Ssd

eliwardian · July 10, 2011, 05:57

Hi all,

I am a newbie to CFD, I like to know which hardware is the bottleneck for CFD. As of now, I only know that memory is very important, so a lot of memory will be an advantage, but how about writing the memory to the harddisk. Will the whole CFD process speed up when a harddisk is replaced with a solid state drive??? Thanks in advance.

abdul099 · August 8, 2011, 17:34

It shouldn't make much difference. In the most cases the bottleneck is memory and memory bandwidth. Next point would be number and performance of the cpu's. And of course communication between cpu's especially when running on several workstations in parallel.

Depending on the software, nearly all operations should be done without writing anything to the hard disk. And when you write a mesh file or a result file, it should be a few big files. Hard disks perform well when writing some big files, but are bloody slow writing tons of tiny files.

Biggest advantage of a SSD compared to a hard disk is the negligible access time. Of course, data rates can also be significantly higher, lets say 2 - 3 times. But access times can be about 10 000 times lower than on a hard disk. So when booting an operating system, there will be a huge difference when comparing a SSD to a HD. When saving a mesh file, the relative difference will be not that much.

And keep in mind, you will not save a results file every 10 seconds...

July 10, 2011, 05:57	Ssd	#1
eliwardian New Member Edward Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: The Netherlands Posts: 4 Rep Power: 14	Hi all, I am a newbie to CFD, I like to know which hardware is the bottleneck for CFD. As of now, I only know that memory is very important, so a lot of memory will be an advantage, but how about writing the memory to the harddisk. Will the whole CFD process speed up when a harddisk is replaced with a solid state drive??? Thanks in advance.

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August 8, 2011, 17:34		#2
abdul099 Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Germany Posts: 636 Rep Power: 21	It shouldn't make much difference. In the most cases the bottleneck is memory and memory bandwidth. Next point would be number and performance of the cpu's. And of course communication between cpu's especially when running on several workstations in parallel. Depending on the software, nearly all operations should be done without writing anything to the hard disk. And when you write a mesh file or a result file, it should be a few big files. Hard disks perform well when writing some big files, but are bloody slow writing tons of tiny files. Biggest advantage of a SSD compared to a hard disk is the negligible access time. Of course, data rates can also be significantly higher, lets say 2 - 3 times. But access times can be about 10 000 times lower than on a hard disk. So when booting an operating system, there will be a huge difference when comparing a SSD to a HD. When saving a mesh file, the relative difference will be not that much. And keep in mind, you will not save a results file every 10 seconds...