A Knowledgebase for all Die Designers…

We’ve been using SSDs (Solid State Drives) instead of HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) for a couple of years now. Our most productive customers have also been using them for years. The difference in performance is quite dramatic. For years we promoted high end Western Digital Raptors and later VelociRaptor traditional platter drives in a Raid 0 array. No longer.

Today I am completely convinced that SSDs are definitely worth the extra money and the extra risk. That’s right, I said extra risk. While manufacturers of these devices would have you believe that since there are no moving parts, the failure rate is much lower than that of traditional platter HDDs. But that is simply not the case. Some brands are notably much more dependable than others. The good news is that when a SSD goes bad it usually goes bad within weeks of installation, and sometimes they are DOA (dead on arrival).

For those of you that I haven’t scared off yet, I can assure you that if you are looking at the bottom line and recognize that time is money, SSDs are very worthwhile, especially to the SolidWorks user. Boot times are dramatically quicker, as are file open times, save times, application load times, and the list goes on. Like any computer hardware, the quality and the brand is very important. It is important than you recognize that all SSDs are not created equal. OCZ drives have been historically bad, even though some magazine reviews give them rave reviews. I am convinced after all my reading and after owning a couple of them that they may be the worst – but there is no way I would have exchanged my experiences with them over the last couple years for platter drives.

I think that SSDs are very much like a front wheel drive car in Wisconsin. Once you’ve experienced driving in snow and ice with a front wheel drive car, you’d never consider going back to a rear wheel drive car. SSDs are the same and this is why, just as front wheel drives did, they are getting more and more popular as time goes on. Prices for the drives fall at a rate of about 50% per year. At the same time, performance is practically doubling every year. I’d encourage you to do some research and order your next computer with one, or, like I do, replace your existing drives with SSDs. There are drives with data transfer kits available that make the transition quite simple. For my money, at this point in time, the Crucial M4 drives are the SSD of choice. I’ll be ordering 4 of them for our training computers in the next few days and also a 512 GB SSD to replace my current 200 GB SSD in my laptop.

In all of our new computer recommendations to our customers, we recommend a high quality SSD drive for the boot drive in addition to a good platter drive for storage purposes. The platter drive can also be used for a backing up, but of course remember that an offsite backup is always important and always will be. (Of course “offsite” could mean “the cloud”.) Besides the benefit of significant speed increases in file related operations, you will have a cooler running computer as well as a completely quiet one from the drive standpoint. I definitely don’t miss the noise of a platter HDD spinning or the extra time spent waiting around for things to load and open and save…

Computer performance

Besides the SolidWorks Performance Benchmark I mentioned in my last post directly below this one, I wanted to make sure you are aware of another benchmark that is available and has been the sort of de facto standard in SolidWorks benchmarks. It is Anna Wood’s Punch Holder Benchmark. It is very simple to run and much less time consuming than the new SolidWorks Performance Benchmark. Practically speaking, it will show you about the same thing as the SolidWorks Performance Benchmark, or at least the most important part, which is CPU speed. You can download it and read more about it here at Anna’s blog:
http://www.solidmuse.com/benchmarks/solidworks-benchmark-punch-holder/

Below is a picture of it along with the results from our new workstation here at Accurate Die Design, Inc., the Sandy Bridge 2600K, air cooled and overclocked to 4.6 GHz +.

Computer benchmark, Computer performance

SolidWorks has come out with a very nice new tool for 2011 called the SolidWorks Performance Test and it is found right in your Program Files menu under SolidWorks 2011, SolidWorks Tools, Solidworks Performance Test. You can run this test to determine how fast your computer is (mainly your CPU – the most important part of a SolidWorks-based computer for most people) compared to other users running the same test. As of this writing in early March, 2011, a computer we built here at Accurate Die Design, Inc. named Logopress3 is currently the fastest machine in this list as you can see below. Note that there have been 950 users and computer manufacturers that have submitted their results to date. The Logopress3 computer built by us has a SolidWorks Performance Test CPU rating of 75.7 seconds as you can see in the chart pictured below. Note that the 25th fastest computer that is listed on the bottom of this first page has a rating of a little over 100 seconds.

You can visit the SolidWorks “Share Your Scores” page here:
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/shareyourscore.htm

For those of you that know me, you know that I’m very passionate about having good equipment. If you are going to buy the best software in the world and pay your designer many tens of thousands of dollars per year in wages and benefits, I believe that trying to save a couple thousand dollars on a computer that you are going to use for a few years is a mistake. Computer hardware is a huge part of the equation. To put it into perspective, for many companies, millions of dollars worth of tooling is designed on this one computer that costs a few thousand dollars.
(To zoom in on the picture, hold your Ctrl key down and roll your mouse button.)

Computer benchmark, Computer performance

You can read more about turning off vertical sync (VSync) if you like by searching on the Internet, but frankly it’s not very interesting reading. The bottom line is that you should definitely do this to increase performance. To turn it off on systems with NVIDIA graphics cards, follow the instructions below.

Computer performance

This is a very simple test that you can run in just a few minutes to compare your computer speed with your peers. More information is in this PDF: SolidWorks CPU Benchmark.pdf

Download the SolidWorks CPU Benchmark by clicking on the picture:

After running the benchmark, compare your
results to other users by clicking on the link below:

Click here to compare your computer’s speed to other designers.

Computer benchmark, Computer performance