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What’s best bang for buck… Faster drives or faster processor?
I’ve started to roll in a little money from my sales. Thanks to everybody whom helped me get up to speed with vegas!
I’m now reinvesting in a little better editing computer. Currently my capture scratch drive drive is a 5400 RPM Sata drive. Basically it sucks lol
I’m curious, about how much of a performance jump I’d get off a 7200 drive, 10000 RPM drive, or 15000 RPM drive. My system is a single core 64 bit setup but can take up to 8 cores which is another upgrade I’m looking into.
Basically I’m curious what would offer me the most bang for the buck right now. I’m looking at a new capture scratch drive and or the processors. Probably 7200 rpm as the 10k and 15k drives are still pretty pricey.
Thanks!!!!
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18 Replies
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Faster processor AND faster drives is what you need.
A faster CPU helps in previewing and rendering. The second generation Intel i7-2600K processor offers good bang for buck and nearly outperforms the original i7 work horse/benchmark, the i7-980.
Multiple 7200 rpm in a RAID configuration means multiple spindles, and generally better read/write performance over a single drive, and if you have spare change, a SSD drive for your OS. I would also be looking at getting SATA 3 drives, but make sure your motherboard supports them.
The 10K and 15K RPM drives tend to literally run hot and also burn a hole in your pocket :-), but tend to be based on older, SATA 2 or SCSI technology.
My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6
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Put everything you have into as many cores as you can afford. Your drive speed is not the bottleneck when rendering. Rendering is 100% CPU bound.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I agree with John, but a 5400RPM HDD *is* too slow for editing. And hard-disk drives are too cheap to avoid an upgrade. I just bought two 7200RPM 1Tb Seagates for $69 each at Micro Center.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
[Stephen Mann] “…but a 5400RPM HDD *is* too slow for editing.”
Yea, but he has a single core! The questions was “most bang for the buck” and I’m betting that he will not feel the difference between a 5400RPM drive and a 7200RPM drive has much as moving to a dual core or quad core from a single core.
I’m just thinking “bottleneck” here. I agree you should use 7200RPM drives for editing but I have a laptop with 5400RPM drives and a dual core and editing on it is way faster than my old laptop that had 5400RPM drives and a single core. Also HD can be smaller than SD. DV was 13GB/hr. AVCHD is only about 7.5GB/hr so hard drive speed is much less of an issue with HD because you are moving 1/2 of the data. (of course HDV is also 13GB/hr so it does depending one which HD format you use)
I still think a processor upgrade is a better choice than a hard drive upgrade given that you can’t afford both.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Hard drives are so cheap it’s crazy to hesitate on upgrading just one single drive. Check out the Western Digital product list-
https://www.wdc.com/en/products/catalog/
Find a drive that fits your needs and budget then search it’s availability at your preferred seller.
I’ve had a good experience with these- Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ for $89.00 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
and these- https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136792
I’m sure the processor will be more bang… but for how many bucks? I say snag a new drive now and save up for a nice big processor upgrade when some more money comes in.
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Hey thanks for the help. I knew I could count on you guys 🙂 Next after this is a camera upgrade.
Exciting stuff! Thanks again, I have a drive on order and looking into processors now.
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I recommend against “Green” drives. Some slow down to save energy and all of them spin down after a minute or so of no I/O. Neither is good for video. (OK for backups, though).
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Hey thanks for the green drive tip! That’ll be quite helpful 🙂 I didn’t even think to look out for that on my last hard drive purchase.
My server (which does the rendering) actually sounds like a hoover vacuum cleaner and has something like a 700 or 800 watt power supply. It was an old number crunching machine we had at work (I used to design aerospace equipment).
It’s quite old but still has some good potential, such as two processor sockets which can support up to 8 cores (or possibly even 12 cores which I’m searching on right now).
Currently I only have one core. It’s an older architecture so the processors are cheaper, but still really fast. I’m sure when they bought it at work money wasn’t an option so they spent 10 or 15k on it.
It also has a SCSI controller on the motherboard. But I think I want to stick with SATA yet.
Anyways, thanks much for the help!
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To chime in i just did a months work on a WD 1TB “green” drives, 500GB of Cineform(‘ol school) V2.5 and over 1GB of.wav on Vegas V9e/32bit on it. Pre-renders were on the WD black OS drive – no problems. its quad core 2.8, 3GB of ram i think…
You got a single core!!! WOW, well depends what you’re are editing but getting a better CPU could make it like night and day!
that said I sometimes edit DV proxies with Vegas 7e on my 2 year old 1.66Ghz netbook (so i like to edit on couch in the evening sue me!) no problems on draft full.
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Actually, I’m on a really really tight budget. So tight I made a nearly 6 hour long documentary on my – 1.6 Ghrz single core laptop with 2 gig of memory and 5400 rpm drive.
It was well um hard lol Sony vegas crashed a LOT. Will be nice to have a decent editing machine.
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