I have a system I use for plotting. has 5 spinning disks in it. 4 disks used for plotting and 1 to dump to.
Decent Xeon processor 4 cores 8 threads 32gb ram.
Should I venture parallel plotting? I run 4 plots at once right now, 1 per disk. But I am wondering if it is worth while to have two running on each disk?
Not with the spinning disks, if you bring up any resource monitor that can show you:
I’m guessing that you are already thrashing those drives into oblivion with all the R/W requests and your CPU Wait time is already non-zero… doing more in parallel will just send the times to the moon.
Out of curiosity what is your time to completion right now for a single plot?
TIP: Make sure you stagger your start times - you don’t want all 4 plot jobs to finish at the SAME TIME and then take 4x as long moving their results to the 5th drive and it’s just getting destroyed context-switching between all those requests.
Running 1 plot on each of the four disks at the same time I get 4 aver 19-20 hours give or take.
I have the time staggered by 30 minutes. I did start a set of plots where they are running in parallel and it is taking much more time. As these complete I will stick with one per disk.
There old 500 gb Hdd’s that were destin to recycle. So I am actually interested in seeing them get toasted.
Thanks for the info.