What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

I have a USB 3.0 Hard drive dock with a 64gig SSD and a 1.5TB 7200 normal hard drive.

I have TONS of Ram and my OS driver is a SSD SATA III.

1. Is it best to put the files to be worked and rendered on the SSD ? how much will this help ?

2. I am already using my video card to help render which helps a ton. Which i found how to unlock here
Adobe Premiere CS5 Video Cards with CUDA Acceleration Mercury Playback Hack Mod Tip Unlock

3. I have been working with cs3 master collection until i just got the cs5 production sweet (Can I be excited I got it for $120 !!!!, and before you think i have a bogus copy, one of my wife's dancers works for adobe and that was her cost, it did take 3 weeks for them to ship it though) So now i need to learn how to use my new stuff. (considering I didn't know tons before I will have lots of fun learning it all over again)

Lucky fellow!!!!!

Look up Harm Millard. He's got some great insight as to tuning systems, and disk setups..
You'll find him over at the Adobe forums also....

But to directly answer your question, pretty well all modern drives do what you're asking for without any issues. So long as it's not sharing any other system resources...
Until you decide to capture and work with uncompressed materials, you don't need to worry about spending wads of money on I/O disks...This is the least of your concerns...

OS on Drive C:
Project files on Drive D:
Scratch files and cache files on Drive E:
Captured material on Drive F:

In a nutshell, this is the ideal situation....

+1. Four drives is ideal. I think of it a little differently. I separate my project files from my rendering files (one on D:, the other on E:). This seems to help rendering a bit.

Note also that Premiere Pro CS5 requires access to the original footage when rendering. When you edit, you create difference files. IOW, Premiere Pro isn't changing the source at all. But to render, it has to see the source and the difference files. My point here is that keeping source and difference files on a separate drive from your rendering files will help rendering speed a little.

So when you get down to it, maybe the ideal is a five drive system. Sigh...

Look here: Adobe Forums: Generic Guideline for Disk Setup

Notice it is generic and individual work flows, editing style, backups and current configuration may require personal approaches.

My personal view on SSD's is that they still are way too costly and do not offer sufficient storage to justify the 40 - 50 times the price per GB over conventional disks on an editing rig. SSD's may be nice on a laptop that may be booted numerous times per day, but on an editing rig, that is booted in the morning and turned off in the evening, the 3 - 5 seconds gain once a day is negligent.

On normal editing flows, there is no discernible advantage from using SSD's. They are not faster than conventional disks yet. I rather have three 1 TB disks than a single SSD in my editing rig for the same price, because I get better performance from spreading the disk load over 3 different disks, than one single SSD, apart from the gains in storage space.

Yeah, SSDs are definitely still far too low capacity and expensive to be used as mass storage at this point in time.

For a C: drive, though, I don't necessarily line up with Harm's cost/benefit assessment. The cost for a new 500GB - 2TB HDD (you really don't find "fast" HDDs much small these days) that you'd buy to be your C: drive is not much less than a decent SSD of 80-120GB. That's plenty for your OS, Programs, swap file, and Project Files. A better measure than cost/GB for a C: drive is simply, well, cost for your C: drive.

There's more to it than a few seconds of boot time. SSDs generally have a much longer MTBF (mean time between failures), are silent, lower power, and cooler. The very fast access times of an SSD do contribute in part to snappier performance. Of course, having a fast processor and lots of RAM also a major factors, but the SSDs bring something to the table -- opening and closing all those program and temp files happens almost instantly. Put it all together and it makes for a very pleasingly responsive editing experience, especially when popping in and out of Photoshop, Soundbooth, AE, etc, etc.

Does any of that mean you should immediately dump your Velociraptor OS drive and buy the first SSD you can find? Probably not, especially if you pretty much just stay in PPro. But neither do I think folks ought to be dissuaded from getting an SSD as their C: drive when it is time for a new C: drive. They're just a better mousetrap and definitely not prohibitively expensive for this purpose.

I just ran a little test with my Intel X25 80GB SSD by opening Premiere, AE, Soundbooth & Photoshop CS5 nearly at the same time (in Win 7, I have each shortcut in the bottom taskbar all next to one another, so its only 4 clicks to open all 4 programs).

I had the windows clock open, and it took only 10 seconds TOTAL for all 4 apps to open.

I totally agree with Pete about using SSDs for only the C: drive. After having 4 150GB Raptors die on me all within less than 2.5yrs of use, I prefer to use a single SSD which has NO moving parts and offers far greater performance than 4 Raptors in Raid 0 can provide (as an OS drive). Just looking at current prices, an 80GB Intel X25 runs $190 and a 150GB V-Raptor costs $150. Plus, you don't need much space inside the computer case. Just stick some velcro on the SSD & case and you are good to go. They even have adapters for SSDs that fit into a PCI slot.

Yes I really do like how fast my programs open up and respond with the SSD for the OS drive, it makes it hard to work on my laptop (thinking of putting the 64gig SSD in there now)

Michael,

I think this statement says it all - Once you use a SSD in your computer, you will never go back to slow mechanical disks.

Re: What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

Will this work for INTERNAL DRIVES only? I have (4) 1TB 7200rpm external drives all USB2.0 connection except 1 that is eSATA.

Re: What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

Essentially, it applies to internal disks. It also applies to external disks that use eSATA, USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt connections. USB 2.0 external drives are way too slow for use in an editing system due to the limitations of USB 2.0 itself: The interface limits the maximum sequential transfer speed to only around 34 MB/s even though the disks can physically transfer far faster than that, making the USB 2.0 interface the bottleneck. As such, USB 2.0 external disks should be relegated to backups only.

Re: What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

You can have external drives connected to your computer.
But as mentioned, they need to have fast connectors like E-Sata or thunderbolt.

Look up G-Raid, and you'll get a sense of what's acceptable..
And yes, you can use these external drives. So long as they don't contain your O.S or critical project files.
They're best suited for delivering video streams or for final exporting.

Good luck!!!

Re: What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

Thanks for the tips everyone. Come to find out, the 3 external drives have esata connection as well (silly me) My computer however only has 1 esata connection on the back. It wouldn't be a bad idea to purchase a couple esata to sata cards and install them since I have several empty drive bays in the back. That way, I can follow Harm's post about utilizing your disk set up.

Re: What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

Not really - we tried them on one of our workstations and had 2 OSZ and 1 Intel drive failing within months.
For us, it's not worth the extra money, others mileage may vary, maybe it was just bad luck.
But the bang for the buck is still pretty bad for SSDs.

I think it really depends on your work style.

We start a machine once a day, also we work in programs for hours, so starting times don't mean a thing to us.

Same is for quietness and low energy draw. We have several raids andwhatnot running here. Our graphic cards suck more energy than the fridge, so energy consumption of a few drives is not an issue.

If you only have a laptop, it may be different (especially when on battery), but not with a bunch of macho workstations in a post house.

Frank

Re: What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

Since it's common knowledge that 7200rpm disks or higher is best for video editing, is there a way to check how fast my external esata hard drives are? Like is there something on the computer that can identify disk speeds for internal and external drives? I can't see them written anywhere on the boxes, or even find the tech specs anywhere on the internet. These are the external drives im using. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822204069

Re: What is the best use of SSD and other dedicated hard drives for rendering speed
 

Hope this is relevant: I saw a reference recently to Intel Smart Reponse Technology, in which an SSD drive is apparently configured as an intellegent buffer to a hard disk drive, and "learns" what files you use the most, intercepting them and storing them in the SSD instead of the disk drive. This might be a good use if your computer offers this feature. Saw it listed on a Sager laptop as an option. (model 9170, sagernotebook.com)