SSD QUESTION - HAPPY BLACK FRIDAY!

Myerz wrote on 11/25/2011, 11:40 AM
QUESTION:

I just picked up a 120G SSD from FRY's....

I'm debating on either -

1. Using the SSD for my OS drive so that other applications/system benefit from the improved seek/write time.

or

2. Dedicating it to a VEGAS PROJECT(SCRATCH) drive stricly for the current vegas project. Utilizing the "copy all media to prject folder" option under the Save as.

Question: If I do choose to use the "copy all media" option do you think I will see a better overall real-time playback having all of the project content running from the SSD or would I see better results letting the OS have it?

Has anyone experimented with this yet?

I'm hoping option #2 is doable seeing how transferring the OS to another drive could be problematic.

..... just in case anyone now of any good (free) drive ghosting software? ;-)

Thanks for any help....

Comments

goshep wrote on 11/25/2011, 12:17 PM
Is this for a laptop or desktop? If it's a laptop with a sluggish 5400 rpm HDD, the OS option would we well worth the price of admission. I did the same thing and found the entire system to be snappier. Most Office apps start as is they were already running in the background and Adobe apps are almost as fast.

As a scratch disk, it depends again on what you are replacing. If you have a desktop with modern HDDs, I don't know that you're going to see a significant improvement as video data is written sequentially on the HDD. Other than spin up time, I just don't think it's going to be significant. There are guys on this forum who've forgotten more about data transfer, etc than I'll ever know but this is my understanding.

Either way, that 120G is going to seem small pretty quickly. That's the first thing I noticed after being used to working with Terabytes of storage.
Myerz wrote on 11/25/2011, 12:30 PM
Thanks for your reply...

It's for my desktop,

- my current OS drive is 10,000 rpm 140G raptor.

- my current "working drive" is a 750G 7200 WD SATA drive.


By default I'm going to do the test of yusing it as a scratch drive myself, it's easy enough to try.



Guitartoys wrote on 11/25/2011, 1:10 PM
I have run in a couple of configurations.

I have a laptop with an SSD boot, and it is fast, boots fast, and little wait for application load.

I have a desktop with an SSD boot, and then a 2 drive RAID 0 (just regular mechanical drives), and I have used it for video editing without a hitch. The RAID 0 is plenty fast for HD editing.

My mongo machine has four SSD's in RAID 0 (OMFG fast) and then four 2TB mechanical drives in RAID 5 for storage.

My 2 cents would be to use the SSD for your boot drive. Then get a pair of cheap drives in and RAID 0 them using your M/B controller. Even though they are CPU assisted, I think you will find them plenty fast enough. Just back up your project to an external drive at the end of the day.

Peace.

Michael
LReavis wrote on 11/25/2011, 7:52 PM
yes, boot SSDs are a treat. But be sure to back up your OS installation. I use Paragon, but also have used others successfully. The problem with SSDs is that they fail more often than hard disks. My Intel X25 failed during a spectacular thunderstorm even though nothing else in my computer failed, and I had a 100% full-time UPS so that I always got power to the computer through the 12-volt battery in the UPS. It must have been the direct effect of the lightning electro-magnetic field that did in the SSD. Intel sent me a quick replacement; but I needed to backup image to reconstitute my boot disk.

Another Intel SSD re-branded under Dane-elec name failed, but I had no warranty and was out $200.

So, yes, SSD, but with regular image backups each time you install a new program
Baron Oz wrote on 11/25/2011, 8:57 PM
Has anyone attempted to capture HD/SDI feeds to an SSD? I use a Blackmagic card and a striped array at the moment which is barely fast enough to grab 720P, I'd like to capture 1080P for the occasional customer that needs it. These are very short sequences, usually no more than a minute or so, so the low capacity shouldn't be an issue. What kind of transfer speeds are you guys experiencing?

Ted
LReavis wrote on 11/26/2011, 5:19 PM
probably not a good choice for uncompressed or barely-compressed video. I just checked my X25 Intel for 8 tests with ATTO Disk Benchmark starting with 64KB file size and going up to 8192KB file size and got a range of write speeds from a low of 18280 (@128 kb file size) up to a high 84487 mb/sec, even though read speeds were consistently above 250 mb/s.

A repeat of the 8 tests gave about the same results. My ancient RexTest gave a write speed of only 20 mb/s.

But the beauty of an SSD is in its near-zero seek time. That's why it's such a magnificent boot disk - reading the myriad of tiny files goes really fast when seek time is near zero.