The SSD myth unraveled
 

I wrote an article on SSD's, very short but maybe it helps to cut through all the myths of SSD's that infect all kinds of fora, including here.

The SSD myth unraveled

Written September 2011.

Introduction

SSD's are hot. Everybody talks about them and they are rumored to be the non-plus-ultra for performance gains. I write this to create a more realistic view on where we are now with SSD's.

SSD's have the reputation of being very fast, much faster than conventional hard disks. There are many reports on the internet that investing in SSD's will give you huge performance benefits and that is the explanation why so many people consider SSD's a must have for the ultimate performance experience. Unfortunately - and this is especially true for video editors - this is mostly a hype and not a wise decision.

Let's start with the basics.

They are physically small, have no moving parts, are quiet, cool and expensive per GB. The small physical dimensions mean that you can easily fit 4 SSD's in a single 5.25" bay. Because there are no moving parts they are quieter than conventional disks. They also operate at lower temperatures than conventional disks, which is a distinct advantage in a crowded system. Average access time is negligent in comparison to conventional disks. SSD's are not as susceptible to fill-rate degradation as conventional disks. (Conventional disks tend to show performance degradation when filled for more than 60%. Not so for SSD's). But there is the cost aspect and the reliability question.

But the most important question is performance. Does it justify the extra cost for the increase in performance?

Currently, the price per GB for a SSD of the latest generation is generally around $ 1.40 - $ 2.00, depending on the model, capacity and brand. A conventional disk is around $ 0.05 - $ 0.06 per GB and that means a SSD is around 30 times more expensive per GB. Is it worth the difference?

According to many, the answer is yes, it is worth it, but I beg to differ. Proponents of SSD's claim that the transfer rates of SSD's with figures of 500 MB/s are way faster than the 120+ MB/s of modern conventional hard disks and that justifies the extra cost. If this were true, why don't we see those performance gains in our benchmark? What is wrong with these claims of unprecedented speeds?

The background

Manufacturer's claims of IOPS - which are irrelevant for video editing - and sequential transfer rates are based on highly compressible data in 4K blocks, something that video data are not, because they have already been heavily compressed. It boils down to writing only 0's and compressing those 0's to achieve the claimed transfer rates of 500 MB/s, but effectively only around 30 MB/s are transferred. If you were to test effective transfer rates using CrystalDiskMark, which uses random data to benchmark, the compression is far less, because it is random, and then the effective transfer rate of SSD's is reduced to something in the order of 200 MB/s. With video data, the effective transfer rate could well be even much less because of the heavy compression that has already taken place during the shoot.

Interesting to see, and I do not know the answer, whether a heavily compressed codec like AVCHD would show lower transfer rates than less compressed codecs like P2-Intra or 50 Mbps MPEG2.

Write degradation

This is one of the most discussed issues with SSD's. On new SSD's the write speed is almost as good as the read speed, but when using that SSD for a longer time there are serious performance issues while writing data to a SSD. Even with the latest generation SATA3 / Sandhurst SF-2281 SSD's, write performance can easily drop by more than 60% despite the TRIM function. This effectively means in the best case scenario, that a SSD with a claimed transfer rate of 500 MB/s, which delivers less than 200 MB/s read speed with video data, can only deliver 80 MB/s or less write speed when used for some time. That is not too impressive in comparison to conventional disks at a fraction of the cost and less than a simple raid0 with two conventional disks on a ICHR10 on-board controller attains.

If TRIM is not working, the write degradation is even worse and you may count yourself lucky to attain write speeds of 50 MB/s or less. Unfortunately, most SSD's firmware in combination with raid controllers currently have the nasty side effect of disabling the TRIM function, so raiding SSD's is not a serious choice for raid configurations.

The only way to correct this write degradation is by performing a secure erase, which means losing all the data on the SSD, not a nice perspective for anybody, but most of all for notebook users. Are your backups current?

Reliability

NAND memory is susceptible to ageing and most SSD's calculate their lifespan in data transfer values. In a worst case scenario this usually means you can rewrite the complete contents of a SSD around 125 times, before the NAND memory is no longer reliable/useable. Not many people would try that and for a boot disk this means a very, very long time before the useful life of a SSD is at an end, but for video editors it is a different story.

The bottom line on SSD's at this moment of writing

They are the way to go in the future, but not yet.

For OS & program disks they are great, provided you set up Windows to not use the SSD for temp storage. They can easily shave off 3 or 4 seconds from your usual boot time of 60+ seconds, depending on your configuration. (Did you notice any sarcasm in this statement? You should.) They are a waste of money for video storage and do not deliver any performance gain, because of the compression that has already taken place with the video material and that lowers the transfer rates significantly. The faster loading of programs, which is often used as an argument for SSD's, is usually limited to 1 second per program or not even be noticeable.

Question

What would you rather have at this moment:

a. 8 TB of net storage with conventional disks for around $ 400 with a sustained transfer rate of 1000 MB/s, or
b. 2 TB of net storage with SSD's for around $ 3000 with the same transfer rate?

Just my $ 0.02

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

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Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

"They can easily shave off 3 or 4 seconds from your usual boot time of 60+ seconds, depending on your configuration. (Did you notice any sarcasm in this statement? You should.) They are a waste of money for video storage and do not deliver any performance gain, because of the compression that has already taken place with the video material and that lowers the transfer rates significantly. The faster loading of programs, which is often used as an argument for SSD's, is usually limited to 1 second per program or not even be noticeable."

Not my experience at all (early 2009 iMac - internal HDD failed so booting Lion from SSD over FW800)

Boot time - halved (conservative estimate)

App launch time - quartered (conservative estimate), sometimes "instant"

More expensive? Yes

The future? Yes

The now? FUD

The current legacy? spindles

I agree that it's only possible to write to each sector on a SSD millions of times before expected failure.

Note - I am only using SSD because the internal HDD failed after 18 months - MTBF for HDD is generally rated much longer of course.

As ever, measure the cost to benefit ratio and choose your poison.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

In my direct experience, operating systems (both PC and Mac) boot considerably faster from SSD's than from hard drives.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

That is correct, it will save you 3 or 4 seconds, but the whole boot sequence with the POST tests, the spin-up of your drives, the initialization of your raid controllers, the loading of the controller BIOS, etc. still take the same time, so the first 60+ seconds are spent anyway. It is only after that initialization that a SSD can kick in and then it saves you - normally once per day - 3 to 4 seconds. So instead of 70 seconds for booting if will only take 67 seconds or there about. Does that seem like a good argument to tell your wife why you need to spend that much on your new system?

As to loading your applications, that allegedly happens much faster, I can not discern any difference. First time loading of PR CS5.5 with conventional disks happens in around 7 seconds and second time in around 3 seconds. No discernible difference with SSD's in my case, but even if there were a 1 second difference, does that justify the cost difference? Not IMO.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

thx for posting.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

While I agree with general idea that Harm presented, I'd like to point out that 120MB/s+ is the speed of the newest generation of 7200rpm hard drives. If you are still using for example older hdd that has 30MB/s or 50MB/s, then you will see more difference when upgrading to SSD, however you will also see the difference when buying a new HDD.

In case of notebooks, of which many still use 5400 rpm drives, the use of SSD has more sense due to much better performance, smaller form factor, and also power consumption.

Personally however I think that the reliability is not there yet, and the pricing is still ridiculous. The only place where the use of SSDs is justified is in high-throughput web and database servers, where IO number is often really what determines the performance. Video editing - not so much.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

I can see someone doesn't like change.

There might be some hype about SSDs but a lot of it is TRUE.

Your premise that people are looking to use SSDs as storage is WAYYYY off. I haven't met or spoke to a single person who wants to use SSDs for storage. Everyone considering SSDs want to use them for the OS.

Most people looking for a 'performance' drive for the OS previously sought after the Raptor/V-Raptor. Looking at today's prices of a 150GB V-Raptor at $130 and a 120GB OCZ Vertex at $140, WHY WOULD YOU CHOOSE A VELOCIRAPTOR? With the OS and Programs, mechanical disks cannot come close to the performance of 95% of current SSDs

In terms of reliability, some of the largest web servers have released the annual rate of failure. Guess what? SSDs have a FAR lower failure rate than the best 15k Enterprise dirves.

WRITE DEGRADATION: Totally something of the past. Every manufacturer worth anything has implemented a program within the firmware to fix this issue. Intel was the first and still is the best. The only time you will see a significant reduction in write performance is when you constantly fill the entire drive using certain programs like HDTach or HDTune, and fill them over and over immediately after each completion.

To your point about this 60 seconds, not everyone has multiple pieces of hardware and software being loaded at boot up. Also, I consider 'total boot up time' to end once you can actually begin clicking and opening things such as programs or the internet. Just saying boot up ends when you see the desktop background is not looking at the entire picture. SSDs cut down even more time when you include this.

I just ran my own test of a V-Raptor vs an Intel X25 SSD with PPro: 19 seconds on the VR and only 7 seconds on the SSD. An unrealistic test would be to close PPro and then re-open it because no one does that. Also, closing and opening allows Windows to store parts in ram and/or cache in order to make loading faster, but who closes Premiere and opens it for the heck of it? Normally, you open it, do you work and then close it; then come open it later in the day or the next day. By then, nothing is pre-loaded (maybe its called pre-fetch in Windows).

I just did another test clicking on AE, PPro & PS and everything was loaded in 8 seconds. Try doing that with ANY mechanical disk within the next 20 years.

Anyone doing panoramic work and/or large megapixel images in Photoshop, using a SSD as cache massively helps.

For fun, I just opened AE, PPro, PS, Cinema 4D, MS Word, Excel and Sony ClipBrowser in 10 seconds on my SSD. (essentially everything I have stored on my taskbar)

I highly suggest anyone wanting to know the truth go to Anandtech and Tomshardware and read their lengthy papers. One paper I read was 34 pages long which helped me understand SSDs. I was like Harm before reading these papers - I didn't want anything to do with SSDs. After reading these papers, I bought an Intel X25 within a week.

While I don't think SSDs are economical as storage, they do have one very good feature for storage purposes: enterprise level Unrecoverable Bit Error Rate of 1x10^16 (at least, the Intel 320 SSD does). Compare this to conventional disks with a UEBR of 1x10^14. Every 12TBs of reads, there is an unrecoverable error which can cause file corruption or 'in the worst case scenario', can cause an entire raid array to be lost during an expansion or rebuild. With 1x10^16, it takes 1250TBs of reads.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

You will be surprised. Currently with 449 systems in the PPBM5 benchmark, there are 141 desktops and 7 laptops with a SSD for OS. Out of those, there are 37 desktops and 3 laptops that also use one or more separate SSD's for storage and projects.

Your statement about Velociraptors is antiquated and belongs in the historic museum. That was accurate more than two years ago, but the technology has improved so much that even a $ 40 SATA disk is much faster than a 150 GB Velociraptor.

Write degradation still happens with all the latest generation SSD's with the latest Sandhurst controllers when you are editing and render your timeline from time to time after modifications. And significantly so. It is not only with applications like HDTune, but during normal editing and rendering the timeline.

That only tells that your system is not properly configured or there is something wrong with your Velociraptor, because I can repeatedly get 7 seconds on the Velociraptor, including several third party plug-ins and I know from SSD users that can not get faster than 8 seconds on SSD. Same with all the other applications from the Master Collection, AU, EN, DW, PS, AE, they all start within 7 seconds or less. AU starts in around 3 seconds and EN in about 5 seconds.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

You are off on the boot time. I went from 1.5 minutes on my old system to 10-12 seconds with SSD and 30-40 seconds with HDD on a new system. Boot time just tells part of the story, launching apps, virus scans, etc, are lighting fast. The power consumption, heat generation and noise savings are things I notice and enjoy.

Traditional hard drive have run up against physical speed limitations of their technology long ago. Drives have gotten bigger and cheaper but not faster. In some cases 2 tb drive actually have gotten slower and less reliable. SSD numbers are written to favor the manufacture's sales but they have always been for all technology case in point hard drive size or usb/sata speed etc. Cut the numbers in half and SSD is still twice as fast. Numbers are numbers, in my real world experience SSD performance benefits are unmistakable and that's all that matters to me.

Per megabyte sure SSD is expensive but when you look at the speed gains you are getting its actual a good value. What's an extra $100 when building a new system? Agreed in video its not any magic bullet but who ever said it was. Sounds like you've made up your mind against SSD, that's fine. When you want to argue about the worth of something everyone is going to have there subjective option.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

I agree with Harm on this: Your particular V-Raptor is either faulty or more than two-thirds full. Any hard drive that's more than two-thirds full will slow down significantly - both in sequential transfers and random accesses.

I did my own testing on an i3-2100 with 4GB of RAM and a WD Blue 500GB drive launching PPro CS5.51. I came up with about 7.5 seconds from the time that I clicked on the Premiere Pro link on the Start menu to the time that the window to create a new project or open saved project came up. But then again, that hard drive was only about 10% full when I tested. What's more, that particular WD Blue was slower in random accesses than all of my other 7200 RPM hard drives. In the end, the 15 ms difference in random access speeds between the WD Blue and a typical SSD results in a less than 1 second difference in PPro launch performance.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Harm, I didn't see anywhere in your post where you dealt with concurrent sequential I/O, that is performance while reading multiple video streams simultaneously. A single concurrent sequential I/O op only reflects video editing with a single video track and no dissolves. Personally, I will frequently have 4-5 layered video tracks at some points in the timeline. I can easily hit 300 MB/s with my 5-disk RAID-5 and read/write I/O with my 8-disk RAID-10, but only if I'm doing one video stream at a time. When I start reading 2, 3, or more, the I/O degrades nonlinearly (i.e. the sum of all transfers is less than 300 Mb/s). With SSD, I get a perfectly linear degredation. 20 streams at 10 MB/s each or 1 stream at 200 MB/s.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Daniel,

How do you measure that? Because then I can check on my side what happens with multiple flows.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Sorry, I forgot what it was called. It was a Windows GUI program that let you dial in the number of simultaneous read streams for the test, as well as a huge number of other parameters. It ran the entire test several times (something like 10 by default, I changed it to 3 because I didn't want to wait a week for the results.) and wrote the results to a text file as well as displayed on the screen. I tried googling it just now, but I was in a maze of twisty benchmark programs, all alike.

That would be neat -- sorry I'm about as helpful as a box of rocks. :)

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Duh, I googled the internet but I forgot to check my own computer. I found the program. It's called "iometer":

Iometer project

Not the most amazing website I've ever seen. :)

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Can you please explain this statement more? I'm actually specing out a new PC and have tentatively chosen a VelociRaptor for the boot drive.

Newegg.com - Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLHX 150GB 10000 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Are you saying that a 72000 RPM drive is actually faster? I've never heard of such a thing before.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

The reasons why I speced out a VelociRaptor are really quite simple: 1) I've had only one WD drive act flaky on me, and I was able to return it w/ zero hassle. 2) The OCZ SSD reviews that I've read are not very encouraging.

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, Hard Drives, SSD, Internal SSD, OCZ Technology, 120GB

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Peter,

The 150 GB Velociraptor is one generation old and achieves a transfer rate of around 105 - 110 MB/s, but for instance the Samsung Spinpoint F4 320 GB achieves almost 140 MB/s. Of course the newest generation Velociraptors are almost equal in performance, but then the Samsung is only € 30.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Harm,

Here's a link of all the VelociRaptors currently available from newegg:

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, Hard Drives, Internal Hard Drives, Western Digital, 10000 RPM

I have to think that the newest drives are those that are SATA 6.0Gig and have 32MB of cache (including the 150GB ones). Would that be correct?

And you're saying that the Spinpoint is just as fast as new VelociRaptor, right?


P.S. Looking at some reviews on the web, it seems that the drives are very close when it comes to continuous reads or writes. But random access is considerably faster w/ the VelociRaptor.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Peter,

You are correct that the SATA3 disks are the new generation and the one Steve and I talked about were the old generation.

The Samsung is not as fast in random access because of the lower rotational speed and thus the higher access times but for sequential work it is about equally fast. Surprising for the price.

Before Steve's remarks or my own get misinterpreted, let me restate that an SSD for the OS makes perfect sense if all the other components of your system are nicely balanced and meet your requirements.

But..., yeah there is always a but, only as the last optimizing step. The seconds won during the loading of a program are quickly and effectively offset if the rest of the system is not up to its task. I take one example, Steve Kalle's own system ranks only # 121 if we were to include his data into the new PPBM5 benchmark at 265 seconds (his results can still be found on the Old benchmark page), despite his SSD and despite his dual Xeons. I think that my own system, which is a very simple 920 and without an SSD at rank # 11 with 157 seconds does a better job for far less money.

If I were to make investments into a new computer system, it would start with CPU (i7-3960X), mobo (X79), raid controller (Areca ARC-2080i-24) and raid cache (4 GB), conventional disks for the arrays (20 x Hitachi 7K3000 2 TB), memory (4 x 8GB or 8 x 4 GB), video card (GTX 600 series), hot-swappable disk trays, and last a couple of Crucial M4 or Mushkin Enhanced Chronos SSD's in raid10. That would be my last step.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Thanks for the list of components! BTW, what's your take on memory C.A.S.? I've looked at C.A.S. 9, 8 and 7, and am just not sure if it makes sense to get the faster memory.

C.A.S. 9: Newegg.com - G.SKILL Sniper Gaming Series 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9T-12GBSR

C.A.S. 8: Newegg.com - Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model 999010

C.A.S. 7: Newegg.com - G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL7T-12GBRM

Right now I'm leaning towards the Mushkin C.A.S. 8's.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

The differences in performance will be marginal at best but likely not even noticeable.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

One thing that people sometimes forget when comparing spinning disk HDDs is that capacity can be traded for speed. For example, if you expect to need 100 GB of space, then the VelociRaptor will be 2/3 full, and will need to use the slower inner portion. But if you get a 2 TB drive, it will only be 1/20th full and will stay 100% on the outer fast portion. That difference may be enough to make the 2TB drive faster. (Tomshardware and other benchmark sites should be able to help with the determination.) Plus, when you decide you no longer need the speed, you can fill the 2TB drive up to the brim.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Hey Harm,

I didn't read your 1st response to me so I am starting from here.

I think you will agree that for an OS, the most important feature is random access speed. This is why I rank in order from fastest to slowest: SSD (Intel), other SSDs, 15k SAS, 10k V-Raptor, 7200rpm Sata. The write speed is not important, which is why the 80GB Intel X25 at only 70MB/s beats all mechanical disks when used as an OS drive. Furthermore, the performance margin between a SSD and any disk is so large that not even 4 10k drives in Raid can compete - I know this because I once had 4 Raptors in Raid 0 for the OS and then moved to an Intel X25 G1 (1st generation). The performance booting up and loading programs was night and day. Ever since then, I have fallen in love with 'good' SSDs. At that time a couple years ago, all non-Intel SSDs had the write problem you talked about, but the Intel X25 G1 had a firmware update that managed the 'garbage' left from deleted files.

Your argument about my system being slow even though I have a SSD is misguided. The speed of encoding to MPEG2, H264 or uncompressed has absolutely NOTHING to do with the OS drive. The PPBM results cannot and do not illustrate how fast a system is while someone is working and performing everyday tasks. Also, it ONLY shows how fast a PC can encode to a few formats with Premiere Pro....it doesn't show ANYTHING else. Everyone uses multiple programs so PPBM only provides a small part of the performance picture. One program which shows very different results is After Effects. AE likes more cores and more ram whereas PPro likes a faster clock speed and isn't optimized very well for more cores.

Most people I know click the render button and leave for the day or leave to do something else. It seems as though you think that everyone performs only a few tasks (encoding) and uses only Premiere Pro. I don't know about you, but less than 10% of my day is spent on a computer rendering or encoding with PPro, AE, C4D and Nuke.

Say what you want about my HP Z800 but its the only system capable of encoding through AME while designing in Cinema 4D and not getting bogged down every time I hit the "Render View" button (in C4D), which happens every few minutes. For the work I do, the extra money spent on 12 cores is worth every penny. The time saved and reliability of the SSD as an OS drive is worth every penny.

But saying that you only save a few seconds during boot up is being disingenuous. If using Vista or XP, the time saved is even larger. Boot up ends once your computer is useable and you can open windows and programs. With a disk, when your desktop appears, Windows is still loading for many seconds. With a SSD, when your desktop appears, Windows only takes a few seconds to finish loading and becomes useable almost instantly.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

You guys are missing the fact that having Premiere open within the last hour, few hours or day (I don't know how long Windows 7 holds data in its pre-fetch) allows it to open much faster versus closing it at the end of the day and then coming in the next day and opening it. Same thing happens with almost all other programs. The 19 seconds to open Premiere is after opening Premiere a day after it was last opened. When I open Premiere, close it and open it again right away, it only takes about 7 seconds to open on my V-Raptor. However, with my Intel SSD, it only takes 7 seconds the first time and less than 5 seconds after that. (I have several plug-ins for Premiere including several from Red Giant and even more plug-ins with AE. Plug-ins seem to add the most noticeable amount of time to load)

One last comment about all of Harm's arguments and this 'debate': using the 'value' argument as the entire basis for buying a computer or other equipment is not the ONLY thing to consider. This value argument is the same as 'good enough'. Many people here think that a Matrox Mini is 'good enough' for color accuracy. To get the next level of color accuracy, it costs at least $3000 more than a Mini plus HDTV. (either a Quadro plus EIzo or Aja plus 17" broadcast monitor) Based on your arguments, people are fine with the 'good enough' level of performance from the Mini and mechanical disks. Just because we experience the law of diminishing returns with computer parts doesn't mean we should all just settle for the best 'value'.

I find it funny that you recommend a high-end Areca raid controller for everyone with 20 drives but a SSD is overkill. You and I both have large raid arrays, but do we need so many drives for speed? Nope. We need it for reliability. What is far more reliable than disks....SSDs (for full disclosure, I am not comparing Maxtor drives and Patriot SSDs or other low quality drives. For SSDs, I greatly prefer Intel which have proven to be far more reliable than the best 15k SAS drives).

On a related but completely different topic, if anyone plays a lot of games with their PlayStation 3, you will be blown away at how much faster a SSD is as the OS drive. With my favorite game of all time, Gran Turismo 5, load times are cut by 50% or more.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

The one thing I wouldn't argue is SSD being more reliable than HDD. The only advantage I've noticed is HDD usually give warning signs before failing where as SSD are known to just die. SSD reliability varies with manufacture where as HDD are pretty much all the same. Either way you should have a back up or if your using it as an OS, worst case scenario your reinstall the OS on a new drive.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

The warning sign I got from my HDD was bunch of corrupted data as the drive tried to be "SMART" behind my (and the OS's) back!! It will actively try to recover bad sectors without telling you (at microcode level) and then fail silently. What genius though of that?! Only when I used a GNU/Linux boot disk to interrogate the SMART logs of the HDD at a low level did I manage to build the real picture of what happened to my data.

Of course, SSD use exact same concept for bad sector recovery. I'll be happier when everything is RAID-10 in affordable consumer gear :-)

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

I tried testing again with the prefetch cleared. This time it took more than 30 seconds.

Nonetheless, I can now see how Harm got those fast launch results: I believe that his workflow requires less than 24 hours (or whatever the length that Windows 7 retains prefetch data) between Premiere Pro sessions. That's simply not long enough to obtain a valid comparison between a hard drive and an SSD.

I also did a retest on this i3-2100 system after Premiere Pro had not run on that system for over 24 hours. This time, with a new prefetch file replacing an expired one, it took about 21 seconds to launch Premiere Pro CS5.51.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

How long does it take to open a large project (more than an hour edited) in Premiere if:

If an SSD is the program/OS drive and HDDs are the media and write drives?
If an SSD is also the temp media drive along with OS/Program?

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

The problem with such a question is that if there is not a common large project, all answers are meaningless, because a comparable base figure is lacking.

I do know that opening a 6 hour 15 minute project with 526 individual clips (75.7 GB), two sequences, once in AVCHD 1080/25i and once in AVCHD 1080/50P (duplicates actually, apart from the framerate and interlaced versus progressive) loads in 3 seconds, displaying the timeline but with media pending, 1 second later that message is gone, then the rest of the time is spent on loading the clip heads and is ready for editing in 54 seconds when all the heads are displayed in that 06:15:00:00 timeline. Makes no difference which timeline is open when loading.

Is that fast or slow? Don't know because I have no idea how much time that same project would take on an all SSD system.

BTW, this is on an old i7-920 system with conventional HDD's only.

@Randall,

I get these startup times after turning on my machine in the morning and booting Windows. If the prefetch cache causes this, then all the more reason to diminish the impact of SSD's, because it is quite normal to start PR once a day and if the prefetch cache makes the loading of PR happen in 7 seconds on a system with conventional disks, then that is great. Personally I'm not looking at ways to slow down my system just to make a point.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

Anyway, I was a bit off on the 24 hours. I might have used a cleaner to clean old prefetch data on that system. Therefore, I am going to wait a few days without cleaning before I perform the launch test again.

Re: The SSD myth unraveled
 

It's pretty fast, by any standard. Thanks for replying.