SSD vs HDD Matlab

How important is it to use a SSD to improve performance of Matlab, if I don't use the commands "load " "save" "but I read only the functions from HD to RAM? I don't care about the time the program starts but only the execution of the functions. Can I save or should I buy the SSD?

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Todd Leonhardt]

Like almost any performance question of this nature, the answer is "It Depends". Specifically it depends on what exactly your code is doing and what aspect of your machine is limiting the performance. Are you doing anything else that involves reading from or writing to files on the disk (there are other functions that just load or save which would do this)?

If you are just using data in RAM and are not concerned with the initial time for MATLAB to startup, then save your money because a SSD isn't going to improve the performance of your MATLAB code greatly if you are limited by CPU, RAM, or GPU speeds.

MATLAB has an excellent built-in profiler which you can use to find out where your code is spending it's time. To use it do the following in MATLAB:

    profile on
    % Execute your code here ...
    profile off
    profile viewer

[Walter Roberson]

One bit to note is that MATLAB uses Just In Time compilation, so it might not read any particular .m or class into memory until the first time it is called upon. Because of this, there can be some reading from disk as the code executes. Typically it is not much, but there are some large packages out there.

[Joss Knight]

The same is also true of many libraries, which are loaded dynamically when they are first needed. This can give a one-off performance hit the first time you run your code.