So, do most of you use sketch up for your designs?

[Reffc]

There is another reason I won't be beholding to any CAD software for my designs. firstly, a few years ago, we lost out main hard drive and back ups all within the same week, whilst the IT technician was trying to recover the hard drive, the back ups then failed (we used external WP hard drives)....10 years of CAD data down the drain! Secondly, I won't be beholding of any company that ransoms what you do after first offering a free software only to remove it and offer it online along with all the insidious tracking and data usage in a unique coded format that is not transferrable (I know not all are).

There's a lot to be said for pencil, paper and good old fashioned technical drawing skills. imho we have all become far too reliant on computers and software and forgotten that it a tool not a creed. There's a fine line requiring decisions on information security and efficiency but accuracy can be assured with hand drawings if they are checked and you're systematic in the way you build up calcs and drawings. Others will have different views and larger scale working has the4se days become totally dependant upon machinery and software such as CNC.

 

[StephenArfer]

I am a SketchUp Make 2017 user. I can't hand draw or sketch well enough to even understand it myself a few days later so 3D CAD suits me for woodworking projects design and 3D printing. I'm not going to try and justify my choice, it just suits me and is a lot more powerful than I had realised in the early days. It doesn't take long to knock out a 3D design for an extraction adaptor which is such a handy function although it takes a lot longer to print it.
You can still download SketchUp Make 2017 from SketchUp Make 2017
Installation is the same as any other Windows software. Every time you run this version of SketchUp, you are presented with the opening screen shown below. Simply select the "Start Using SketchUp" button in the bottom right and you are up and running.

 

[Spectric]

There is another reason I won't be beholding to any CAD software for my designs. firstly, a few years ago, we lost out main hard drive and back ups all within the same week,

Don't think me hard but this does not sound like a good backup when it comes to digital asset management. I have seen to many people almost in tears having lost their work due to failure of IT equipment and when asked about backups just look blankly at you.

If you are producing anything in a digital format, be it a story book, a technical manual or software then it takes time, your time which has a value and you should value this data as if it was a solid object sitting on the table next to you. A good backup system will require multiple storage devices, I do not consider " The cloud " to be one of them. The more storage devices and the higher the frequency of backups the less data you will lose so think of how much you value your data.

As a minimum you want to save anything you are working on to a pen drive during the time you are on the Pc, every hour is ok. Then backup your entire workdrive every week, using at least three storage devices. Week 1 to device 1, week 2 to device 2 and week 3 to device 3, on week 4 you overwrite device 1 and then repeat this cycle.

If your data is extremely valuable then you should have a RAID array in the Pc so all the data is mirrored and many more backup devices with some stored securely away from your place of work just in case you have a fire. If you want an extra layer of protection then backup your data to a server with a raid array within where you are working as well. Big companies will mirror data to many off site secure backup servers and run expensive backup solutions because they know the value of interlectural property and the time taken to produce.

 

[Reffc]

You're not being harsh at all as we ought to have backed up to the cloud. I took the decision after we lost that data that I was not entrusting the future of our small business to the internet, that I wanted all our current design data kept in paper back ups on site and that is what we do. That suits us where it wouldn't suit a larger business where efficiencies can be had for investing time especially in repetitive manufacturing jobs which are more computerised (CNC being the obvious example where you need to archive dxf format drawing data in case you need it again). In principle, as soon as you entrust your precious data to someone else, you lose some control over it. It only takes a server to go down and you're stuffed. In 10 years this has happened twice with our server provider, so we upgraded that several years ago and now our website and marketing is safeguarded but I do not trust online storage any more than I trust external hard drives locally. We now renew our external drives every two years and keep multiple back ups for all historic projects but all new work and designs are done on paper and archived locally so we keep hard records of everything and that suits us fine. I can't afford to lose such valuable data again and this way the risks of doing so are almost non existent.

 

[Spectric]

I have used Western digital black drives and never had one go down, I am still on the fence with the solid state drives.

 

[Reffc]

I have used Western digital black drives and never had one go down, I am still on the fence with the solid state drives.

It was one of their 1tB external hard drives that I had fail Roy. It was used for about 8 years and the advice I received is many hard drives, WD ones included, should be replaced every 4 to 5 years as reliability can be sketchy longer term. Our local GP had two of them fail within 18 months of new. Many no doubt go on many years longer but once bitten...SS drives I think can be just as risky but prices are coming down all the time. We use WD Elements SS drives now and they've been very fast and very reliable so far. We're a few years in now on our last one so will be replacing it next year. They're quite inexpensive at £30 to £40 for the 1TB ones so in terms of cost/year about a tenner for peace of mind per year.

 

[StilwellDesigns]

I use sketch up and fusion 360 for designing.

Great tools and you can render an object with near photo realistic wood grains, plastics, stone etc.

 

[Matty]

Fusion 360 is great and free if u don't want all the functionality of the paid.

 

[sploo]

I have used Western digital black drives and never had one go down, I am still on the fence with the solid state drives.

No worries at all with the modern SSDs. I've worked for a few different companies in the disk storage business over the years and at one point we were considering moving some servers from running HDDs to SSDs (for the internal operating system, rather than the data storage). The very early SSDs sometimes had bugs in the internal firmware that could cause data loss, and obviously writing large amounts of data to a smaller (old) SSD would wear out the flash. I tested a few servers with SSDs and despite huge amounts of abuse they just kept working.

These days it's just not a worry, unless you're maybe trying to use SSDs as a constant data store for, say, video editing work. The write duration of even the budget drives is impressive; partly due to the capacities (~500GB rather than 64GB).

Just checking my current system; there's an ancient Samsung 830 (256GB) that has nearly 13,000 hours on it. A couple of Samsung 860 EVO (500GB and 1TB), both with well over 5,000 hours of use, and an 870 EVO (500GB) also with 5,000 hours.

Around the 860 generation I started buying the (budget) EVO series, as even they will last for ages now.

 

[Spectric]

Everything is changing and seems to be changing faster than ever. We must eventually hit some type of limit because nothing can keep going at the current rate but I do like the prices these days. You must remember the days when if you wanted faster hard drives then you used Adaptec cards and the SCSI interface with the much more expensive SCSI drives, i think we were also still in the days of megabytes and gigabytes were probably rare if they were even around.

 

[sploo]

Everything is changing and seems to be changing faster than ever. We must eventually hit some type of limit because nothing can keep going at the current rate but I do like the prices these days. You must remember the days when if you wanted faster hard drives then you used Adaptec cards and the SCSI interface with the much more expensive SCSI drives, i think we were also still in the days of megabytes and gigabytes were probably rare if they were even around.

Yea. As I'm not a gamer I find most tech has reached a point where I don't need more (running what was a relatively decent PC, but with tech mostly dating from 2015).

I still have a whole load of various 2.5" and 3.5" HDDs (mostly consumer, some professional/industrial, and even a few prototypes from previous jobs). I used to run some in RAID configurations for performance, but these days a cheap SSD will be ~5 times the performance and twice the capacity.

 

[Spectric]

Gamers, what can you say but then each to his own. I agree they seem to be the market that most Pc suppliers are aiming for and when I last upgraded my Pc I was amazed when it came to motherboards and cases. For me the case is just a box to contain all the internals of a Pc but I found so many with odd shapes and windows so you can peer in and to top it all off you can have this RGB lighting so it then looks like a christmas decoration. They are not catering for the people who just want a Pc that sits under a desk and is nothing more than functional. I ended up buying a Gigabyte X570S UD mobo and no disco lighting so even though that board became obsolete within months it is a great board, but I do tend to buy Gigabyte boards and use Scan as my main supplier.

 

[sploo]

Gamers, what can you say but then each to his own. I agree they seem to be the market that most Pc suppliers are aiming for and when I last upgraded my Pc I was amazed when it came to motherboards and cases. For me the case is just a box to contain all the internals of a Pc but I found so many with odd shapes and windows so you can peer in and to top it all off you can have this RGB lighting so it then looks like a christmas decoration. They are not catering for the people who just want a Pc that sits under a desk and is nothing more than functional. I ended up buying a Gigabyte X570S UD mobo and no disco lighting so even though that board became obsolete within months it is a great board, but I do tend to buy Gigabyte boards and use Scan as my main supplier.

I don't really get the RGB "bling" lighting thing these days; though I'd admit to having a case with some LED fans about 20 years ago

In a way, the needs of gamers seems to drive the ever increasing performance of CPUs and graphics cards; such that those without such high-end requirements can get decent performance for budget money.

That said, some 3D printing applications, and image stacking for astrophotography, certainly benefit from CPU horsepower; but I can't justify the cost of a complete upgrade just for that.