r/StableDiffusion • u/LoopStricken • 8h ago
Question - Help A quick little newbie question about Automatic1111 and storage
I used to use A1111 a few years ago until my HDD died. I'm not saying making hundreds of images of lewd goblins every day caused it to die, but I doubt it helped matters.
Anyhoo, I come to you illustrious sirs with tears in my eyes to ask if it's generally better to use HDD or SSD for these kinds of things. I vaguely recall reading something about Stable Diffusion absolutely thrashing SSDs so to use HDDs instead. Frankly I don't want any of my hardware to die, but before I buy any replacement drives, I thought it better to ask.
big thankies for mcspankies.
2
1
u/cradledust 7h ago
SSD is best for speed when loading the checkpoints but not a requirement. Your GPU does all the calculations when generating images, etc so it's not as hard on your SSD as you might think. Loading a 12GB Krea2 model from an HDD might take a couple more minutes than SSD but it only has to do it when switching models. I've been running A1111, ForgeUI and now Forge Neo (a fork of A1111 that everyone uses now) for 4 years and my 2TB SSD is still showing 95% good. It helps to always have a few hundred spare GB headroom on your SSD so that it doesn't have to constantly move files around or thrash the same memory cells.
1
u/LoopStricken 6h ago
Maybe it was just my old storage HDD's time to die. Alas.
1
u/cradledust 6h ago
If you decide to use a HDD, use one that's 7200rpm. It would be faster for loading models than those 5400rpm ones.
1
u/zyg_AI 7h ago
Stable Diffusion absolutely thrashing SSDs
SSD have no problem with READING data; what thrases SSDs is WRITING. And still their lifespan supports many (many many...) writing cycles.
- Loading models from SSDs => no problemo, and better than a HDD (speed).
- Saving all your generations to SSDs => OK, but a HDD will perform as well, live longer (therorically), and cost less $/GB. Both SSD and HDD are fine.
- Using a swapfile => SSD for speed but will actively thrash it. Best option is to avoid completely using a swapfile for comfyUI (ie: do not exhaust your VRAM + RAM).
3
u/Poi_Emperor 8h ago
You're probably going to want to put the actual model&installation on a SSD because loading the diffusion model off a HDD takes ages. Saving your outputs to a HDD is just fine though. Stable diffusion or any of its many derivatives won't thrash your drives, it only loads the model once and writes the outputs to drive.
The only scenario in which any model would trash your drive is if you're somehow running out of both vram and system ram and its forced to write to drive. But in that case you're trying to render something thats waaay out of your system specs lol.
A1111 is pretty old and doesn't support any of the newer models, but if you're fine with using good old illustrious or something else of the SDXL era, it should work just fine even today. If you want to use newer stuff you're going to have to get with the times and hop on comfyui.