DPP speed up (fingers crossed)

[mangurian]

I switched my cache/scratch driv from a spinning HDD to a SATA internal solid state drive.

So far, no lag/busy cursor.

[shadowsports]

Improved I/O performance after changing from a spinning disk to solid state (any application) should not be surprising.

[mangurian]

Not surprising however, after many year of developing and supervising the development of software, I can tell you that often the cause of a super-laggy program is not HDD access, but bum code.  Going from HDD to SSD will speed up launch and other items, but it usually will not change delays/lags of seconds to tens of seconds in processing intensive modules to unnoticable/zero lag.

(It also could also be a super fragmented HDD - should not happen under Windows 10 - or not enough free HDD space for contiguous writes/reads.)  Usually it is either algorithms too intensive for the hardware or just bad coding.

I still need to test this more to be sure my line-up did not produce a one-time miracle.  Thus "fingers crossed."

[BurnUnit]

Please keep the updates coming. I've got no experience working with SSDs. So am I safe in assuming that SSDs can read and right info that much fast than a 7200 RPM HDD?

What kind of minimum specs are required for adding a SSD to an existing computer? Operating system? Motherboard? Processor speed? Power supply?

Any tricks to making sure that DPP4 will use the SSD as the scratch disk?

[mangurian]

There is no comparison speedwise.  SSDs are much faster.   I have two internal SSDs.  One is my 512 GB system disk (C: drive).  The other, 1 TB, I use for tasks where I want rapid acquisition.  

My PC went from almost a minute to less than15 seconds to boot.

SSDs are also more reliable and use less power.

Your speed will most likely be limited by your bus speed, not the SSD.   My PC has SATA II.

Works with any relatively modern computer.  My PC is 4 years old.

You can tell DPP what drive to use in the preferences.

BE SURE AND SHOP THE SALES.  Prices are variable.  512GB about $75,  1TB about $125.

[wq9nsc]

Like Mangurian, I use a pair of internal SSD drives.  One is used for the operating system and a few standard programs and the other is 2 TB which I use for my video and photo processing apps along with temporary storage for the group of files I am using currently.  

Although SSD devices are very reliable I do longer term storage on mirrored external 5 TB drives that are replaced in sets as I exceed their capacity. 

My PC is a HP Z820 workstation which is about 4 years old now but should cover my needs for a long time. It is a dual CPU system with plenty of memory and the only cards in the expansion bus are one video card and a Thunderbolt card.  It is dual boot with Windows 10 professional and Red Hat linux but primarily runs Windows software.  Most PCs, once upgraded with a good SSD, a good video card, and plenty of memory, will do quite well with photo processing software.  All three of these upgrades can provide a significant increase in performance depending upon your current setup.

The only SSD issue I ran into was when I first moved the operating system to the SSD and the security manager in the workstation shut it down during the boot sequence because I neglected to properly authorize the new drive in the password protected bios so it shut the system down to prevent it from being hijacked.  I wouldn't expect this issue to show up with putting an SSD in a typical system which doesn't have that level of system security.  Do check to make sure whether your SSD requires any mounting rails or other mounting hardware because they are often sold "bare".

It is a cheap upgrade that greatly increases performance.

I believe that current versions of Windows automatically disable automatic disk defragmentation with a SSD because it isn't needed and creates needless wear to a device that has a very large but finite number of write cycles before it becomes useless.  If running older versions of Windows with a SSD, or third part maintenance programs, make sure to disable unnecessary actions in order to prevent needless wear.

Rodger