How much hard drive is needed for SW to run smoothly?
SW installed on my computer. but I have less space in my hard drive. is it effect pc speed? and if yes, is it important? should I open how many more free space in my hard drive?
1 Answer
I have a 1T HDD partitioned to have 100GB for the system (where SW is also located) and about 30-40G is always available. Never had any issues with SW speed because of that amount of space.
My system HDD is a WD Black Caviar @7200RPM - I was looking at SSD drives, but the only reason that would justify the investment (x10 the price per GB) would be a use of FEA (simulations which require a lot of read and write) i any other case, a standard hard disk will do.
To improve the performance, do the usual maintenance, clean and defragment your hard drive on regular basis, keep the registry clean, be sure you have at least 4G of fast DDR RAM, (I upgraded from 6 to 16G, no noticeable increase in speed, OC on memory to 1600MHz proved to be more efficient regarding speed, use preferably Intel instead of AMD processor (I-7 2600K @3.4GHz gives about 250% effective speed increase compared to AMD Phenom II X4 965BE @3.4GHz - same nominal clock, four core on both processors - results based on benchmarks available at: http://www.solidmuse.com/benchmarks/solidworks-benchmark-punch-holder/ and http://www.solidmuse.com/benchmarks/solidworks-benchmark-sheet-metal-carrier/ )
At work I have the same HDD, single partition (1T) but the processor is an I-3 @2.93GHz and the benchmarks show that this much slower CPU with only two cores performs better than the four core AMD.
During test, I was monitoring use of system resources and there is no stress on disk activity in any way - no read or write, only the CPU and memory are of importance.
The only case when HDD size/speed is of importance is when you are at low resource, with about 2G of free space you should be worried. At about 10G of free space, no problems.
Defragmentation and a clean registry in Windows are essential to improve the performance.
