Question Perfomance on SSD vs HDD

[wintrparkgrl]

Current install has bloomed to ~200GB and is eating my SSD space. Other than load times is there a noticeable performance loss from having VAM on a hard drive?

 

[Toonen1988]

I'm not going to talk about VaM particular but more in a general approach.

I've noticed in many cases that the loading speed isn't the only thing but also the streaming of assets. I don't know how VaM is programmed but many 3D rendered software have a special technique build in where assets and textures disappear and appear based on view or position to reduce the stress on your hardware. I forgot the name of this technique.

I'm going to take a simple example, GTA V. The whole map isn't loaded but only 'parts' of it. While you are driving around, assets and textures need to load in. If your HDD is to slow and can't keep up, you will get strange artifacts in screen but also buildings that doesn't spawn in, no roads like you are floating in the air etc. Because the HDD is to slow to stream everything. And everything behind the view of the player despawns to reduce the stress on hardware.

Now this is a weird comparison with VaM but these things can happen aswell in any 3D rendered software, including VaM.

Slower HDD can also cause FPS issue's and framedrops.

 

[HolySchmidt]

SSD prices are going down more and more. Good 500GB is around 50€ in my country. You can also get 1TB for around 70€. I'd never think about going back to HDD, only for data storage and backup. Speed improvement is insane. One of the best inventions in pc hardware of the last decades I'd say. No noise as well.

 

[Toonen1988]

SSD prices are going down more and more. Good 500GB is around 50€ in my country. You can also get 1TB for around 70€. I'd never think about going back to HDD, only for data storage and backup. Speed improvement is insane. One of the best inventions in pc hardware of the last decades I'd say. No noise as well.

Also the durability is increased a lot than ten years ago. I have a Western Digital M.2 something, it have 2500mb/s read and write speed, being used daily and it still have 98% health after 5 years of use.

I also don't wanna go back to HDD. Even external storage is SSD in my house.

 

[brasileirinho]

Other than load times is there a noticeable performance loss from having VAM on a hard drive?

Other than load times? I'm going to say no. There may be a stutter here or there to load a texture that overbudgeted the VRAM and DRAM, but I think it's negligible.

 

[DJ]

Vam does run faster off an SSD, but the Vam cache does not. And the Vam cache gets pretty big!

Go to user preferences> performance and click "clear cache" to free up that SSD space. Then hit "change location" and set it up somewhere on your HD.