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Best hard drive setup for my laptop to speed up the workflow
Hi!
I know it’s not directly Vegas related but since that’s what I’m using and you guys always giving good and quick answers, I will post it here anyway.So I go to travel soon and take with me my old Samsung RF711 laptop. I want to upgrade it a little to speed up my workflow but I’m not sure is it actually worth it or not.
So it’s a 2 bay laptop and I thought of putting in a good SSD for the system and use the present 7200 rpm drive for raw materials. It also has 2USB 3 ports so I usually encode to an external drive.
So the question is: Does a SSD drive make a difference in rendering speeds? Usually the CPU is already maxed out, so does it make a difference? I’m interested in rendering speeds and try to find out the bottlenecks.
The laptop has 8gb memory. I work with full HD material from a Canon XA10 and edit, convert into mp4 files. Graphics card is not worth to mention and it cannot be upgraded anyway. The only thing I’m considering is the hard drives, everthing else is already maxed out, what this laptop can handle.
So right now I use an external drive through usb 3 for the materials, intenal drive has the software, convert videos to another USB 3 hard drive. Now if I’m right, usb uses only one controller, so that means I lose half the speed with 2 hard drives connected through the usb. That can be overcome by using the second bay, but if the cpu is already working good, will it actually make a difference?
Actually I could also hook up a 3rd hard drive with the caddy by taking out the dvd writer, maybe put 2 drives into RAID 0 and the 3rd for the materials and 4th drive through the usb 3 for output.
Is there anything worth upgrading? Can’t afford more than 1-2 drives at the moment anyway.
Thanks you!
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8 Replies
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Does a SSD drive make a difference in rendering speeds?
NO!
Unfortunately you are concentrating on the wrong components Jaanus.
For faster rendering speed in Vegas, Procsessing power is really
what makes the difference and what you should be more focused on.Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia -
[Jaanus Henno] “Does a SSD drive make a difference in rendering speeds? Usually the CPU is already maxed out, so does it make a difference? I’m interested in rendering speeds and try to find out the bottlenecks.”
Based on what you’ve said, I beleive the answer is No, an SSD will not increase the rendering speed on a computer who’s CPU is maxed out because I/O is not your bottleneck. SSD’s do make everything else faster and I wouldn’t own a computer without an SSD but it’s not going to make rendering any faster. You need a more powerful CPU or GPU.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
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Thank you. That’s all I needed to hear.
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An SSD system (boot) drive will make your computer boot up MUCH faster, and run quicker as well, but as Stevie & John stated, it won’t affect render performance. The only thing that will decrease render times is a CPU upgrade, but that’s not always a simple upgrade with a laptop.
Dave
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lol… You are welcome Jaanus.
Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia -
[Jaanus Henno] “So right now I use an external drive through usb 3 for the materials, intenal drive has the software, convert videos to another USB 3 hard drive. Now if I’m right, usb uses only one controller, so that means I lose half the speed with 2 hard drives connected through the usb. That can be overcome by using the second bay, but if the cpu is already working good, will it actually make a difference?”
Depends. Some PC chipset have multiple USB hosts, some have an internal hub. Multiple hosts on the same PCIe controller are limited by PCIe, they’re not limited by USB. Multiple drives on a hub share the bandwidth of that single host. You should be able to see if you have multiple hosts, a hub, or both looking at the USB entries in Device Manager.
And given that it’s USB 3.0, you will never find that two external USB 3.0 drives on a USB 3.0 hub will be your rendering bottleneck. Raw transfer speed is never your problem unless you’re working with multiple uncompressed files. The bottleneck you can hit on any HDD is seek time issues, if you have too many assets loading from the same drive. Not an issue with SSD. You’ll know you hit this kind of issue if your rendering doesn’t have the CPU nearly saturated (ideally over 90% for all cores).
-Dave
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Thanks Dave, that really clears it up.
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