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Suggestions for SSD or Fusion for new iMac
I am budgeting 5 new iMac 5k’s for our work. I would like some advice on wether the 256 GB SSD or 1TB Fusion would be a better solution. It would be over budget to get either upgraded. We do video editing and often times projects are larger than 300 GB making them impossible to house directly on a 256 GB internal. However, we have external storage but only with Firewire and eSATA connections. Is eSATA adaptable to thunderbolt or USB 3.0 and would doing so provide us with a fast enough connection to house our media externally and read / write fast enough without slowdown. We will be shooting some 4K footage but do not plan to output much since we mostly go straight to web. Premiere and Adobe After Effects are our primary programs.
If we can not get an SSD large enough to ever edit a LARGE project directly off of it, should I just opt for a 1TB Fusion? Would editing off a 1TB internal Fusion be faster than internal SSD (for program and scratch) and external Firewire (maybe eSATA if adaptable) media drive?
I hope I am being clear. I would appreciate any help. Thank you!
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7 Replies
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The Fusion drive is great for OS caching of commonly used data, but it offers nearly 0% improvement for editing. An SSD option will always be faster.
To make use of what you currently have, you could use any of a number of USB-3 to eSATA adapters (we have a couple of the VanTech units). While you would be pushing the limits for editing more than 2K off of a single USB-3 attached drive, it would be fine otherwise for your web-destined output.
If you’re limited in budget and can’t go for the high-capacity SSD in the Mac, I would recommend either standard system drive and then add an SSD via Thunderbolt. We use a lot of the Samsung EVO 840 1TB drives with the Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter (around $550 US). Assign both your project storage and cache to the SSD.
Samsung EVO 840 1TB
Seagate Thunderbolt AdapterWe use these with rMBPs and new Mac Pro cylinders with great success.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
I agree with Tim that the Fusion drive is great for OS caching but doesn’t give you much more improvement in editing.
I’m currently looking at a variety of setups with SSD drives and what I’ve commonly come across is that three drives is the key, minimally. If you have a low capacity SSD, your scratch will fill it very quickly and this could lead to you having to delete peak files etc, which could impede your edit workflow.
An internal SSD would make the applications run lightening fast. I’d suggest getting a USB 3 drive for your scratch as these are fairly cost effective.
Another option for your rushes would be to get a BlackMagic MultiDock. This allows for Thunderbolt connectivity with the option of docking four SSDs if you want to build them up over time that you can use for your source media. Also, it’s worth thinking about the SSDs that you buy. Samsung offer a five year warranty with their disks.
You’re only going to be as fast as your slowest item so take the graphics card into consideration too as Premiere and After Effects are very graphics card heavy. Look at graphics cards with CUDA cores to enhance your processing speeds and obviously a fast processor will also help, as well as a good serving of RAM.
Even if you’re only outputting for the web, you’re still going to have to handle the demands of 4K files in reading your source media, you could be outputting a 200×113 file size but your machine will still have to transcode those 4K files.
If you have the budget to get five iMacs, I’d consider whether you truly need five machines that all need a bit more work or whether you should get four and make them a better specification.
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Post Production Co-OrdinatorOpinions here are my own
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Both of these suggestions are very helpful. I agree with Alexander, perhaps it would make more sense to get 4 iMacs with higher specs and I could use the left over money to upgrade my Mac Pro, which is currently 2.8mhz Quad-Core Xeon, 12GB RAM, non-CUDA GPU. I could add more RAM, an SSD and CUDA-GPU to it and be just fine.
Obviously, SSDs are ideal for cache so should I upgrade to 512GB SSD internal (a $300 upgrade) and keep cache/scratch on the OS disk… OR keep the 1TB Fusion HD internal to use as media storage (and hopefully SSD application speed) and purchase an external SSD for cache, but what size would be appropriate?
Thank you so much for your help.
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Hi John,
Just to say that changing the processor in your Mac Pro will void its warranty as Apple only deems Hard Drives and RAM as being good to upgrade as a user.
By cache I take it you mean preview files/media cache? In this case, I would keep this on a USB3 drive or a separate, internal drive if appropriate. If you’re going for one SSD, this should go primarily towards footage in my opinion, you don’t want any latency if you’re working with 4K files.
To clarify what I was saying before:
– One drive for OS and applications (system drive)
– One drive for footage (the faster the better), these can be extended or added to later
– One drive for cache, this will fill up rather quickly so you don’t want it impacting your footage storage or speed.Also, keep in mind that you will want to backup your files too and where you’re keeping your Projects to make sure they’re safe, I’m unaware if you have a system in place for this and it would be best practice to archive your footage also.
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Post Production Co-OrdinatorOpinions here are my own
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Interesting, you seem to be placing the speed priority on the footage drive over the scratch disk. Do you think it would make more sense then to keep the scratch disk writing to the eSATA via USB3.0 drives and store footage (media) on a say, 480GB SSD external via thunderbolt 2? Then the internal drive could be a 1TB Fusion, so programs still open fast and I could have the extra storage if I needed it.
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[John Buckman] “Do you think it would make more sense then to keep the scratch disk writing to the eSATA via USB3.0 drives and store footage (media) on a say, 480GB SSD external via thunderbolt 2?”
This is the path that I would recommend, but if you went with the 1TB SSD on Thunderbolt that I originally described, that Samsung 840 EVO drive is quite fast enough to handle both your cache/renders and your original media.
Also, as Alexander said – be sure that you have a backup in place whatever mechanism that you decide on.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
“This is the path that I would recommend, but if you went with the 1TB SSD on Thunderbolt that I originally described, that Samsung 840 EVO drive is quite fast enough to handle both your cache/renders and your original media.”
This is a great suggestion from Tim, my point is that your cache will fill up very quickly and yes, I would always put speed priority onto accessing the source media if you’re intending to work with 4K native files, which will probably have an extraordinary bandwidth. For greater speed, you could do lower resolution proxies for an offline to enhance creative workflow. Those specifics are down to you!
Technically, if your workflow is fast enough then you shouldn’t really have to render (save for After Effects). The major speed difference will come from having your applications, scratch and footage on separate disks as only one process will be writing to one disk at each time.
The main red flag to all of this for me is working with 4K footage as one hour uncompressed will be very large, though obviously it depends on what codec you use and what compression rates that codec has.
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Post Production Co-OrdinatorOpinions here are my own
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