the info on it stays pretty constant such as an operating system and programs. HDdrives are designed for a lot of frequent scrubbing and rewriting, changing of files, etc so perfect for data and caches. I wouldn't install caches on an ssd, if you want to maximise your investment of that drive keep it for running hosts and let the HD deal with changing data demands. So my advice would be fs/viewer on the SSD and cache on the HD. Ram drives do work especially well for caches but again have it write them after to a HD drive not a ssd (they write their data on close). As previously mentioned I would not use one unless you run with 16gig. Regards

[Nalates Urriah]

On 6/11/2020 at 1:27 AM, mrwotevaman said:

coming from a bit of a computer music/audio background I did a lot of research on ssd and hd and the general consensus in the audio community is that programs go to ssd and data to hd,  ...  HDdrives are designed for a lot of frequent scrubbing and rewriting, changing of files, etc so perfect for data and caches.   ...

Once upon a time... this was true. The newer SSD's have much better longevity. SSDs made in the last 2 maybe 3 years can stand about as much read/writing as a hard disk and now fail less often than a HD. Life expectancy for business use is like 10 years. (Reference)

There is another limit they talk about with SSDs, total data written to... in general it is now 150 Terabytes. Think about that. But, only the bits being repeatedly written to die.

The typical home user is not going to see a SSD fail before the computer is too old to be worth using. So, life of SSD is not an issue, except in special cases.

Any app that needs to store or read a lot of data to or from the storage can benefit by having its data on the SSD. For instance the viewers cache. But, if you do a lot of building and spend a lot of time in various viewer panels it can be nice to have the viewer's program files on the SSD too.

However, for best performance buy a lot of system RAM and use a RAM-Drive, which is WAY faster than an SSD. One also has to consider how the SSD is connected to the system. They need lots of PCIe bandwidth. But some drive replacement SSDs use the SATA interface that HDs use. Those interfaces are designed for HDs and are too slow for an SSD. So, you pay for an SSD to get only slightly better than HD performance. Low cost motherboards have a narrow PCIe bus that has to carry the graphics and data plus storage traffic. Not ideal.

[Lindal Kidd]

Nalates, I tried a RAM drive for a while, but did not see any noticeable real-world performance improvement over using an SSD. 

My current setup has my operating system and software applications (including SL) on an NVME SSD, and my caches on a SATA type SSD.

[Nalates Urriah]

The SATA SSD is going to perform at about the speed of a physical hard drive. The SATA data path is the bottle neck.

If you aren't seeing a difference with a RAM drive then something else is getting in the way. I have my viewer cache on the RAM drive. I use my SSD for video recording.

Using the RAM drive for the cache improves scene render time. But, the region and SL server load can obliterate that advantage. We may not see the actual hardware effect until they have the caching software rewritten.

In late 2016 when I built my current computer I tested its HD and M.2 SSD and a RAM Drive. See Hardware: Disk Performance Compared.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Am I that blind or aren't you mentioning any details about your M.2, except that it was a deal?