SSD Solid State Drive P2 offload time?

[Nick Walters]

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with P2 and SSD's? I'm curious about the offload time as well as general experience.

I'm building a system for on site editing in a rack mount road case(removeable top/bottom, with handles for transport), and since this may be treated roughly I'm going with a 160gb SSD for temp storage(on site short edit, then offload to delivery drive and personal RAID for backup...then delete SSD footage).

System is an Intel SR1400 Dual 3Ghz Xeon, 4gb ECC DDR2. I'll be installing a PCI to PCMCIA adapter(any suggestions?), and be using an IDE to SATA converter so that this system can utilize the SSD. OS/NLE will most likely be win7-64 with the latest adobe....any suggestions are appreciated and I'll put up a full post on the system once it's complete.

basically I'm gonna film at standard def. and offload to this system. I'll have 1-2 hours footage from 1-2 cameras needing to be cut to 5-7 minutes in 2 hours or so.

 

[Barry_Green]

Well, as always, it depends on the slowest element in the chain. If you're using an SSD that has a minimum sustained write speed of 160 megabytes per second or more, you can offload a P2 card extremely quickly; a 32GB E-series card will transfer in less than four minutes. But if the SSD is slower than that, that will add time. If you raid a couple of SSD drives together, you should be able to get the maximum transfer rate.

It also depends on the P2 card. Original (640mbps), A-series (800mbps) or E-series (1200mbps) will largely influence the transfer speed. I've seen a 64GB A-series card completely offload in 10 minutes, to a SATA raid. A 64GB E-series card should be able to do the task in about 7 minutes, assuming the raid is fast enough to handle a sustained 160 megabytes per second write speed.

The bus speed of your adapter will matter too. The highest-speed adapter is the PCD35, which is optimized to not only take full advantage of the P2 card's speed, but to also transfer multiple cards so it can saturate the PCIe bus with data from multiple cards.

Which all might be kind of overkill. If you have 2 hours of standard-def footage (assuming DV25?) that's about 30 gb, which can be transferred in four minutes to the SSD depending on the card.

But the ultimate question is -- do you need to transfer at all? If speed is an issue, why not just edit directly from the P2 card? Plug it in, import the footage from the card, and edit. You should be able to handle at least a dozen, if not two dozen, streams of DV simultaneously from the P2 card.