External Hard Drive

[Peter C.]

I stumble upon this video the other day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bySZmIxMjW8
The gist of it hard drive speed doesn't matter as much as you might think for editing. What he saying seems like it shouldn't be true but I want to try it out. Obviously there are other considerations that have nothing to do with editing performance. SSD are portable, durable, quiet, don't need to be powered, and you can copy large files on and off quickly. That being said what you think about that large spinner drives are good enough for most editing? Could it be really true that super fast ssd while nice aren't as essential as we have come to believe?

 

[Publimix]

He is right and he is not right, transfering files, rendering and searching files on a ssd is faster.

Most of the comments on his video agree.

I guess there is an optimum read/write speed for storage disks. He compares fast disks with insane fast disks.

 

[ahalpert]

I guess there is an optimum read/write speed for storage disks.

Can't you calculate the required throughput for your specific task? If you know how many streams of video at what bitrates you'll be accessing, you can figure out how fast you need to read the drive for playback and anything faster than that will have no impact, no?

But I would think that for rendering/exporting, the maximum useful throughput would be limited by the processing speed of the cpu/gpu. maybe that calculation is trickier and depends on the type of effects it's processing? But you could probably analyze the computer as it works to figure out how fast it's crunching?

 

[drboffa]

This is entirely at odds with my experience editing off spinning disks and SSDs. In FCPX I can't get smooth scrubbing through footage if I'm going from a spinning disk and it takes significantly longer to pull up any footage I'm going through.

Certainly for some aspects the CPU/GPU will be the limiting factor, but beyond that an SSD makes a huge difference (again, at least in my experience). I just tried it out in FCPX to confirm and the difference in scrubbing through footage was notable. And this is in FCPX, which is pretty remarkable for getting smooth playback most of the time. In Resolve I recall having even worse issues when going off a spinning disk compared to an SSD.

 

[jb.]

I'd concur. FCP specifically seems to really like editing off of SSD. Premiere (on my Windows machine) seems fine editing off of a two-drive RAID 0 as long as the Media Cache drive is a fast SSD. Resolve seems closer to Premiere than FCP to me on both Mac and Windows.