Hybrid HD for Premiere?

rawfa

rawfa

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Hi guys,

I was thinking about getting a new hard drive for my laptop and since a 500GB or so SSD is REALLY expensive I was thinking about the Momentus XT 750GB hybrid HD. I´ve read some good things about it for everyday use but I´m not yet convinced it will do something for Premiere, as I´ve also read the benefit is that it uses allocated memory on tasks it marks as regular (most used apps and such). Does anyone have any experience with it?
 
An SSD boot device is not very useful for Premiere, other than for start-up times.

I bought a 120 GB OCZ Agility SSD for $80 that I plan to use as a scratch device for Premiere.

I also bought two, 2GB Seagate Barracuda drives for $100 to $110 each (on sales recently.) I will use those in a RAID O configuration for my Media files (with careful backup - that doubles your chance of losing files.)

The Barracuda are second only to the 10,000 RPM Velociraptor at Tom's Hardware. These are the newer, 1 GB platter Seagates.

That was the best configuration of drives at a reasonabler price that I could come up with to approve CS6 performance. I am just using a regular 7200 RPM HDD as my boot drive, as this is an editing desktop that only does CS6 for teh most part.

I have not installed or benchmarled that configuration yet. I did not believe in using the SSD as a scratch disk until recently, when someone here convinced me after I did more research (They used to say not to do it because of the limited read/write cycles. Turns out that still gives a pretty long life.)(Thanks - forget who learned me!)

YMMV, so wait for others to chime in.

Good luck!

Michael
 
Well, at the moment I have a 5400rpm HD, so I´m guessing I should notice SOME speed improvement, right?
 
Yes.

Can you fit two drives in the laptop? That might be your biggest gain.

Also, how much RAM do you have? A minimum of 8 GB? 16 GB? GPU? CUDA cores enabled?


A HDD is pretty slow, and with only 1 drive, the position of the head can be a huge "bottleneck."

For example, if you are doing simultaneous reads & writes, instead of just streaming and buffering the data from a read, the head jumps from place to place, replaces all of the data in the buffer, then has to dump that data, and go get differnt data for the next request, pre-fetch that data to the buffer, dump the buffer, etc.

Add to that using all of your RAM so that the system needs to swap out it's memory, or Premiere creating Render files in the background, or running a background Export from Media Encoder, and you have a clusterf*** of CPU, GPU, and RAM operations being constrained by physical processes that are 10x to 100x slower than their operations. The WHOLE SYSTEM is locked up waiting for I/O - their next data "fetch."

That is why Adobe really performs well with at least of 3 drives, preferably in RAID.

There is a hierarchy of "needs" for speed though, with the System OS and Application Program Files being the least demanding, Media/Asset files, being next, along with Render files, and then finally Scratch files and system Swap files benefitting most from things like a RAM Disk (in the old days, before 64 bit and 16 GB of RAM) or an SSD.

Short version - 2 hard drives, either 2x 7600, or 1x 7600 & an SSD, if you can. Then a single 7600, yes.


What is your laptop? Time for a new one? Is it your main video editing platform? Is it an i7? How much RAM? Do you also have a desktop?


Gotta run - more later. And hopefully someone else will chime in - I'm not always right or accurate! (thinking too much of my own editing needs, working conditions, etc.)

Cheers!

Michael
 
Hi, my laptop is a LG A520, Core i7-230QM CPU @ 2.00GHZ, 6GB RAM, 64bit, GeForce GT540M. It is my main (and only) editing platform as space around the house is an issue. The laptop is less than one year old (when I got it photography was it's main purpose, which it does flawlessly).
Would it be more beneficial for me to simply get a 7200rpm HD for the laptop and then hook up another 7200rpm HD via esata?
 
Definitely worth investing in. Definitely worth a better HDD.

Not sure about eSata. I haven't tested it, need to research. I have eSata on my desktop, but my external RAID is Ethernet, and my 3TB backup drive is USB 2.0

I believe in **real world** benchmarks - actuals - over theory. Need to do some other things, but i will research.


You might also go to at least 8GB of RAM. You have about 4GB available now max I think, going to 6GB (with 2 GB for OS, etc.) is a 50% increase.

How many sockets? Max ram? You should be able to sell the chips if you have 3x2GB. 3x4GB would be 12GB, would be great at $100 +- max.

Did you do the hack to enable GPU support/CUDA cores on the GT520? (Not sure, that might be an approved card and not need the hack.)

You might change the title to "Hard Drive for Laptop?" or similar. We might get more responses. When I saw "Hybrid HD" I thought it meant "uprezzed 720 to 1080" or similar when I first saw the title.

Cheers!
 
It looks like eSata throughput should be almost equivalent to your internal input. The drive will be the bottleneck rather than the interface in most cases.


Here are streaming read benchmarks on some internal laptop HDD's from Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...-IOMeter-2006.07.27-Streaming-Reads,3013.html


I don't see that you listed the exact drive you have, other than the 5400? there were a copuple of 5400's with decent throughput.


If you have any external USB 2.0 drives around, you might try that quickly to see what you get. But eSata should be much better.

Let us know your results! If you get a chance to run benchmarks before and after, that would be cool. You can get a benchmark suite here:

http://www.ppbm5.com/


The CS6 benchmark version will be more complex and would be better, but I am not sure if it is ready yet:


http://www.ppbm6.com/


Michael
 
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