NONMEM performance on solid-state drives

1 messages 1 people Latest: Dec 14, 2010

NONMEM performance on solid-state drives

From: Mike Dodds Date: December 14, 2010 technical
All, Solid-state drives (SSD) are becoming reasonably priced, commodity storage options for PCs. I was wondering if anyone in the community has done benchmarking on systems using these storage devices? I ask because NONMEM appears to use a number of temporary files in the local directory for a run. Certainly, the OUTPUT file is being continuously written to, and some of the new stochastic methods need PRINT=1. When we've looked at the impact of that directory being on local disk storage or network storage, the local disk storage can execute much, much faster. This led me to wonder if any advantage could be gained by increasing the access speed of the local disk storage, which SSD offers over traditional magnetic disk storage. Regards, Mike Dodds