Speed up VideoStudio with a solid-state drive?

[pvreditor]

Sorry if this has come up before, but can I expect an improvement in rendering speed or get other performance improvements by adding a solid-state drive (SSD)? Will an SSD speed up making proxies or make the editing process faster/smoother in general? Does anyone have any experience with this and can share their insight?

Thanks!

Bob Kovacs
http://www.bobkovacs.com

[Ken Berry]

No idea -- but we'd be happy if you were our guinea pig!!!

[DVDDoug]

I would guess that you would get some improvement with some operations, but only where the hard drive is the bottleneck.

I've read about people installing solid state drives and not noticing a big difference (not necessarily Video Studio users). But, this is just random anecdotal information and maybe it does make an improvement for most people...?

When you make a copy of a large file on the same drive, it usually takes about twice as long as when you copy to different drive. I assume this mostly because the read/write head has to switch back-and-forth between the reading and writing locations. With a solid state drive, there is no seek time (no delay for head movement), so I would expect faster results when copying to the same drive.

When you are rendering, sometimes the CPU can be the bottleneck, and sometimes you can render just about as fast as you can copy files. Sometimes you can almost double rendering speed by putting your original files on one drive and rendering to a different drive.

So, I would expect some improvement with a solid state drive whenever your rendering doesn't require much CPU processing.

For basic read/write "data transfer" of large files where there isn't much seeking, I believe the interface is the limiting factor. So, I would expect a SATA-3 hard drive to be about the same as a SATA-3 solid-state drive in that situation.

[skier-hughes]

I have an ssd for my OS drive, still have sata for the working drives, can't afford a 2tb ssd.
Can't say it has made my head turn, and I've not run side by side tests, but if you are buying a new pc then I'd suggest going for it, just upgrading, well not really sure, but am thinking not going to see much difference.

[pvreditor]

I have an ssd for my OS drive, still have sata for the working drives, can't afford a 2tb ssd.
Can't say it has made my head turn, and I've not run side by side tests, but if you are buying a new pc then I'd suggest going for it, just upgrading, well not really sure, but am thinking not going to see much difference.

I realize that SSD drives are very expensive compared to rotating drives, but I wonder if there is a speed advantage when used for direct interaction with VideoStudio. It sounds like you have only the OS and maybe some programs on your SSD, and that you render to your rotating drive. If that's the case, can you try an experiment? Try loading some raw video files onto both your SSD and the rotating drive. Create an edited video file that's about two minutes long. Using the edit file, have it render in the folder that's on the SSD, using the files on the SSD. Then repeat the same experiment with the files on the rotating drive, rendering to the rotating drive. Keep track of the time it takes to render and see if the SSD has a time advantage. Be sure that, when you work with the SSD drive, all files and rendering are done to the SSD. Likewise for the rotating drive.

That should answer the question fairly scientifically. Thanks!

Bob Kovacs
http://www.bobkovacs.com

[canuck]

i doubt you will see much difference since rendering involves mostly the CPU and your RAM. I/O to a SSD will of course be faster but I would think for such a short test the difference would be minimal.

[pvreditor]

i doubt you will see much difference since rendering involves mostly the CPU and your RAM. I/O to a SSD will of course be faster but I would think for such a short test the difference would be minimal.

Still, it would be interesting to know. A 10 percent difference might not be much for a simple two-minute video, but it might be a significant time savings for rendering a complex 20-minute video.

Inquiring minds want to know...

Bob Kovacs
http://www.bobkovacs.com

[stelch]

Here is some info

http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/SSD.htm