Question: What are the hard drive requirements?
Answer: Please check out: http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html and click the link for PDM (Product Data Management) requirements for more information on this requirement. The requirement will depend solely on the size of the data stored in the system. Therefore, the actual requirements can exceed the values in this recommendation.
Comments
Are there any requirements/recommendations for hard drive speed? 7200, 10k, 15k?
Jeff,
It depends on how you are using the drive array. In our performance testing we found that the network connection to the Archive server is typically a bigger bottleneck than the drive speed. SQL Server data on the other hand is more sensitive to IOPS performance, where the faster drives with larger caches will be a benefit. If the drive array is being used by both the SQL Server and the Archive Server then there is a case for faster spinning drives.
Chris,
What are the symptoms of the SQL Server being impacted by drive performance? Is it sluggish response when loading the datacard info or other tabs of the vault view?
That is, tabs other than the Preview tab which loads the CAD data from the Archive server. That will be sluggish due to network connection and size of data.
But the other tabs, like Version, Data Card, Bill of Material, etc. Is that what will potentially be affected by a slow hard disk?
Would putting the SQL database on a SSD help and the archive server of slower 7200 rpm drives? Both the database and archive would be in the same server.
Our current vault database is around 400mb. So fitting it on a SSD would be no problem.
The reason I am asking is we are looking into either upgrading our current server of getting a new one. I am trying to figure out what would give us the best performance for the money.
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