Which SSD for UHD videoediting?

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FoxAdriano

Well-known member
Hi, I'm about to assembling a good video editing PC with Intel i9 7940X and GEFORCE GTX 1080Ti. Regarding the SSD for the Operative System I will buy Samsung 960 Pro NVMe 512GB (I'm sure).
But I'm not sure about the other SSD for video editing, I'm very undecided. At first I thought of 1 TB SSD Samsung 960 EVO, M.2, NVMe, then 1 TB Samsung 850 evo and now I realized that there is Crucial mx300 Sata III that gives more than appreciable results but with a low price. In fact I can afford 2 TB with Crucial mx300 Sata III. I inform you that I only make UHD (4K) projects with Edius Workgroup 9 (not in multicam).
What do you recommend?
Thank you
 
SSD is not really necessary for video editing. You can get way more bang for your buck with regular drives. A 7200rpm SATA drive mounted internally can handle UHD, depending on the codec. Shoot, I can edit 4k Prores 422 HQ fine off an external USB 3 drive. Raid a few 7200rpm drives together, and it could probably handle it uncompressed. Drive speed was more important when people were capturing off decks, when you needed fast write speeds. Now, it's mostly transferred off memory cards, so only read is important. If you can afford the SSD then by all means the speed will be great. Capacity is more important to me so I stick with regular drives. I have an SSD for the OS drive, and the boot speeds are amazing.
 
Sata SSD. Blackmagic makes a good app to test disk SPEEDS with, indicating which formats and codecs should work with your drive.
 
Sorry, I like to understand better. When I export from the timeline a 45 minutes UHD project I will need a SSD, so that it is faster. Do I make a mistake?
 
FoxAdriano said:
Sorry, I like to understand better. When I export from the timeline a 45 minutes UHD project I will need a SSD, so that it is faster. Do I make a mistake?
Click to expand...

No, hard drive speed is more important during the edit. You need enough speed to play back without dropped frames. The higher the bit rate of your footage, the more speed you will need. Common formats like Prores and DNxHD don't need incredibly fast speeds. Most UBS 3.0 or SATA drives will be able to handle it. You'll need more speed for less compressed formats, and if you're dong multicam edits. I'd say put together your system with an SSD for your OS, then first try out a USB 3 external drive to see if that works. If not, and if you have room in your PC, 2 7200rpm internal SATA drives striped for RAID 0. Beyond that is a Thunderbolt RAID array with 7200rpm (or 10,000) drives. And the fastest would be a RAID array with SSD drives.
 
To clarify, you can get faster exports with a faster drive, but that's dependent on how complex your renders are, as well as your CPU and graphics card speed.
 
Ok, now I understand better. I thank you. A last question please:
if I have a i9 7900X and GEFORCE GTX 1070Ti can I use internal Crucial MX500 SATA SSD 2TB to export UHD project from Edius timeline instead of 7200rpm internal SATA drives striped for RAID 0?
 
Yes, even a single SSD is faster than regular drives striped for raid. My raid gets about 250mbs write speed, while my SSD gets about 450mbs.
 
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