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SSD or HDD for NFS boot server

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maxxjr

Occasional Visitor
I am in early planning stages for a small render farm...like 8 or 16 nodes.

Each node is a diskless PC that boots from an NFS server. The NFS server will be another PC. Nodes and NFS server will be on Gigabit Ethernet.

Will an SSD drive on the NFS server offer better performance over a traditional HDD? Or will I be too limited by the Gigabit Ethernet to notice a difference, and should go with the cheaper HDD?

Thanks!
 
It will depend on what you are rendering. But it is VERY unlikely you will see much if any difference at all between SSDs and HDDs in this application. Most render farms hand out fairly significant pieces of work that will take at least minutes if not hours for each node to process. The only way you would notice a difference for this application is if the nodes were handed out work and each node was actively writing to the NFS mounts several times per second. This is really the only place where SSDs can really hand it to HDDs as they can do more small transactions every second. Seeing as your application is likely doing 1 transaction per hour per node... it will make no difference so go for cheap.
 

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