Looking for Solid State Drive Feedback RE: Civil 3D

[Jase]

I am considering the purchase of our next generation of workstations and am seroiusly considering a solid state drive.

Does anyone here have any experience in the use of solid state drive with autocad civil 3d?

I would very much value any feedback and comments regarding the benefits and drawbacks/ problems encountered.

Cheers,

Jase.

[andrewp]

Having windows up and ready less than 30 seconds after you push the power button is worth it alone.

We recently upgraded from computers with Core 2 Duo @ 3.0 Ghz with 3Gb ram and 320Gb 5400rpm Hard Drive running Windows XP 32bit to Core i7 2600 @ 3.40 GHz with 16GB Ram and 320Gb SSD running Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit.

I can't say from the IT side whether there was any problems with the SSD's during the computer setup, but I did not hear any complaints about them. (Other than we are lucky the PC's didn't get "misplaced" in the IT department. lol)

From the designers side, we have not had any problems with the SSD's since starting out with them.

Using the new PC's with 64bit windows and the extra RAM and 64bit Civil 3d allows us to operate on larger jobs without crashing and if windows swaps part of ram out to the hard drive it is barely noticible due to the SSD.

The next upgrade I will do on my home PC is to put in a SSD.

The main problem we have with the upgrade is swapping to the 64bit version of windows, as some of our older programs used in house are quite dated.


You might note that our old computers were decided on by someone who saw the minimum specs and thought they would save some money and buy minimum spec computers.

After struggling for 12 months with these computers, I put together a spread sheet that summarised the cost that these minimum spec pc's incurred over the past 12 months. Roughly, from memory, the direct cost in wages, of the designers using the computers, due to wasted time was about $2,500 per computer. For 5 regular users and 4 casual users this worked out to about $15,000 in lost time based on wages alone. Not long after I showed this to my manager, I was asked what we should getto replace the expisting PC's. The costs were based on crashes in civil 3d only, with lost drawing time, civil 3d restart time and computer restart time used.

[Jase]

Andrew,

Thanks very much for that valuable information, just what I was looking for - Its a no brainer really!

Cheers,

Jason.

[the_mini_guy]

Jason,
I have been running a SSD in my laptop for 6mths. Yes i am doing work on a laptop in C3D. The guys at AEC know that i work on LAEGE mining data sets, and the laptop is just as fast as the desktop.

The SSD is brilliant. I can wait to switch to Vault Collaboration, where the dwg files will be pulled from the server to my C.. SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEET... 

Go the SSD.

Cheers
TMG

[Jase]

Thanks Mini Guy,

I just got 2 PC's with SSD's on tuesday and so far I am very impressed - very fast!

Cheers,

Jase.