SSD for MBP for Video Editing - do read & write speeds matter?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
E

elem

Honorable
Dec 14, 2013
4
0
10,510
I'm looking to buy a SSD for my MacBook Pro to speed it up a bit. I experience slow downs mostly during searching through big video files (20-80GB each in size) in Premiere, say when I'm finding certain frames within 1-3 hr long file. Render times are about 2-3hr for same length of finished clip (I'm editing mostly lectures rather than short promo clips). I'm currently working of a 5400rpm (I know...) 750GB HDD. Every week I have about 250-300GB of footage to copy from external HDD via FireWire.

I have 4 questions here.

1. What is the best SSD for me to get on a tight budget to speed the editing up? I'd love to spend money on a 512GB SSD to keep OS, Apps & Footage on it, but I just can't afford it for a moment. Budget allows me to go with 128/256 GB max. I was looking at Samsung 840 Pro, but would I notice any difference if I went for something cheaper & slower?

And comparing Samsung's PRO vs EVO, why is there 50 quid in difference between them two?

Samsung 250GB 840 EVO €170
Capacity:
Sequential Read: 540MB/s
Sequential Write: 520MB/s
Random Read (QD32, 4KB): 97,000 IOPS
Random Write (QD32, 4KB): 66,000 IOPS
Random Read (QD1, 4KB): 10,000 IOPS
Random Write (QD1, 4KB): 33,000 IOPS

vs

Samsung 250GB 840 PRO €220
Sequential Read: 540MB/s
Sequential Write: 520MB/s
Random Read (QD32, 4KB): 100,000 IOPS
Random Write (QD32, 4KB): 90,000 IOPS
Random Read (QD1, 4KB): 9,900 IOPS
Random Write (QD1, 4KB): 31,000 IOPS


2. Would I benefit more from getting smaller but faster SSD, or would I go with a bit slower but bigger? That way I could keep some of the footage on SSD and rest on HDD, so at least say half of work will get done faster.

3. Which speeds should I pay attention to when it comes to video editing? Is browsing through few large video files considered as random or sequential read?

4. When it comes to rendering, would it be faster to work off HDD and render out to SSD, or the other way around? Or work off single SSD only?
 
Solution
geofelt
Do not be much swayed by vendor synthetic SSD benchmarks.
They are done with apps that push the SSD to it's maximum using queue lengths of 30 or so.
Most desktop users will do one or two things at a time, so they will see queue lengths of one or two.
What really counts is the response times, particularly for small random I/O. That is what the os does mostly.
For that, the response times of current SSD's are remarkably similar. And quick. They will be 50X faster than a hard drive.
In sequential operations, they will be 2x faster than a hard drive, perhaps 3x if you have a sata3 interface.
Larger SSD's are preferable. They have more nand chips that can be accessed in parallel. Sort of an internal raid-0 if you will.
Also, a SSD will...
Sort by date Sort by votes
geofelt

geofelt

Titan
Oct 9, 2006
54,374
4,185
174,240
Do not be much swayed by vendor synthetic SSD benchmarks.
They are done with apps that push the SSD to it's maximum using queue lengths of 30 or so.
Most desktop users will do one or two things at a time, so they will see queue lengths of one or two.
What really counts is the response times, particularly for small random I/O. That is what the os does mostly.
For that, the response times of current SSD's are remarkably similar. And quick. They will be 50X faster than a hard drive.
In sequential operations, they will be 2x faster than a hard drive, perhaps 3x if you have a sata3 interface.
Larger SSD's are preferable. They have more nand chips that can be accessed in parallel. Sort of an internal raid-0 if you will.
Also, a SSD will slow down as it approaches full. That is because it will have a harder time finding free nand blocks to do an update without a read/write operation.

1. The advantage of the PRO vs. EVO is that the pro will have better endurance.
It is not an important advantage to the desktop user.
Under heavy desktop usage, the Pro might last 15 years, while the evo might last 10 years.
Both will be long obsolete before they run out of update capability.
2. A bigger SSD will actually perform a bit better. Buy the largest single unit.
3. Actually, it is the random response times at queue level 1-2 that are most important.
All modern SSD's will perform very well.
4. A hard drive will perform relatively well in sequential operations.

Laptop hard drives are optimized for power savings, not performance. They are notoriously slow.
You will be amazed at the difference a ssd replacement will make.
I have changed out to a ssd on all my laptops.

Since your files will fit on a decent sized ssd, use that for everything.
Your bottleneck will move from the hard drive to the cpu.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom