Inspiring

Question

External solid state drive for scratch disk?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
July 17, 2012
6 replies
24758 views

After doing everything i can find to optimize my hardware/software for doing 3D animation in Ps Ext CS6. I still cannot render an animation to video using the Ray Traced Final setting. (Ray Traced Draft, no problem.) The last time I tried (after repairing disk permissions), at least Ps did not crash and give me the same old crash report (Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000007a0020000). This time I just got an error msg that my request could not be completed. (Progress?) Checking Activity Monitor, I could see that my available RAM, which was 13 GB when I started the render was now less than 1 GB (761 MB).

So, I have come to the conclusion that my 16 GB of RAM and 300 GB available for virtual memory on my HD is not enough for rendering the type of 3D animation I am trying to do. Would you agree? Also, I have read it is not good to use the same HD your program is installed on for a scratch disk, so I am considering getting an external solid state drive to use as a scratch disk.

Whaddaya think? Does this sound like a good solution for me?

Thanks!

--Carol Gunn

Gunn Graphics

cs6-3d

This topic has been closed for replies.

carolgunnAuthor

Inspiring

I just tried an experiment to get some more data in trying to determine if my crashes are indeed being caused by the fact that my images don't fit into the 13 GB of available RAM + 330 GB available on my HD for scratch space. So I set my external backup drive to be the primary scratch disk (500 GB available) and my internal HD (330 GB available) as the secondary for a total of 830 GB of available scratch disk space. It rendered for about an hour, then crashed, giving me less than 1 second of video (the animation is 6 seconds long.) You can see it here: http://youtu.be/lm1bMY37pAQ

The full version, which rendered just fine at the Ray Traced Draft setting, is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY9e0At1ki8&feature=plcp

So I don't think this bodes well for me getting a 120 GB SSD to use for scratch, since I had the same crash with an additional 500 GB of scratch. OR--would the SSD work better as a scratch disk since it is faster?

Message was edited by: carolgunn. Forgot to mention, the external drive I was using is USB 2.0. And I am on a 27" iMac, running OSX.7.4.

Message was edited by: carolgunn. When it crashes the program (ps CS6) I get a crash report that says: "Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000000" (altho, never before was that number all zeros). If anyone can shed any light on that, please do so!

Chris Cox

Legend

We'd need to see the full crash report to know what might be happening.

station_two

Inspiring

Thaks for your quick response, Chris. I am growing increasingly furstrated as it appears that even with an additional outlay of money for Creative Cloud, After Effects will not allow me to salvage any of my work since it does not create 3D shapes (sphere for instance) and would require that i shell out even more money for a new machine with an nVidia video card. I agree with Noel, above, who so eloquently put it that it is "irresponsible and bordering on fraud" that the application does not work as advertised. I am bleeding money over here and I need something more from Adobe than an inability to comment on when this bug will be fixed. In the grand scheme of things, can you tell me if Adobe considers fiixing this bug to be a top priority? What if the bug cannot be fixed? Then will you refund customers who upraded to the Extended version specifically for the 3D features?

Carol,

Your frustration is understandable, but that frustration will only get worse for you if you don't accept the fact that Adobe is never, ever going to give you a more detailed answer than what Chris has offered. To his credit, he has more intestinal fortitude than most Adobe staff in owning up to shortcomings in their software.

If I were among those giving legal advice to Adobe, I would urge them never to acknowledge a bug, much less to characterize it as critical or a priority of lesser or greater magnitude than any other. Think about it for a minute or two.

On the other hand, I never buy any software without trying it first and making sure I can live with any limitation it might have.

Not trying to defend Adobe bean counters or apologize for them, just recognizing the fact that Adobe is a mammoth, unresponsive bureaucracy that is coldly nonchalant in its attention to customers.

Noel Carboni

Legend

I'm not a Mac user, but my experience may be helpful / interesting...

I wanted to mention that I have recently been through an exercise on my PC workstation where I built a RAID 0 array out of four 480 GB SSD drives, controlled by a PCIe (x8) RAID controller. This nearly 2 TB volume is now my system drive and virtually everything is pointed there (including Photoshop scratch).

This volume has 1.7 gigabytes/second sustained throughput capacity with sequential reads/writes, though based on Resource Monitor, I haven't seen Photoshop actually read/write much more than 300 or 400 megabytes/second, but it's possible it does so and Resource Monitor's sample window of 1 second just doesn't show it accurately. Whatever's going on, no waiting. Photomerges that used to take 3 minutes now take 11 seconds. I literally cannot tell when Photoshop "goes virtual" and accesses its scratch files and/or does auto-saves. It just stays responsive.

I do have 5 TB of other storage on (spinning) HDDs in the system, but I don't regularly access it in minute to minute operations and those drives usually stay spun down by Windows' power-saving features.

I learned all I could, made parts choices, then jumped in with both feet. Actually doing the job and subsequently using and managing the setup (quite successfully) afterward taught me more. As with anything new, there's a learning curve, and I can see that I was smart in some ways and lucky in others.

Things I've learned:

A modern SSD with SATA3 connection can saturate the link with sustained throughput of 550 megabytes/second or more (and zero seek time). This stresses the SATA3 controllers and cables, so good hardware's a must.
RAID 0 essentially adds up space and speed. In my case my 4 drive array maxes out performance because my PCIe buss / processors / RAM simply can't handle the data any faster.
The only downside I see to using RAID 0 is some additional risk of failure (i.e,. if you have 4 drives, the risk is 4 times as high). I do nightly backups to an external USB drive, but so far in 3 months I have had no hiccups whatsoever. It's been rock solid.
Modern SSDs with SandForce internal controllers can take heavy write loads over time without worry about "wearing out" the drives, because they do "wear leveling". This was a real consideration up to a year or two ago and early adopters had to take special measures to relocate volatile data elsewhere. No more - the idea of using them for scratch and data as well as OS files is now quite valid.
SSDs work best if you overprovision (i.e., when the dust settles and everything's installed/running, you should have a lot of free space, which is not a bad idea in general anyway). I have 1 TB of free space. Of course, this is still more expensive than spinning HDDs, but you get what you pay for in performance.
SSDs work best if you leave the system power on when you're not using them. This gives them time to do internal maintenance, such as erasing flash blocks no longer in use, preparing them for next use.
Since SSDs are very sophisticated in their internal storage management, and stress the communications links to the max, there can be incompatibilities you might not expect, and weird things can happen. I learned that the particular brand I bought (OCZ Vertex 3) get along nicely with the particular brand of RAID controller I bought (HighPoint 2720SGL). Fortunately no weird things have happened to me, but the forums do reveal people reporting lockups and crashes.
Having everything (system files, temp, scratch, data areas, photo library, etc.) all on the SSD array means that everything you do is as fast as possible. System responsiveness becomes unbelievably fluid and smooth. No lines, no waiting! It's like getting a computer 2 generations newer.
Though I'd never really thought of it as a problem, the elimination of the small seeking sounds of electromechanical hard drives is very nice.
The SSD drives are small (laptop sized) and use almost no power (1.something watts), so they don't get hot and can be stuffed in a small space inside your computer. In my case I have 4 drives in the space of an optical drive bay.

I have a feeling an arrangement like this can apply to a Mac system as well, though I'm not privy to the specifics. I'm sure someone else out there has done it and documented it online somewhere.

-Noel

Noel Carboni

Legend

I need to ask... Why external? Is it a laptop?

What's your budget?

-Noel

carolgunnAuthor

Inspiring

Noel, It has to be external because a second internal hard drive can't be aded to my mid-2010 iMac 27". Budget? aarrgghh!! I am looking at OWC's Mercury external SSDs and quibbling between the $120 GB for $200 and the 240 GB for $300. I am just a small (one-person) company, but I do want to get into 3D anuimation and video editing, so I guess I am just gonna have to put on my big girl panties and shell out some (more) cash! Why do you ask--did you have any recommendations?

A

Anonymous

Did a little research and this seem to spell out the connection speed quite well.

"Bottom line seems to be that a good SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) HDD will often achieve a 70 to 100 MB/s long-term average transfer rate. I don't know for sure what older IDE drives can do, but I know it is less. For an external HDD connected by USB2 (a slower interface than SATA), the rate is more like 30 to 35 MB/s (USB3 is faster, close to SATA II rates). Firewire 400 is a little slower than SATA II, and Firewire 800 (uncommon on PC's but on many Mac's) may be faster than SATA II. IF your external HDD is a SATA II and connected by a good eSATA port to your machine, it probably will exhibit a speed close to an internal SATA II drive."

What I get from this is the speed is increasing as you go from USB -USB2 - SATA - Firewire 400 - USB3 - SATA II - Firewire 800.

pf22

Participating Frequently

Curt Y wrote:
What I get from this is the speed is increasing as you go from USB -USB2 - SATA - Firewire 400 - USB3 - SATA II - Firewire 800.

USB3 is faster than Firewire 800, but Thunderbolt, well established now in the Mac world, with the exception of the Mac Pro tower, and being adopted, agonizingly slowly, in the Windows world, is fastest of all, as well as allowing the daisy-chaining of devices, as Firewire does.

L

Lundberg02

Inspiring

Don't be so sure about Thunderbolt. The disk and/or adapter has to be ready for it or you won't get anything better than SATA II and maybe not that. My eSATAs aren't much faster than FW800 yhrough my Tbolt adapter.

the_wine_snob

Inspiring

Welcome to the forum.

You might get a lot of great info from this ARTICLE. While it was written with Adobe Premiere Pro in mind, much of what you wish to do, is parallel to the Video work that both PrPro and After Effects do.

Also, I would post to the Adobe Premiere Hardware Forum with specific questions, as there are a dozen real hardware gurus there, who spec. and build systems for some high-end video and animation houses. They can give you some very useful answers.

Good luck,

Hunt