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Beginner seeking some basic advice
Hi all,
I’m looking for some basic advice for my setup. Currently using CS6 on my MacBook Pro which has an internal SSD. I’ve got my OS and applications on this SSD, and I’m planning to keep source media files on an external USB3 Drive.
My concern is that there will be a bottleneck on the drive’s speed (5400rpm), and I’ll get dropped frames all the time.
I’d welcome any suggestions on how best to set my drives up here. Would I be better off investing in faster external drives, or would a better choice to be to keep all source media with the project files and scratch disks on the internal SSD and just use the external drives to back up?
I will only be working on small projects, and only one at a time.
Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.
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4 Replies
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you can get a T1,T3 samsung usb external SSD for pretty cheap now. it should work pretty well as long as you have usb 3.0 or higher.
Primary SSD (budget ssd for good OS boot up time, and page file)
OS & SoftwareSecondary SSD (fastest, the external usb in your case for media playback)
Project files, Scratch, & Media CacheOptional Platter/SSD (slowest, for Storage & Archive backup)
read the conclusion here.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-2015-4-Storage-Optimization-854/#Conclusion -
Rotational speeds are not the determining factor they once were – due to changes in drive designs, many 5400rpm drives can move data as well as a 7200rpm unit.
The bigger question is what is the transfer speed of the drive, and what kind of footage are you editing? If cutting AVCHD for instance, that runs about 24mbps typically, and the MiniDV of yesterday was 25mbps, so that is a very low demand for bandwidth.
My advice is to simply TRY the drive you have right now. If it does seem to be an issue, then add a faster drive, not a big deal. Not necessarily an SSD because they are still far more costly per GB than a spinning drive. Look to a vendor that specializes in drives for video/media, such as Glyph, G-Tech, or LaCie for instance, and not something from the local big box store which may be more for “storage” than “performance”.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
if AVCHD, then they will probably be needing a proxy editing friendly codec such as cineform which requires a fast hd anyway. you can get a WD black which is around 200mb/sec. but that will limit how many streams you can edit simultaneously 0-2 or possibly none at all.
you may indeed be running into cpu limitations anyway and require a proxy workflow as h.264 is very cpu intensive. What video codec are you editing with? I should have asked these questions beforehand.
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Hi Chris & Jeff,
Many thanks for your quick responses. I am editing in h.264 for my current project, but right now everything is on the internal SSD. Haven’t noticed any dropped frames yet, but that drive is filling up fast.
I think I’ll try the platter I already have first and see how that affects performance. If there’s an issue then I’ll look for a faster external, and use the current HDD for archive and back up.
Thanks once again for your help guys!
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