How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
(OP)
My main (system) hard drive is a 1T WD Caviar Black 7200RPM 64MB Cache (WD1002FAEX) but the system partition is limited to about 100G while the rest is "D:" with data, backups etc. Somehow I feel that this 100G isn't quite enough when SW is in action (around 35G is free) but I might be imagining.
Is it better to give SW more room, that is, a bigger partition (up to the whole size of the drive) or it makes no difference? I couldn't figure out if SW uses swapping to HDD once it runs out of system memory (although I do have 16G of DDR3 - should be more than enough RAM for a standalone machine)
For other less important data I have two more 1T disks (WD Green)
So, should I expect any improvement by increasing the size of the system partition?
Is it better to give SW more room, that is, a bigger partition (up to the whole size of the drive) or it makes no difference? I couldn't figure out if SW uses swapping to HDD once it runs out of system memory (although I do have 16G of DDR3 - should be more than enough RAM for a standalone machine)
For other less important data I have two more 1T disks (WD Green)
So, should I expect any improvement by increasing the size of the system partition?






RE: How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
This was especially true when running NASTRAN, which generated lots of data files while. It helped to have a drive that didn't have to split its time between writing temporary files and running the OS.
RE: How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
As long as you have enough RAM that the OS is not paging to the disk, I doubt that SW triggers much disk I/O apart from opening and saving files. You might get a small improvement from moving the window page file to one of your data drives.
The biggest disk related improvement would come from having a RAID for your system drive, but there are probably better areas to spend money.
Eric
Eric
RE: How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
I keep my working files on a network drive or on a local drive that is again quite small by today's standards. This works out quite well.
TOP
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RE: How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
Thanks to everyone who tried to give a helpful advice :)
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RE: How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
If you do a lot of FEA, SSD's will improve performance since there are a lot of writes to disks while solving.
Cheers,
Anna Wood
SW2011 SP5, Windows 7 x64
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RE: How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
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