What’s best bang for buck… Faster drives or faster processor?

[Dave Haynie]

While a 5400RPM drive is not ideal for editing, it’s hardly “too slow”. Most editing is concerned with linear drive speed — how many bits per second you can pull from a drive in a straight line, a couple of files. That’s a function of drive density and rotational velocity, and in modern times, the drive density has been the key. That’s how much stuff is available in a single rotation. If I cram twice as much data per track on a 5400RPM drive as a 7200RPM drive, that 5400RPM drive will go 1.5x faster than the 7200RPM drive.

So, for example, a 2TB 5400RPM drive is probably much faster than a 500GB 7200RPM drive, for straight-line stuff. Obviously, the 2TB 7200RPM is faster than either. If you have a very small data drive, upgrade it, both for speed and capacity, but only after you get a multi-core CPU.

Where drive speed still matters a great deal is latency… the rotational velocity has the largest single influence on the seek time. This can have an effect on overall rendering speed if you’re loading too many assets from one drive. That’s easily cured by using multiple drives. This is the predominant issue for audio recording in realtime.. drive seeks will have a large influence on the number of tracks you can record or play back in realtime (I did audio on PCs for a good ten years before I got into video… my field recording rig is still more impressive than my video gear).

Keep in mind that HDDs are many, many times faster than most video media. My camcorders record at up to 28Mb/s. When I encode 1080/60p in Cineform, it’s about 130Mb/s. DNxHD video is usually around 144Mb/s.. that’s probably the slowest video I’m likely to use. A typical decent HDD these days can easily read at 50MB/s-100MB/s, faster still if you’re using an SSD. That’s 400Mb/s-800Mb/s… you video is read much faster than realtime. The SATA interface is rated at up to 6000Mb/s… not bottleneck there.

Video decode (eg, your CPU) is always the bottleneck. A modern Core-2 or i3/5/7 single core is probably not fast enough to decode HD AVC in realtime on its own. It’s very code dependent, but on my 6 processor AMD 1090T, I see some video players (VLC, for example) taking as much as 50% CPU to play 1080/60p in realtime, 25% for 720/60p or 1080/60i. That 1080/60p drops to 7% CPU using a better video player with GPU acceleration. You may see some of that kind of thing running the latest Adobe Premiere, but Vegas doesn’t do this yet. So even for just plain editing, you want all the CPU you can get — every CPU is still inadequate, once you start thinking about a few layers of 1080/60p AVC in an edit. And that same decoding time applies during a render… Vegas has to decode each frame, apply all FX, render the final single frame, etc. even before the AVC encoder is invoked. This can be sped up a bit editing in MPEG-2, better still in something like Cineform, when performance matters.

-Dave

[Matthew Jeschke]

I just ordered a pair of Opteron 285 processors. It’s the maximum my motherboard will accept. That puts me up to four 64 bit cores at 2.6 ghrz a piece.

I don’t need too large a capture scratch drive. I’d think around 100 gb would do the trick. But I cannot seem to find any SATA-3 drives that are that small, only the older SATA-2 drives.

Does anybody know… is there a large difference in performance between SATA-2 and SATA-3 7200 RPM drives?

Thanks!!

[John Rofrano]

[Matthew Jeschke] “I don’t need too large a capture scratch drive. I’d think around 100 gb would do the trick.”

You want the largest drive that you can afford. Larger drives actually perform better because they pack more data into a smaller area so the head needs to move less.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Matthew Jeschke]

Oh interesting. I never thought of it that way but that makes sence 🙂

[Matthew Jeschke]

I’m still shopping for drives. But my processors did come in. I previously had one 2600 GHRZ Opteron Core. Now I have 4 cores same speed and architecture.

I noticed a good jump in preview performance. I can preview most any of my cuts at maximum quality without dropping frames. However, render time doesn’t seem much faster (which I found weird).

I’m starting to wonder if my antiquated operating system isn’t taking full advantage of all four cores. They are on two separate processors. Does anybody know if Windows Vista Home can support two separate processors. The resource screen only shows two cores yet device manager shows all four.

Additionally, I have 32 bit version of Vista. Is there a substantial increase when moving to a 64-bit environment?

Thanks!

[John Rofrano]

[Matthew Jeschke] ” Does anybody know if Windows Vista Home can support two separate processors.”

The Home version only supports one physical CPU so you are not using 1 CPU if you have 2.

You really should upgrade to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit to take advantage of two physical processors.

[Matthew Jeschke] “Additionally, I have 32 bit version of Vista. Is there a substantial increase when moving to a 64-bit environment?”

Not as substantial as upgrading your CPU but you will be able to use more memory which is very important when you have more cores. With the 32-bit version all 4 cores have to share 2 GB of memory because 32-bit applications can’t use more that 2GB. Moving to 64-bit will use all of your 4GB of memory and you can add more.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Matthew Jeschke]

Thought I’d update this post on my “cheap” editing system. It’s been about a year since I asked for pointers and here’s what I found after buying some hardware…

Everybody was absolutely right. CPU cores / power are the biggest bang for the buck. I’ve since updated my system with the highest performance CPU it would accept (within reason). I now have 4 AMD Opteron 280 – 64 bit cores.

I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit which seems to run a little more stable than Vista home and a bit quicker. I do notice if Vegas is still quite unstable with large projects. Especially if I switch applications (forcing a page fault). Sometimes Sony Vegas crashes on it’s own… I think because it’s switching processes inside the applications for some filters and previewing? Otherwise it runs really well. I think more system memory would be prudent though.

I also found a work around to get more mileage out of my cheaper 5400 RPM drives. I use two drives on two separate SATA controllers. Then have capture scrap on one while rendering to the other.

While watching resource manager, I noticed my drive is maxed out when using just one drive. Otherwise when using two, my CPU cores are maxed out.

I’ve have since bought a 7200 RPM drive (mainly for more space) but didn’t seem to make any difference of course as my CPU(s) are maxed out.

Thanks again for the help! This little post was more than able to help me make a freebie PC from my old job do the trick. Though it’s not ideal setup by any means I’ve got a TON of mileage from it for just a few bucks in upgrades!

I’m learning the ropes of online publishing. Mostly as an excuse to play with more cameras.

Here’s several of my latest ventures,
https://www.keystoaz.com
https://www.fitlish.com
https://www.corvettemedic.com

[Dave Haynie]

[Matthew Jeschke] “Oh interesting. I never thought of it that way but that makes sence :)”

Basically, a larger drive will pack more data per track, and this has been the primary reason drives have increased in speed. There have been 7200RPM drives for decades… I had a 2.1GB Seagate back in the early 90s (cost about $1200) that could manage about 10MB/s peak. Today, any old 5600RPM drive is likely to approach 50MB/s, maybe 100MB/s reads. It’s not spinning any faster, but the amount of data read per spin is dramatically increased. This means more performance per revolution, and fewer seeks per unit of storage.

Plus, you need a ton of storage for video anyway. I would generally recommend speed over size if your main goal is large multi-track audio projects (seeks become the gating factor), but you’ll get more speed for the usual demands of video on a larger drive, even if it’s slightly slower.

And as you’ve correctly noticed, if you can keep your CPUs near 100% during a render, you have fully optimized you system. Computation is the only thing that SHOULD be a bottleneck these days, at least on most projects (I’ll admit to having done a few animated projects with 50+ tracks, including some raw HD tracks… this can clobber CPU and HDD alike).

-Dave