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19-Tanzanite
March 14, 2013
Question

Hard drive system question

  • March 14, 2013
  • 11 replies
  • 3389 views
Hardware guru's,

I was wondering if someone could shed some light no hard drives for CREO/Windchill use?
I am looking at new systems to purchase this year and have the option of the following hard drives:

* 500 GB, 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s

* 300 GB, 15k RPM SAS 6Gb/s

* 600 GB, 10k RPM SAS 6Gb/s

* 500 GB, 10k RPM SATA 6Gb/s

What would be the order you would rank these drives?
I wish I could use a Solid State Drive, but IT will not let me pick these. 😞

Thank you,

Brian Toussaint
CAD Administrator

Hoshizaki America, Inc.
"A Superior Degree Of Reliability"
618 Hwy. 74 S., Peachtree City, GA 30269
Phone: (770) 487-2331 ext. 1216
Fax: (770) 487-3359
www.hoshizaki.com

    11 replies

    1-Visitor
    March 15, 2013
    I doubt it will make much difference for use with Pro/E.
    All modern hard drives have a nice cache size. The OS will cache the
    rest.
    The extra rpms will only be noticed when opening a fairly large
    assembly with many parts.

    I'd choose the cheapest one if the money saved can then be spent on
    other things like memory or CPU.
    Or the one with the largest cache if performance is needed.
    Or the biggest if you are going to store stuff local.

    If you look at the OCUS benchmark, the difference between disks is
    small. Some 7200rpm disks are just as fast as some SSDs. The maximum
    time saved is about 20 seconds when openening the assembly.
    23-Emerald III
    March 18, 2013
    What is your operating environment?
    Files stored local or on a server/PLM system?
    Pro/Engineer installed local or on a server?
    Do your engineers do a lot of local backups from Pro/E because they don't trust the system?

    If all you need locally is OS, applications and cache, then the lowest cost one will be fine. Invest the saved money in RAM or the next fastest CPU or graphics card.

    Thank you,

    Ben H. Loosli
    USEC, INC.
    19-Tanzanite
    March 18, 2013
    To answer your questions.

    Windows 7
    Files stored local.
    CREO2 local.
    No.

    Our current ones have a dual drive configuration. One for OS and one for engineering stuff.

    Thanks,

    Brian Toussaint
    CAD Administrator

    Hoshizaki America, Inc.
    "A Superior Degree Of Reliability"
    618 Hwy. 74 S., Peachtree City, GA 30269
    1-Visitor
    March 12, 2015

    Fellow sys admins,



    I briefly glanced on ptcuser portal for hardware in particular Hard drives topic and I do not see any new/recent posts. Nowadays I have a lot issues with our engineering dept (who doesn’t) so the last think I need is to get them wrong recommendations related to Creo Parametric 2.0 engineering workstations. Are there more people using now Solid State Drives or still regular hard drives? What is better (all things considered)


    2.5" 512GB SATA Solid State Drive


    600GB Hard Drive,15000RPM,2.5",SAS



    Thank you, Adriana

    23-Emerald IV
    March 12, 2015
    We’ve switched to SSDs and we’d never go back! The performance improvement is greater than even heavy overclocking.

    Tom U.
    1-Visitor
    March 12, 2015
    Agreed – going SSD and won’t go back.
    15-Moonstone
    March 12, 2015
    I advise to get the ssd drives. But I wouldn’t spread any performance hype about them either. I personally found any differences to be close to imperceptible. But if they ask you, you can say they have them. And I do feel they are less prone to failure. Have not seen a failure yet.


    13-Aquamarine
    March 12, 2015
    If you want the best performance, set it up with two in a raid 0 configuration. Works better with SSD than it ever did with conventional hard drives.
    13-Aquamarine
    March 12, 2015
    One more thing. Here’s the results of one of our new computers with ssd and conventional. We didn’t have a raid setup. So I don’t have numbers for that.

    Conventional
    ==============
    Precision T1700
    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz
    Total Physical Memory: 32,710 MB
    NVIDIA Quadro K4000
    OS Name: Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise
    OS Version: 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
    64_Bit
    M120
    Total = 1214 seconds
    CPU Related tasks (CP) = 840 seconds
    Graphics Relatsed tasks (GR) = 360 seconds
    DISK related tasks (DI) = 188 seconds

    SSD
    ====
    Precision T1700
    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz
    Total Physical Memory: 32,710 MB
    NVIDIA Quadro K4000
    OS Name: Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise
    OS Version: 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
    64_Bit
    M120
    Total = 1177 seconds
    CPU Related tasks (CP) = 807 seconds
    Graphics Relatsed tasks (GR) = 356 seconds
    DISK related tasks (DI) = 177 seconds

    David Haigh
    23-Emerald IV
    March 12, 2015
    We don’t have a terminal setup (like Wyse units), but we do run Creo from the network. As David’s numbers show, the SSD doesn’t have a huge impact on Creo specifically, but they do make the entire user experience much, much better. Our users don’t just use Creo, they run office apps, load web pages, etc. The interaction will all of these is so much better with a SSD. System startup in 10 seconds (power on to login). Virtually instantaneous application startups. It really is nice.

    Tom U.