Will the hdd or non optane ssd be the bottleneck of speed?

[farhang amaji]

hi my question is, for computational purpose softwares like abaqus or matlab for huge models with lots of ram installed on(more than memory gets full) will the hdd or non optane ssd be still the bottleneck of speed, of course comparing to optane?or just say, will lots of ram remove the need of storing data in hard drive (of course except the end)in general(if you acknowledge me about specific information on abaqus or matlab would be appreciated)?

[FloRolf]

I'm pretty sure that it doesn't care about storage at all. Why don't you benchmark it yourself with data from an hdd vs ssd? 

SSDs are so cheap right now anyways. 

[Jurrunio]

During calculations all these data will be in the RAM, so at worst the storage drive bottleneck will be at the very start... which is nothing compared to the time needed to do the math unless you're on the slowest of hard drives.

[Mr. Smiley]

All the data imported and variables stored in MATLAB will all be stored on your ram, and not your HDD. If the data set you are working with is larger than the ram capacity MATLAB should throw an error code. 

 

Hopefully my attached image makes sense as to what I mean. MATLAB only cares about RAM capacity and not HDD capacity.

[farhang amaji]

2 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

I'm pretty sure that it doesn't care about storage at all. Why don't you benchmark it yourself with data from an hdd vs ssd?  

SSDs are so cheap right now anyways. 

first why do you think it doesn't care for speed limiting of hard drives?
second it's hard for me to uninstall abaqus from ssd, to again install it again on hdd just for the sake of taking a benchmark.

[FloRolf]

6 minutes ago, farhang amaji said:

first why do you think it doesn't care for speed limiting of hard drives?
second it's hard for me to uninstall abaqus from ssd, to again install it again on hdd just for the sake of taking a benchmark.

See the two other answers above. It's all just ram.

[farhang amaji]

1 minute ago, Mr. Smiley said:

All the data imported and variables stored in MATLAB will all be stored on your ram, and not your HDD. If the data set you are working with is larger than the ram capacity MATLAB should throw an error code. 

 

Hopefully my attached image makes sense as to what I mean. MATLAB only cares about RAM capacity and not HDD capacity.

will it give error for low ram???I thought anyway ram stores overflow on windows drive temporarily, so no error should ever occur in just any software due to low ram, except proportionally high ram over flow .

and why it just had error of limitation(if I m right about the picture)for 2gb of ram used by matlab in 32gb memory system???

and I didn't say hdd capacity, i meant hdd speed of writing or reading.

and i didnt understand how did you conclude from pic that this doesn't have anything of read&write speed of hdd?

[farhang amaji]

20 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

During calculations all these data will be in the RAM, so at worst the storage drive bottleneck will be at the very start... which is nothing compared to the time needed to do the math unless you're on the slowest of hard drives.

it may need to write the results of steps in out put file so probably it won't be just at the start for associating with hard drive
main question is I can't understand will it need to write the results of steps in out put file so making hdd bottlenecked.
I'm don't understand how I can  figure it out? just by monitoring task manager or do you know other way of understanding will it write out  the results of steps in out put file??

[Jurrunio]

18 minutes ago, farhang amaji said:

it may need to write the results of steps in out put file so probably it won't be just at the start for associating with hard drive
main question is I can't understand will it need to write the results of steps in out put file so making hdd bottlenecked.
I'm don't understand how I can  figure it out? just by monitoring task manager or do you know other way of understanding will it write out  the results of steps in out put file??

do the same math twice with different output file location (one HDD, one SSD), compare time used.

 

If you dont have SSD, create a RAM disk and use that instead

[Mr. Smiley]

7 hours ago, farhang amaji said:

will it give error for low ram???I thought anyway ram stores overflow on windows drive temporarily, so no error should ever occur in just any software due to low ram, except proportionally high ram over flow .

and why it just had error of limitation(if I m right about the picture)for 2gb of ram used by matlab in 32gb memory system???

and I didn't say hdd capacity, i meant hdd speed of writing or reading.

and i didnt understand how did you conclude from pic that this doesn't have anything of read&write speed of hdd?

What do you mean will it give an error for low ram? I will throw an error if you do not have enough ram to store the data in.

 

that is not an error, MATLAB is stating that the storage is limited by the amount of ram plus the swap disk, your temporary ram overflow. 

 

None of those variables are being written to my HDD, thus the R/W speed of my HDD plays no role on me creating those variables. 

 

If your model/script/function is periodically writing files to your HDD, then yes the R/W speed of your HDD will matter. However, depending on the size of the file I doubt that you will see much performance bottleneck from your HDD. You will be more limited to the amount of ram available for matlab to use. The below image shows the difference in time writing to the HDD versus just storing the data in a variable. Note, it is writing 2 million numbers to a text file, so the time will go up or down depending on how much you are writing to an outside file. I am also writing to an old SSD, so your results will vary.