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Activity Forums DaVinci Resolve External or Internal SSD

  • External or Internal SSD

    Posted by Rafael Tasios on August 8, 2016 at 4:55 pm

    Hi. My system is slow but I want to color correct a short film in Resolve Lite. The footage is Apple Prores Ultra HD.
    Should I upgrade the internal hard drive to an SSD or buy an external one?
    From what I read around the internet a proper set up would be to run the software from the internal hard drive, read the files from an external hard drive and render/export to a different external hard drive.

    If I upgrade the internal drive to an SSD would it be ok to run the software and read the footage from the same disk? And then render to an external hard drive.

    Thank you in advance

    Joseph Owens replied 9 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Joseph Owens

    August 8, 2016 at 8:09 pm

    [Rafael Tasios] “If I upgrade the internal drive to an SSD would it be ok to run the software and read the footage from the same disk?”

    Its still not a really great idea. If you’re going to buy another drive, dedicate it. The system drive is not your bottleneck.

    jPo

    “I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

  • Marc Wielage

    August 9, 2016 at 12:31 am

    Note also you should check the drive speed with the Blackmagic Speed Test utility, and make sure it can handle the camera footage you’re using.

    SSDs alone are not necessarily fast or the best choice. I think a RAID is a better way to go for a lot of reasons. I would never try to read and write to the same disk unless it was a very short file, like maybe 3-4 seconds.

  • Rafael Tasios

    August 9, 2016 at 8:11 am

    First, thank you all for your responses!

    The data rate of the footage is around 300mb/s. And using the aja datacalc application the total size is 45GB. So I found a Lacie external ssd thunderbolt 256GB, that has speed 340mb/s (as I read around the internet) and I thought this could the job, no?
    I’m sorry I’m not so good on technical stuff.

  • Joseph Owens

    August 9, 2016 at 5:39 pm

    [Rafael Tasios] “I found a Lacie external ssd thunderbolt 256GB, that has speed 340mb/s “

    If you are working in HD, and maybe don’t expect utterly fluid performance you should be fine. SSD drives are improving all the time as far as data transfer rates are concerned. BlackMagic warned early on that some specifications with SSD were slightly misleading as their bitrate capacity was sometimes inflated by concentrating on their “flash” bit rate, rather than “sustained”, the latter being more important for us. Earlier SSDs relied on some form of compression to meet spec, which lead to some operational bottlenecks. Perhaps that is a thing of the past, its not a day-to-day concern of mine.

    jPo

    “I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

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