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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

SSD for boot drive and CS5.5, how much improvement?

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Brian Merlen

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I have been reading up on this for a while and hear conflicting findings on if a SSD internal really helps significantly with encoding times. I am using a Core 2 duo 2.26ghz with 4gbs of ram. I am going to put in 8gbs of ram and basically am stuck trying to justify or not justify getting an SSD as well. I would only run the aps and boot off it using it as my internal drive and ditching my stock 5400 HDD. I would still be running my media on firewire off a 7200rpm raid 0 external.

Does SSD improve encode times? Where do I send it to the internal or external when exporting?

Or does it simply improve boot times, and make the system faster opening aps and allows more aps to work at once? If it can't improve encodes significantly I am not interested really. Ideally I don't want a new system and if I can't get faster encodes I am going to get a 7200rpm HDD for a far better price with much more capacity.

OWC was the SSD I was looking at seeing as they supposedly last long and are high quality...

Thanks appreciate your help
 
SSD drive isn't going to aid in transcode speed... Unless you're writing your data to that SSD, as it can write a bit faster than an fast HDD, at times. It does improve boot and application load times. Generally speaking, data read times will be 3~4X faster than your stock 5400rpm HDD in most cases. Assuming you have something along the lines of a 256GB or 320GB or similar, that was stock about the time the 2.26GHz C2D systems were all the rage.

If you're intent on keeping this system, then I suppose you could go the SSD route, but I would suggest just using a 7200rpm 500GB drive and save the money. Better yet, skip buying the SSD, sell this system and buy a new one with a quad-core i7 CPU.
 
Yes I would love to do that once the new mac pros are out (and i'd get a mercury enabled card) or go for a macbook pro right now... Then get an r6 and let that thing fly! Thanks for the advice, much appreciated. I don't have the budget to really do that at this time and was weighing my other options for upgrades. 8Gbs of ram and 750gb 7200rpm seem like a good short term fix for a core 2 duo. its big enough to keep 1 project on the internal at a time for working quicker then my firewire can and beats my stock HDD in size and speed. plus its dirt cheap to have OWC do the parts and install these days, which is good because I am still under applecare and am trying to not void it if possible by letting apple certified techs do the work...
 
OWC SSD's are some of the best ones out there. No reason to go with the 6G Extreme version, they will run at 3G in all but the current 2011 model Macbook Pro systems.

If you're using Firewire for external working storage, you should really move to eSATA. It makes a HUGE difference. A fast eSATA drive (like a CalDigit VR or similar 2-drive unit) really helps boost performance for working in apps like Premiere, REDCINE-X, etc.. I would upgrade your RAM and get a nice eSATA unit with a good ExpressCard adapter (CalDigit or Sonnet). See how that does for you.
 
not really popular in this crowd I guess, especially for mac users. pci e slots are very precious to us... and really just not worth the dollar per gb even though you can obtain insane speeds. All that money you are spending you could put into a spinning disc raid and get great speeds and many times more the capacity. and these days capacity supersedes the top speeds. if you can get around 500-800 mb/sec going on your raid you are pretty solid to work with uncompressed to r3d. my 5 tb internal raid 0 is starting to feel like I need to change it out to 10 tb raid soon...
 
PCIe SSD's use the small PCIe slot, not the big one. But I'm not very familiar with those slots, expecially on a Mac.

OCZ_Revo3_X2.jpg
 
PCIe SSDs just move the SSD directly onto a PCIe host controller, they can bypass the need for a SATA or SAS host. They are fast, for a single device and relatively compact. I think they make the most sense for server blades that need local storage or other similar applications where capacity isn't that important, but they need fast storage internally or in a very small space. For a lot less money, one can build an external RAID that posts overall better numbers and has 10X the capacity. Just comes down to what you need. As Tom points out, the Mac Crowd isn't going to be interested. PCIe slots are too few to begin with. Instead of spending $4K on a 800MB/s 1.2TB internal SSD, I would much rather spend it on a good SAS controller with 8 drives in an external enclosure that can still do 800MB/s and give me 12TB of usable storage, plus I have the ability to connect another such RAID to the same host card or an LTO backup unit, etc..

In terms of PCIe slots, they're the same on a Mac or PC, they're all standard. They come in several common sizes and speeds. The common speeds are 1X, 4X, 8X and 16X, which represent the number of "lanes" or channels that concurrently operate. Typically, we only see 1X and 16X configurations for the physical slot itself, this is for electrical purposes. So most X4 and X8 slots are the same size as an X16 slot and provide the same amount of power. PCIe speeds vary with each revision of the standard. PCIe v1.x tops out at 250MB/s per lane, v2.x slots are 500MB/s per lane. That SSD card picture you posted is a 1X card. Assuming it's a v2.0 device, it's maximum throughput is 500MB/s. Most that I have seen, of the high performance models, are PCIe v2.0 X4. They theoretically can transfer 2GB/s. Some of them can come close to that for read performance. Actually about 1.7GB/s seems to be the upper end most of the time for burst speeds, but their write speeds are usually in the low 300MB/s, or much lower than what you can get from a decent small RAID.

SSDs are indeed the future and will probably replace mechanical hard drives for most applications in the near future (3~5 years?). In terms of price, longevity and capacity, we're just not there yet. People tend to over-estimate what SSDs can really do. Across the industry, SSD write performance is still pretty lackluster compared to read performance. For Joe Average Consumer, this isn't a huge deal and is typically invisible with typical photo and small video clip sizes, small documents, etc.. For those of us working with huge images, videos, databases, etc.. Stuff that spans multiple GB per file on a regular basis, those write speeds can become a real issue.
 
thank you Jeff, that was informative. It seems that as long as SSD write speeds are rather low, spinning disk RAID's will remain in use for a couple of years. Maybe even longer.
 
If you buy an SSD drive for Premiere Pro 5.5, you won't be sorry, because it makes everything seem much snappier. But it doesn't affect rendering times at all.

Because of cost, SSD's are usually only system or program drives. Video drives are usually of the spinning variety, since you can get the same speed and much, much more storage by raiding a few of them together. But if you can play the number of streams you want to render in realtime without hiccups, then getting faster or more video drives won't improve your render time, either. Only processor or Mercury GPU upgrades will help you there.

I just added a 240 GB OCZ Vertex 2, an older model. It's "only" 240 MB/s read & write, but I've never added a system part that made such a significant improvement in the useability of my computer, ever. It's not just the throughput, but also the random access time, which is hundreds of times less than a mechanical disk.

Also, bear in mind that SSD's aren't "slow"; if you put two in a Raid 0 array you'd max out an SAS 6 Gb channel, while you'd need about 4 spinning beasts to manage that feat.
 
SSD's need to go down in price and up in capacity. At the moment it's a lot cheaper to have mechanical disks in a RAID then SSD's in a RAID.
For use as the OS and software drive there's no reason not to use SSD's, it improves startup times at about 60%, but not just that. All the OS workload and disk readings with cache and stuff becomes much faster.

And it makes a huge difference. I still don't have my workstation equiped with an SSD, but I have a macbook air late 2010 and even though it's not nearly as good with processor speed and RAM it's actually almost as fast as my workstation when working with After Effects (ok, my workstation is two years old). I'ts only because of SSD's ability to keep the software snappy.

I love SSD's, but I really long for when they are so cheap you can build your RAID with it. Then you could take advantage of thunderbolt and uncompressed 10-bit 4K, but as I said, they need to go down in price or else it won't happen.
 
I use an OCZ Ibis, only 100 gb but fine for an edit only PC. It reports read at over 750mbs and performs effortlessly, I also appear to get better speeds from my internal raid 0 set up, maybe not using the onboard sata controllers, but the pcie lane, has cleared some of the data traffic, and hence cleared the way for an improved interchange.

Load times or ludicrously fast, and everything runs very smoothly with multiple apps open, CS5.5 PPro, AE, photoshop.

The rig is an i7 Sandybridge 2600K @ 4.6 GHz OC, water cooled with 16GB ram on a Z68 UD7 mobo.

Also attached is an external 4TB raid 5 via esata, not installed the GTX 570 yet, but performance should be pretty good.

Paul
 
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