Over at the RenderStream Blog they have a discussion with Vincent Brisebois of FusionIO on the use of SSD’s in Compositing work.  They cover the benefits of using SSD as disk-cache, to improve performance on cached renders, but then get into a less-frequently discussed aspect of SSD’s.

RS: In a recent interview you gave on CG channel, you mention that before you started using your solid state memory cards, you were never able to fully utilize your Quadro FX card. Can you elaborate on that? How do the GPU’s and the Fusion-io cards relate to each other and when does it make sense to buy another GPU or assemble an SLI?

VB: This is an interesting case. Before the Fusion-io cards, I never had enough data throughput to saturate my CPU and GPU. Even with a 4 drive Sata RAID, you only have four reading heads (one per disk), so if you have a 20 layer comp, you aren’t able to feed 20 frames simultaneously to the CPU. With SSD technology you can feed hundreds of images simultaneously, allowing you to easily “feed” the CPU. With the CPU now at 100% utilization, you can quickly process the images and render a result which then goes to the GPU to display. With a four drive raid, I could realistically work on 1080p footage pretty well, but stereoscopic 2K was impossible and 4K was just a pipe dream.

In the interest of fairness I feel the need to point out that Vincent Brisebois works for FusionIO, a well-known SSD manufacturer, and RenderStream builds high-end workstations, so they both have something to gain by pushing more SSD’s in the industry.  However, they both make very good points.

As prices continue to plummet on SSD technology, I think we are really heading for a world where Hard Drives are the equivalent of modern Tape Drives: Slow but Huge and Reliable storage.

via Solid State Flash Memory For Compositing « RenderStream.com.