DS Scene Load Time HDD vs SSD - It makes no difference
hjake
Posts: 894
DAZ Studio Content Load Time – I see no difference HDD vs SSD - WHAT?
Step 1: I copied my 2.7TB DAZ content library to my Crucial X9 4TB Portable SDD drive (1050MB/s).
Step 2: Then I made a quick sample scene:
- Accents Fall - https://www.daz3d.com/accents-fall-for-genesis-8-females
- Alyssa Ponytail - https://www.daz3d.com/alyssa-ponytail-hair-for-genesis-8-females
- MI Autumn Outfit - https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-mi-autumn-outfit-for-genesis-8-males
- Commander Hair - https://www.daz3d.com/commander-hair-for-genesis-3-and-8-male-s
- Urban Sprawl 3 (USBlock02) - https://www.daz3d.com/urban-sprawl-3
- DAZ Default HDRI sky
- DAZ default camera – quantity one
Step 3: I started DAZ Studio and loaded the scene with my current content library on a Seagate Barracuda 4TB 5600RPM hard drive.
Step 4. I re-started DAZ Studio with the content library pointing to my Crucial X9 4TB Portable SDD drive (1050MB/s).
Step 5: Conclusion the SSD did not reduce load time. It seems the delay in load time is caused by internal working of DAZ Studio not your drive's performance. This was a small basic scene. Load times are higher with the bigger scene I work with.
Test Scene
Crucial X9 USB SSD - 1 min 14 sec
Seagate Barracuda 5600RPM HDD - 1 min 14 sec
M8 HD only
Crucial X9 USB SSD - 12 sec
Seagate Barracuda 5600RPM HDD - 16 sec
V8 HD only
Crucial X9 USB SSD - 19 sec
Seagate Barracuda 5600RPM HDD - 19 sec
One aside point to mention by default the Crucial X9 drive comes formatted as exFAT so that it is compatible with many operating systems. The DAZ content library is filled with MANY small files so when I tried to copy my 2.7TB files to the drive it ran out of space before completing. I talked to Crucial service about it and the only solution was to format as NTFS. So please consider that if you plan to move a lot of small files to a drive that is formatted as exFAT. I am not certain if this is related to how SSD drives allocated space vs how exFAT manages space.
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Comments
A lot of the load time is tracing through the connections between properties so that sldiers work correctly - loading the actual geometry doesn't take that long.
Thank you Richard. This furthers a question I asked 10 years ago.
SSD vs HDD for the content difference the SSD adds no benefit.
https://hpclscruffy.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50161/daz-studio-library-of-content-and-sdd
Just a quick note on ExFat and NTFS - the difference you ran into is the Allocation Unit. The drive allocation unit is the size the drive tracks, reads, and writes. The default for NTFS is 4KB; the default for ExFat drives over 32GB is 128KB. So with NTFS a small file will still eat 4KB, on an ExFat drive it takes up 128KB. ExFat is really designed for external drives used for large media files - Daz content doesn't really qualify. Even the Dim download directory - half the filles are the .dsx files at 1KB each.
That's amazing- I just assumed an SSD would reduce load times. Maybe I should be happy with my 7200 rpm 1tb internal storage HDD or upgrade to a larger capacity one.
Worse, if you hunt around on reddit and elswhere, you'll see there are a lot of quality control issues with SSDs. And some of the larger SSDs have fewer checksums to get more space. Defiinitely makes a case for HDDs if your software cannot keep up with the amount of data being read in.
Couple of things to condider, the external usb drive you mentioned in the original post is about 6 x slower then a decent gen 4 internal NVME drive.
At some point the storage speed won't be the bottleneck, cpu/ram speed will.
Couple of examples, I've got a 900mb internet connection, on my older PC with a sata ssd I can't quite get the full download speed. Not an issue with the newer system. Both systems are on the same wired network and bandwidth isn't an issue.
It used to be often repeated that ssds didn't help game loading times much, if at all. This was because the data has to be processed and loaded into ram. On my newer system the cpu and ram can keep up with the process and drive speed makes a big diffrerence, to the point where I can tell if something is coming off a newer nvme drive or an older sata drive.
Studio uses a cache which is located in "appdata", any content you have loaded into Studio will be in that cache, and that is where Studio is loading the content from rather than from you content directory, that is why both load times are the same.
Clear the cache every time you start Studio will allow you to benefit from the SSD's faster load times.
I have attached my CrystalMark test for each drive. The USB-3 is 5Gbps and the SATA-6 is 6Gbps. My C drive is a Samsung 990 Pro NVME M.2 with heatsink. DAZ Studio is installed on my C Drive.
Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 Gaming X
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3600.0 MHZ
GPU: Gigabyte RTX 4080 Super
System Memory: 64GB (DDR4-3200 / PC4-25600) [2x Corsair and 2x G.Skill 16GB modules]
OS Drive C: Samsung 990 Pro 4TB
Considering the Crucial X9 provides a theoretical 3 times performance of the Baracuda HDD, if load times were impacted by drive performance then I should see some significant difference between SSD vs HDD. My conclusion is that modern hard drives are fast enough for your DAZ Content library because there is other things that DAZ Studio is doing which limit load performance. Richard mentioned that above in this thread.
What made me start thinking about this issue was that a couple of months ago DAZ Studio got an update and I noticed my G8 content (with a million morph library) was loading almost twice as fast and i had done nothing to my computer.
When I recently swapped my Samsung 860 EVO SDD SATA-6 for the Samsung 990 Pro NVMe M.2, I decided to revisit my 10 year old question about whether put all my content on a 4TB SSD would improve content load times. I could never afford a 4TB SSD back then if they had existed. My library is actual more than 4TB but there is a lot of old stuff I don't have installed, plus I don't installed all my DAZ tutorials purchased over the years and any poser version of a file if I have includes a DS version.
If DAZ Studio 5 is a ground up rebuild of DAZ Studio, then hopefully they have addressed the software limitation.
I would love for someone to demonstrate that i am mistaken and provide a detailed explanation of how they are get better load time with a 2TB or more DAZ Studio library. This is part of why I posted, if anyone knows how to do better please share with the class. I know the DAZ store offers cookies for you.
The Crucial X9 is 334.99 and the Seagate HDD is 37.65
I just looked in this folder and I do not see an indication of scene cache. ( C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4 Public Build )
Could you be more specfic?
ADDITIONAL NOTE:
The DUF file for the scene I described is 50MB.
I loaded the scene and compared the appdata folder before and after scene load and saw no difference (total size 1.97MB)
The scene DUF file is simply a descriptor for all scene assets and when I search it in Notepad++ I see no reference to the appdata folder.
I know that all scene contents are loaded into RAM while running DAZ Studio and from there loaded to the VRAM for rendering, but what would be the point of copying all the scene content files from the content library into the appdata library? Especially if you changed to a new scene frequently or saved your scenes incrementally with content changes.
And I know from previous troubleshooting DS that it flushes render and scene data when you properly exit the application.
Could you explain how you know it is copying the contents to the appdata folder?
I had to return the Crucial X9 since the project i purchased it for was dropped. So I won't be able to test SSD vs HDD for a little while. I might purchase a Samsung EVO 4TB SSD SATA-6 for a different project and I might be able to test again with that. Using my second NVMe drive for this test is not practical at the moment.
Oh and funny point the test scene loaded at 1 min 5 sec from the HDD and I had a bunch of other stuff running at the time.
So I had some time this week to copy my DS content library on to my drive D (Samsung 990 Pro SSD NVMe M.2 4TB)
I loaded my test scene from my HDD then my SSD. Same result both obtained load times of 1 min 10 sec. I exited from DS before each test, as I had done on previous occasions.
I did a duplicate node heirarchy on V8 HD and M8 HD to make the scene a little bit bigger. I wanted to see if the scene size would start to have an impact with 4 people in the scene.
The HDD was 1 min 30 sec and the SSD was 1 min and 25 sec. So maybe as the scene gets much larger you will see a difference, BUT NVMe is not cutting load times in half as I would have hoped.
My conclusion is the bottle neck on scene loads times is DAZ Studio, not where you store it. If you use a much less expensive HDD for your content library, then you will be just as happy as using an SSD.
However, running DAZ Studio from and SSD or better an SSD with NVMe will dramatically speed up performance over a HDD.
attached is the CrystalMark for the Samsung 990 Pro and a 6 minute render of test scene with duplicate node hierarchy of V8 and M8 (massively oversharped , whooops).