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Is it worth upgrading to SSD to improve slow performance
Hi all, firstly let me apologise for not having the spec of my PC to hand right now but I’ll update this thread later if it is relevant.
My question is about HDD configuration. I have 4x 1TB 7200rpm drives in my PC, one for OS, scratch discs, premiere folder, etc. Basically everything except the video files. I then have 3x HDD with video files on. I realise this isn’t the best way of doing things and in future I’ll probably change this to keep the video files on external drives and only copy them over when needed. (as I generally only use one folder of video from say 20 in total and then the following month I’ll move onto the next folder, so it’s a bit of a waste of internal space keeping all of the video on the internal drives all of the time.
I think ideally I’d like to get some sort of housing to maybe keep these 3 internal drives in an external enclosure maybe connected with USB 3.0 or SATA and then replace all internal drives for SSD drives but what configuration would you recommend for this? For example 2x 256gb for cache files, 1x 256gb for video files and then a final one for OS and programs?
I am quite sure the slow down I’m experiencing is HDD related as I often hear a lot of noise coming from the drives (pretty much constantly) and although they’re SATA2 drives they’re quite good ones i think.
Thanks in advance
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9 Replies
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I read that your os drive should be the fastest drive in the system. So if you have a raid I would guess you would gain speed by getting an ssd.
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i don’t have any raid set up. I did initially and start up time increased to over a minute so I abandoned it
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do you think it’d be worth the hassle to reformat and change my HDD configuration using my existing SATA drives to the one that Harm recommends in this post, or just plump straight for the SSD’s and do it all in one go?
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972
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Hi David,
You’re on the wrong track – SSD drives are not suitable/recommended for video editing for various reasons, limit it to a boot drive.
We don’t know anything about your PC hardware, or the material you are editing. Many possible reasons for performance issues. Please let us know your setup and what issues you are seeing.
At least, go to My Computer and Right-click the non-OS drives and check Properties – you will want “Indexing” set to OFF as this slows things down. Also, keep drives defragged and less than 80% full.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Jeff, thanks for the tip and I will post tonight the full details. Changing this indexing thing will not remove/change any of the data at all will it? I have lots of video (AVCHD .mov files from canon 5d mkii) still to edit on there or already partially edited
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Good question, but no, changing the Indexing setting will not harm existing data. Indexing simply means that Windows is constantly accessing the drive to build it’s “index” that would aid in using the “Search” function. We don’t want the drive being accessed by Windows though when capturing/playing back video streams, because we want maximum performance.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
thanks Jeff. Ok so I’m on the pc at the moment. Spec is:
Intel i7 950 3.07ghz
16gb Ram
win 7 64 bit
Nvidia GTX 570
HDD’s you know about.The issue is relatively minor but would still like to get it sorted if possible and I have another slightly lower spec PC to compare it to that and one is MUCH better,
I constantly hear hard disk activity.. it never stops even with indexing now disabled on the 3 video drives.
When I scrub along a timeline the video doesn’t change in the playback window particularly quickly at all. If I click to a certain point in a timeline or indeed a clip in the preview window it takes between half a second and 2 seconds for the video to change. Occasionally when playing back long timelines the video freezes altogether for a few seconds and audio continues. If I pause and resume then it sorts this out for a short time until it does it again.
The 3x video HDD’s all have about 20% free on each.
Would love some suggestions to try! My cache files are saved to the default location on the same drive as my OS and premiere installation folder, not sure if changing this will help?
Thanks very much
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Hi David,
Seems like the drives all being pretty full could be part of the issue. Are they all defragged? That can really mess things up if badly fragged. May not have enough free space to even defrag though. Could also try cleaning the Media Cache database (Edit > Preferences > Media).
Is the GPU Acceleration enabled in Premiere? Project > Project Settings > General
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Jeff,
Hardware acceleration is on, yes.
When I analyze before defragging they all say 0% fragmented except the OS disc which says 3% so does this mean I don’t really need to defrag them?
In terms of clearing media cache I try to do it manually by locating the folder and deleting all of the temp files. Not sure when I last did it but can’t really do it either way now as I’m half way through a large project but I know it’s not a case of not having done this for ages as I try to do it regularly.
All I can think is the drives are a bit full up but they’re not *that* full… really quite stumped.
Editing tonight for a few hours and it confirmed the problem is the pause before the output or clip window shows the video after moving the slider along, it’s REALLY slow a lot of the time.. much slower than my lower spec PC in another office that’s whats confusing me
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