Hard drive system question

[BrianToussaint]

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

[iceblink1]

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.

[BenLoosli]

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.

[BrianToussaint]

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

[ascorupco]

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

[TomU]

We’ve switched to SSDs and we’d never go back! The performance improvement is greater than even heavy overclocking.

Tom U.

[rrich]

Agreed – going SSD and won’t go back.

[msteffke]

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.

[davehaigh]

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.

[davehaigh]

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

[TomU]

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.

[Jim.Tierney]

This is some testing that I did back in 2012. SSD is now part of our standard Mech laptop:

HP 8740W with 256GB disc drive vs HP 8740W with 256GB SSD

Test

Disc drive

SSD

Percent faster

Notes

Launch Pro/E

165

6

96.36%



Start up windows

121

34

71.90%



AJA write (16 gig) MB/s

130.9

187.5

30.19%

HD speed test, higher =better

AJA read (16 gig)

91.9

225.9

59.32%

HD speed test, higher =better

Zip copy

10.6

11.9

-12.26%

Third time, faster after first test Disc drive - SSD same on all 3 (optimization?)

Launch SW 2010

180

12

93.33%



Launch outlook

97

8

91.75%













OCUS overall

2568

2484

3.27%

These are Pro/E benchmark tests that stress the whole system and kick out values (in seconds) for each area.

OCUS CPU

1493

1445

3.22%

OCUS Graphics

1074

1039

3.26%

OCUS HD test

233

92

60.52%


Here was a snapshot of average tasks in the morning:
Start up windows

121

34

Launch outlook

97

8

Start up WF 5

165

6

Total

383

48



Thanks,

Jim