SSD, uncompressed HD, Vegas, Intensity
 

Hello,

Preface: I don’t mind RAID, I'm using it now in fact, but RAID arrays come with their own problems and I’d like to try something new! Thanks!
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I do commercials mostly. At the very most I get, 40-50 min of footage to edit.

I was wondering if anyone had any idea about using uncompressed 1080 24p 10bit HD on SSD hard drives.

My main concern is: I’d like to use Blackmagic Design’s Intensity card in Vegas. I know the card has trouble with various codecs under Vegas but from what I’ve heard it works quite well with uncompressed video in Vegas.

So :
Uncompressed 1080 24p 10bit HD, on an SSD, playing on Vegas’ timeline out of the Intensity.


Anyone see any problems with this?

1. SSDs still are quite expensive. I have 2 80-gig Intels - one is first generation, the other is second generation. Intel G1 SSDs cost around $200 for the 80G size that I use; the G2 SSD cost me $230 a few months ago (Intel SSDs currently seem to be the champs). Uncompressed files are huge - especially 10-bit files; so you'd probably want to get much larger capacities than 80G.

2. The G2 SSD failed during a thunderstorm even though I run my computer from a UPS that always gets power from a battery, never directly from the power line. The G2 Intel SSDs have 34-nm traces - quite vulnerable because of their tiny size (Intel sent another with no hassle - 3-year warranty).

3. Some controllers can't see the SSD. Fortunately, my ASUS P5B had two controllers w/boot bios, and one of them could see the SSDs; so I was OK. I'm also pretty sure that my Gigabyte 8-port SATA controller also can see the SSDs (but it has no bios for boot - which you wouldn't need anyway).

4. You really should be using Win 7 with SSDs. Only Win7 has TRIM, which actually empties the cells of data after a file is deleted (earlier Windows versions merely mark the cells as "available"). If the cells are not emptied, the SSDs become much slower with use. Intel has a free utility that, if run at boot-up, will keep their SSDs in pretty good shape; but only if you're using Intel SSDs.

5. Write speeds diminish when the SSDs are nearing capacity. My G1 card currently has a read speed of 121 mb/s; my G2: 160+. However, the write speed of my G1 is about 60 mb/s, whereas the G2 now writes only at 40 mb/s - probably not fast enough for uncompressed 10-bit even at 24fps. My G1 now is faster than my G2 because it is almost empty, whereas the G2 is 70% full. For comparison, my 1.5 TB Seagates write at 36 mb/s - almost as fast as my G2 - without RAID.

You could get a pair of SSDs and put them into a RAID 0 configuration; but what for? SSDs are wonderful as boot disks - all my programs open about 5 times as fast as when I used spinning disks, and boot up time is reduce proportionately. But for capturing video? I don't think so.

Judging by the read times when the drive is closer to full than empty, i don't think it would be a viable solution for uncompressed at this time.

but if moore's law is any indication in one and half to 3 years time, SSD drives will be fast and cheap enough for short form uncompressed work. (also just read an article about the third gen SSDs, and how error correction is 3 million times better than last gen)


Oh
Looks like it's gonna be AJA/Vegas/Cineform again!