Hey there. Among my biggest peeves when working with large scenes are the frequent hangups I experience when Sketchup autosaves. I was wondering if switching to an NVME (from a SATA 3 SSD) would offer a noticeable, real-world difference. I know they are lightning fast on paper, but in a lot of cases (like gaming) they don’t really create a noticeable difference.
Thanks in advance for any info/personal experience you guys can share!
I would say that at a point where you experience significant lags due to a large edge/face count in your model, there is nothing hardware related you can do to make it run noticeably faster. The only thing you can do is to learn to make better, more intelligent models.
And turn off autosave and save often at appropriate times.
Not too much because it seems that the slowdown during save is due to Sketchup doing some thinking, rather than your PC waiting for the disk.
In theory, placing a 500mb file onto a hard drive) writing new data:
SATA HD = 4 seconds
typical SSD = 1 second
NAND = 1/2 second
Background saves or incremental saves would be excellent…a real boost to productivity on larger models.
My models ALWAYS seems to save while Im about to show something to a client…it’s almost funny hwo it does that. Maybe a “smart autosave” could be used where it detects if you are working on the file at that time, and if so, waits til the next time when you’re not working on it (eg 15 seconds of non activity before attempting to save)
I think that the actual write to disk is done asynchronously by the OS. But it takes SketchUp time to prepare the data to be written out and hand it off to the OS. I suspect that the file format is not simply an image of the in-memory representation of the model.
Thank you all very much for the answers! It seams an NVME won’t make much of a difference because Sketchup itself is at fault (when I use Blender, saving and autosaving even very large files is indeed instantaneous, both on an SSD and an HDD).
learn to make better, more intelligent models.
That is indeed very good advice for beginners. I’ve been using Sketchup for more than a decade, so I know all the tips and tricks for keeping a file as small as possible, but in my workflow I sometimes have to work with very large files.