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Best use for a second SSD
I have been given a 120Gb SSD as a birthday present. At present, I already have Win 7 and most of my regularly used programs on a 120Gb SSD (with over 45 Gb free), plus two 1Tb HDDs. I thus have no real need for the extra storage, but would like to make use of the extra speed of the new SSD. I am considering using it as my video and photo editing “scratch pad”. If I do this, is it worth copying the in-use videos from where they are stored on one of the HDDs onto the SSD?
Or is there another, better use of the new SSD which I haven’t thought of?
Any suggestions?
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3 Replies
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The SSD can help a bit with speed in video editing if you put the source files on them. The sweet spot for data transfer is between a standard 7200rpm and an SSD. Somewhere in between CPU decoding and calculations become the bottleneck and all the disk speed in the world will not help… and an SSD will certainly take you to the point of this bottleneck easily (so will a Raid setup of your standard drives.) If your terabyte drives are in a Raid setup you will not see a significant advantage in using the SSD as a scratch pad. I am also a musician so I use SSD’s for virtual instrument sampling which works better with higher disk data transfer but most video editor’s don’t have this need.
With Vegas the most significant increase in having everything SSD is the program start (which you already have with, I assume, the program being on your OS drive.) Having the project files on SSD (and slightly better because it is a completely different physical drive) your projects will load much faster as well. That will be about it.
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[Matt Carlson] ” If your terabyte drives are in a Raid setup”
The 2 x 1TB drives can only be set up as a mirror or stripe. The latter has great read and write performance, but no redundancy. Lose 1 drive, lose the lot. If they were set up as a mirror, you get great read performance, but lousy write performance. I would guess that Roger has neither, and uses 1 x TB for source files and the other for output.
I would use the SSD to store and read source files. As SSD’s do have a limited life span when it comes to read/write operations, this may help prolong its life. If Roger’s current drives and motherboard are SATA III enabled, he should be getting decent data transfer rates for video. Not good enough for audio as Matt has correctly pointed out, but okay for video.
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Thanks for your input, guys.
I have been using one HDD for project files, and the other for output, but both are SATA 2. The SSD drives are both SATA 3, and are connected to the only two SATA 3 connections on my MB. So it seems that the way to go is to use the new SSD for project files, as I was intending.
Good to have confirmation, though.
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