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Question about optimal drive set up
I read a very interesting post on this forum (https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/913158) by Nigel O’Neill (Thanks Nigel!) that I’ll cite below:
“Ryan
Here’s an extract of an article I wrote for an amateur movie making club (Queensland Movie Makers or QMM):
Given the fall in disk prices, there is no excuse to not take advantage of low prices and high capacities. A video editing PC should have at least 3 hard drives:
• C: – contains your operating system and programs
• G: – contains your video captures/project files
• H: – contains your output filesBy splitting the workload across drives, you can improve performance having one disk read whilst the other writes. An improvement to the above set up could be to have 5 drives in your PC as
follows:
•1 x HDD: C: – contains your operating system and programs
•2 x HDD (RAID 1 mirror): G: – contains your video captures/project files
•2 x HDD (RAID 0 stripe): H: – contains your output files”That was July 2010. I have an SSD for my C: on which I will keep my OS and Program Files. I have a i7 2720QM (I have a laptop) processor with 16GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 580M video card (considering downgrading to 560M). I would appreciate any input on how much better or worse in terms of speed the following set ups would be compared to my default set up: (please try to give me an idea of % or some kind of scale like little, moderate, or a lot as I need to decide on price/benefit ratio):
DEFAULT SET UP
C: SSD as OS/program files (NO media work)
D: with RAID 0 with two 7200rpm HDs with ALL of media workSET UP # 1
C: SSD as OS/program files (NO media work)
D: with single 7200rpm HD for SOME media work
E: with single 7200rpm HD for SOME media work
(Trying to split media b/t D & E)SET UP # 2
C: SSD as OS/program files and SOME media work – in this case I would opt for a larger SSD.
D: with RAID 0 with two 7200rpm HDs for rest of media workSET UP # 3
C: SSD as OS/program files (NO media work)
D: with a single 7200rpm HD for some media work
E: with esata with RAID 0 with two 7200 HDs for some media work
(Trying to split media b/t D & E)
I suspect this will offer my much?? better performance but also would require much more cost.I had read against using SSD for media due to the constant writes and rewrites potentially slowing down SSD performance and also accelerating degredation. Are people having sustained success using SSDs this way?
Thanks!
Charles
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9 Replies
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Here’s my insight (but by no means take it as gospel):
Set up #1:
Faster or slower depends on your media locations. That is, are you always going to read from one drive and write to the other? If so, it’ll probably be faster than default; if not, it’ll be slower than default.Set up #2:
Ditto. Assuming your SSD will only contain source files and you’ll always write to the RAID drives, this will be faster than default. If you write to SSD it could be slower in some cases and offers no real advantage.Set up #3:
I would make drive D as the read drive and E as the write drive. In this case, it’ll be faster than default.SSD’s are slowed down by writes, but excel at reads. Not sure about the degradation, but at this point I think it takes approximately 5 years (or more) for the drives to degrade. I’m sure by then you’ll have upgraded something anyway. 🙂
Even with SSD’s I believe it’s best to take “scratch disks”, pre-render folders, caches, and the Windows Pagefile to another drive. This way there’s even less writing to the SSD and significantly more reading.
Hope this helps! We’ll now see what can of worms I’ve opened. 🙂
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Charles
Just be aware that RAID 0 (striping) offers no redundancy but offers excellent write performance. If you lose 1 drive in a RAID 0 configuration, you lose EVERYTHING on both drives.
I typically RAID 1 (mirror) my projects drive as it offers redundancy, plus RAID 1 offers good read performance. RAID 0 offer excellent write performance, and if I lose 1 drive, I can still regenerate from the source (projects drive) drive, which also holds all my media files.
With SATA 3(6 Gbit/s) drives now becoming mainstream with supporting motherboards, the performance gap between SSD and mechanical drives is narrowing. Furthermore, modern drives offer more platters and read heads and lower latency than drives 5 years ago did.
My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6
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thanks for the replies. Sounds like there’s definitely a speed advantage to separating read and write operations physically through drives.
How much faster would set up #3 be than set up #1 if I separated read and writes? Also what happens behind the scenes with reading and writing when I’m editing but not rendering or exporting? I’m assuming minimal writing and mostly reading.
Re: SSD drives, glad to hear they have 5 year life. Warning – long question. If I was constantly copying source files on the drive and deleting then once I’m done with a project, even if the source files were relatively much smaller than the drive and I always had a bunch of free space on the drive, the way SSS writes writes data, would I still quickly fill up the free blocks on the drive and cause it then to slow down in performance?
@Nigel:
Thanks for the tip. Since I would have my source media on the read drive and would already have a backup for that. I’ll skip raid 1 and would either do Raid 0 or just a single HD (or even an SSD).I’m curious about your system b/c I was considering a i7-970. I was told that w 12GB RAM (which was max on that system i could get) it would be slower than i7-2720QM with 16GB RAM for video editing all other things being equal. Any thoughts?
Here are the only benchmarks I could find.
https://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/pc-benchmarks/https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2630QM+%40+2.00GHz
Thanks.
Charles
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In terms of raw processing power, the 2720QM processor is a lesser performer than the 970. Where the 2720QM may struggle is in the laptop environment itself, where the other components such as motherboard or HDD are detuned or scaled down to reduce heat output.
Laptops traditionally were let down by their HDD’s, but SSD’s go a long way to resolving that, albeit a pricier option when compared to inexpensive SATA III desktop drives. SSD’s are still a bleeding edge item as far as I am concerned. I am waiting for the price per gigabyte to drop substantially before getting one.
I would be interested to know if your laptop’s CPU cooling policy is active or passive (you can search this forum for my posts). If the former, you may find your laptop shutting down mysteriously during heavy render work when the laptop cooler cannot cope. A win for the desktop :-).
My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6
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I agree with most of what Nigel said, but still went with a laptop with enhancements because of the portability factor.
In terms of upgrades, I had an i7-2820QM put into my laptop for raw processing power.
A lot of laptops come with “power schemes” so people can set the cooling and other things. When plugged in my laptop’s cooling is “active”, but “passive” when on battery. I haven’t had any overheating problems.
Also, my laptop came with a RAID 0 configuration between 2 750GB drives. I removed that. Instead what I did was replace the primary 750GB drive with Seagate’s 500GB Hybrid drive. I have just my OS and programs on there in a 200GB partition. The remaining space is filled with my music and local host website (neither of which are used much). The other internal drive is where I do all my media work on (yes, not ideal but I’m not in James Cameron’s position either 🙂 ).
The 750GB disk I removed I now use as a portable USB 3.0 drive.
While not as fast as an SSD, the hybrid drive boots up my laptop in a ridiculously short amount of time to the login screen. Then it only takes about 5 seconds after I type in my password before the system is rearing and ready to go!
I have Vegas 10 and Photoshop CS5 in the programs folder on my hybrid drive, and neither takes more than a few seconds (literally) to load up and be ready. This is because I use them so much the hybrid drive has copied them to the “memory” part of the drive.
Here is a good article to read which does comparisons between SSDs, the Hybrid, and traditional drives:
https://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=5818&p=1Notice that according to this article the Hybrid drive, on average, is only 6 seconds slower to boot windows than the fastest SSD drive they used. So you have to ask yourself, with the price-per-gb is the SSD’s cost/performance really worth 6 seconds of boot time if you’re mainly just going to use it as the OS drive?
Another article worth reading which also compares Photoshop times:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hddLastly (as if you haven’t had enough to read already! 🙂 ), here’s an article on how to partition your drives to increase performance as well. I’ve had fantastic results with this:
https://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/442289-partitioning-performance-hitachi-7k500-benchmark-setup-specifics.html#post5617217Hope this helps!
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https://www.davelozinski.com/DemoReel/
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[Charles Stevens] “How much faster would set up #3 be than set up #1 if I separated read and writes?”
I cannot say for sure as I’ve never done any benchmarks. However, making an educated guess I’d say if you did the read from the single drive (with it defragged) and wrote to the RAID Drive, that would be faster than the opposite if you wrote to the single drive and read from the RAID config.
[Charles Stevens] “Also what happens behind the scenes with reading and writing when I’m editing but not rendering or exporting?”
Do you mean in Vegas or with the actual underlying hardware? If the former, Vegas would just read the data, process it, and show it in the preview window. Vegas won’t do much writing other than if it builds caches when you play the same section over and over.
[Charles Stevens] “If I was constantly copying source files on the drive and deleting then once I’m done with a project, even if the source files were relatively much smaller than the drive and I always had a bunch of free space on the drive, the way SSS writes writes data, would I still quickly fill up the free blocks on the drive and cause it then to slow down in performance?”
I think that’s drive dependent, but I cannot say for sure because that’s beyond the scope of my knowledge. Some drives might be programmed to use up memory in certain order; others might truly be random.
If you did a Google search on the subject you’d know just as much as myself.
Anyway, I hope the rest of my response is able to help some?
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Good articles Dave. I liked the Anandtech article. I read an article recently comparing the top 7200rpm drives including the Momentus XT and it seemed to give the edge to WD Scorpio Black 7200 esp on PC Vantage. Even power requirements seemed to be opposite to the article you quoted from notebookreview. Argh…so frustrating when you see so much conflicting info. Systems the drives were tested on were a bit different – mostly in the processor.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hdd-750gb,2832.html
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The Seagate drive in that article is NOT the hybrid drive. The hybrid drives are marked as Momentus XT and are usually referenced with hybrid drive.
The one in that article isn’t, which is why you’re confused.
The “16 MB cache memory” is definitely NOT the same as the 4GB static memory the Momentus XT has.
Definitely give more credence to my articles. The one you quoted just marks a regular 7200rpm drive.
And I can speak from experience that the Momentus XT drive is fantastic and definitely a good bang for the buck. 🙂
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https://www.davelozinski.com/DemoReel/
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Thanks for your insights Dave – definately helpful. I’m to a point where I’m almost thinking of scratching the whole idea of an SSD for the reason that I mentioned earlier – about filling up all the blocks (my my internet research on this). I’m probably going to get either the momentus XT or WD Black 7200. The article I had put up actually did test the momentus XT – but this was not evident until page 6 and onwards on their graphs of benchmark comparisons where they tested both the older momentus and the newer momentus xt (I’m assuming XT here denotes only the hybrid drive). Not trying to argue or anything – either way both the WD black and momentus XT are fairly close so in real world experiences, probably not noticable differences by much.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hdd-750gb,2832-6.html
Charles
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