Optimizing Render Times & SSD's

N

neweditor

Well-known member
Hi all,

I'm interested in really ramping up the speed of my renders/exports. I was thinking of installing an internal PCIE 1.2tb SSD along the lines of: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167363

Would this be overkill or really worth the price tag over my second option which would be installing a standard 1 TB SSD via serial ATA at half the price.

If I used this drive solely as a render/export cache, would I see a very noticeable difference between the PCIE and Serial ATA SSD?

Thanks in advance for any help offered.
 
Hard to say without knowing your full setup. Rendertimes are mostly based on your CPU rather than the harddrive. There's always a bottleneck somewhere, but that is entirely dependend on your specific system.
 
Depends on the NLE and files but likely SSD will have little effect compared to the CPU and/or GPU which will likely have the main influence on render times
 
Thanks for the info guys! So a PCIE SSD weighing in at 1200 mb/s Write wouldn't have too noticeable a difference over a Serial ATA SSD weighing in at 520 mb/s Write because it would be more influenced by CPU/GPU?

By the way, this is specifically referring to a dedicated render cache.

My system:
i7 5960X Processor 8x Cores
64GB (8x8) DDR4 2800
GTX 980Ti - 6GB Superclocked
ASUS X99 Deluxe/U3.1 MB
500 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD Boot Drive
8TB (2x 4TB HD) Raid 0 Thunderbolt Media Drive
***RENDER CACHE*** PCIE 1.2TB SSD or Serial ATA 1TB SSD
 
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Depends on the software you use but rendering has to be done by the CPU or with assistance of GPU. What are you rendering ?
 
What is the source file? MPEG, MP4, AVCHD, XAVC, RAW ..... That is really what matters and to what format are you rendering.
 
With those data rates I do not see the need for more than a normal hard drive. The CPU and GPU do the number crunching. What software are you using to render ?
 
Faster drives move larger data faster.
Faster CPU/GPU processes data faster.
Figure out if you're being slowed down by the data moving, or by the data being processed.
 
You've got everything you need already hardware wise.
The differences between these two drives you're looking at are hardly going to make any measurable difference in this system you have. You might pick up 1 or 2 percent time gains... Maybe.

Your hardware may have one element that is slower than others....but really this system you have is about as good as it gets without going really specialized and expensive.

IF your system is currently tweaked for best speed then there is little you can do to speed it up without something like a second 980 video card.
But if you feel the render speeds are not what they should be then it is always entirely possible that something in your software/hardware configuration is not set correctly for best performance. This is ALWAYS possible....but you'd really need to get an expert on site to trace down any less than optimal conditions.
 
Thank you so much for your insight guys! Super appreciated. Would a faster render cache be more relevant then for handling multiple and higher data rate streams? I.e. Rendering 3-4 ProRes Proxy clips simultaneously would require a drive that can handle all those streams simultaneously, or rendering a ProRes HQ clip natively. In that sense, does the render cache work similarly to a normal hard drive?
 
You could handle 3 or 4 ProRes Proxy from a 7200rpm drive . I regularly edit with EDIUS 7.5 4 streams of AVCHD 1920x1080 60P at 28Mbps from a 4T Green drive !!! What software are you using to render? That could be more of your problem than fast drives. I have an i7 4790K, 16G RAM running WIN 7, no GPU just the Intel graphics on the CPU. I can export to a Bluray m2ts file from the timeline using Intel Quicksync in about 40% of realtime. Source files on the 4T Green and export to a 3T RED.
 
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