A number of metrics are used to quantify storage performance. If you're a content creator, you have to be wondering how such dry terminology can apply to your video projects. Rather than telling you, we're going to dissect several media-oriented tasks.
In an attempt to better understand storage, we’ve examined the characteristics of six different games and nine productivity-oriented applications. We learned a number of things along the way, and one of those was that most folks (at least here in the Tom's Hardware labs) don't really stress their storage subsystems on a daily basis. Low queue depths let us know that most SSDs have no trouble handling I/O requests as they're made. So, even when you're transcoding a movie, taxing your CPU, or playing through Battlefield 3, stressing your graphics processor, most SSDs manage to yield very similar real-world performance.
We're still missing one puzzle piece from the storage story, though: entertainment and content creation apps. You probably don't watch a feature-length movie every day, but surely there's a smattering of Hulu, photo editing, and iTunes launching. More serious enthusiasts convert videos for use on their mobile devices. They turn home videos into digital works of art. And they record their game play antics to post up on YouTube.
Now, in reality, very few folks can afford to put all of their multimedia onto flash-based storage. The price per gigabyte is just too high for that. However, the video guys use SSDs as scratch space, and recording from Fraps onto an SSD is just so much smoother than using a hard drive. Almost inevitably, and multimedia-oriented workload is going to involve moving a lot of data around, and that's one area where the fastest SSDs really shine.
And so we move on from gaming, which only really showcases the benefit of SSDs in certain situations, and productivity, which generally isn't super storage-intensive anyway, to a set of tests that common wisdom suggests should push lots of sequential data transfers.
In most SSD reviews, we see drives pushed hard in an effort to validate big-time throughput numbers and the ability to satisfy tens of thousands I/O operations per second. Rarely, if ever, though, do enthusiast desktops see such taxing workloads. Does that generalization ring true in media apps as well? Let's put a handful of different scenarios under the microscope with which you've already seen us use so many times before.
- Storage's Role In Content Creation, Explored
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Capture Card Recording
- Recording With Fraps
- Transcoding Multiple Streams (Intel Quick Sync)
- Transcoding Multimedia Video (CPU)
- Watching Video Clips
- Editing In Adobe Premiere Pro
- Exporting In Adobe Premiere Pro
- Content Creation Means Lots Of Sequential Data

Makes all your encoding bench's completely worthless until a method is figured to have the software CPU engine do the exact same workload as the QS engine.
How some queue depth,transfer size and seek distance bars can show me how better the ssd is? In the case of the encoding it is time ,but thats all. I realize ssd are faaaaaar better but such tables aren't helping.
Boot drives are great for an SSD as that is pretty much limited by disk reads and content creation can be limited somewhat by disk reads, but I do think hard drives in RAID provide good enough performance with substantially greater storage space.
For one, due to your GPU selection you are not using the Mercury Playback Engine CUDA processing in Premiere, which will bottleneck the CPU during use, and skew the test results compared to an editing rig (in this case I believe it would tilt the results in the SSD's favor).
2nd, no serious editor is going to use a single HDD for video editing. At the very least you would have a content drive and a scratch disc (in addition to the system drive), and typically you would have a RAID0/1 for editing with. All of these setups are well within the budget of a single SSD, and will support much larger sizes.
3rd, Editing on a 240GB drive (much less using Adobe Premiere with only 8GB of Ram) would be a logistical nightmare for file storage. Yes, it does make the point that the SSD is faster (no contest there, and nobody would believe for a second that a HDD could beat an SSD in any performance metric), but comparing a 2TB drive (which has plenty of space), to a 240GB drive (which could only hold a few projects and files on it at once) is unfair price-wise. Yes, it may work for 5min youtube projects, but for wedding videos, or other longer projects (especially if there is a lot of raw footage) it would be impratical to use, and you would constantly have to be moving files, and deleting old projects to make space, which will waste much more time than the few minutes saved on export.
In general, buying a RAID setup (or having multiple raids for content and scratch discs) will provide much more space, and overwhelm even the fastest i7 processors on the market today, and still be cheaper than a decent sized SSD. Until CPUs and GPUs get faster there is no practical 'need' for having an SSD to serve up your content for video editing, unless you are on a server/workstation grade computer with duel Xeon processors. In short, if you have the money for a large enough SSD, you would see much more improvement in the system to invest in other parts. If you happen to have a top notch system already, then you could throw money at an SSD, but the test system used here would not qualify as being high end for video editing.
All that said, I would still invest in a 120 or 240GB SSD for a system drive. It is just for editing and data storage that it becomes impractical.
On the contrary, these bars are very important as it shows just how far behind the drive is, and what types of loads the drive has to deal with. This is extremely important for choosing the correct drive for the job as different drives handle different workloads better than others. This is something I appreciate about Toms, they are not afraid of specifics, and go beyond things like simple rendering times and FPS scores to make an opinion. While I still disagree with the end opinion of the article (only on an issue of cost/performance), they have done an excellent job with the overall review.
Bingo, that's bang on. It is disappointing that they did not test a mechanical HD raid 0 setup which offers all the throughput needed while offering far more storage space (which is definitely a huge plus in media content creation) at the same or lower price.
CaedenV covers some good points there. I'm building a temporary PC for a friend atm for use with
After Effects. I don't have a spare SSD to use as a system disk, so it'll have a 450GB 15K SAS instead.
Likewise, the video storage will be 3 x 600GB 15K SAS (Seagate 15K.7) in hardware RAID0 using an
LSI SAS3442E-R PCIe card (if I didn't have the SAS disks to hand I'd build the system using a bunch
of 300GB 15K SCSI instead, using an LSI 20320IE). It will also have a typical 1TB SATA for general
storage and backup (Samsung F3).
So, the final graph showing the conversion times is interesting, but it's not realistic when it comes to
what any real professional would use for storing video. At the very least, it'd be RAID, and more likely
FC, SCSI, SAS or Enterprise SATA. I'd never recommend a consumer drive for doing pro work.
Thus, can you please try your test on a decent 15K SAS? Both single and several in hw RAID0? It
would be most interesting to see how it compares to the SSD.
Btw, I get a bit over 700MB/sec aswell, using 4 x 15K SAS, but I already know such an array is
still nowhere near as fast as an SSD for random I/O.
Ian.
For the "dabblers" among us, however, or those thinking about getting their feet wet, this article was very interesting.
Concerning palladin9479's remark, I think there are some good points there, but they are the sort to be explored in an article comparing QuickSync with alternate methods. The charts that they produce are still showing usage patterns which might be useful, not as a directly comparative benchmark between the methods, but to consider the storage subsystem best suited for each method.
lol, thanks for the complement. I would not say I am a huge authority on the subject (just an 'enthusiast dabbler'), but I did spend most of my college career fixing and optimizing machines for my fellow video majors and was really surprised at the time at what upgrades helped, and which ones didn't. In the end I found that it is all about a well balanced system, not about having 'the fastest' of any single part (unless you could afford the fastest of everything... which college students cannot).
I saw some people with P4EE chips that ran slower than P3 chips with a dedicated video rendering card (like the old RT2500 by Matrox). At the same time I saw systems with nice RAID0/1 setups, but very little ram, which cost them more performance than systems with tons of ram (at the time 2-4GB was 'more than you could ever need' lol, and people were duel booting XP and XP64bit to use the extra 1/2GB of RAM) paired with single drives.
Today I keep up with it and build the occasional system for friends and recently rebuilt my rig to do video editing for church and some non-profits I work with. If you are thinking of building a system do a lot of reading, and build around the specific software you plan on using because different ones use different technologies, and you don't want to throw money where it won't be effective, or overlook the advantages of a technology that could be in budget with minor changes to other parts. Adobe has a lot of good videos and articles on their site which can give you an idea of what kind of hardware to put behind their systems for various levels of awesomeness, but the main thing for video editing is the more parallelism in the hardware (multiple cores/processors, multiple HDDs/RAID arrays, more CUDA cores, more RAM, etc.) the better.
My own system is an i7 2600, 16GB of ram (need more but 8GB modules are too expensive lol), 3 single HDDs for system, scratch, and content drives (will move back to RAID when HDD/SSD prices drop more), and a nice fat GTX570 (completely overkill for what I do, but it fit the budget and enables CUDA processing for some of the filters/color correction I like to use, so I went for it). For what I do (mostly 2-3 layers of video, with color correction and simple transitions in glorious 1080p) it is largely overkill, but for those doing more intense work my rig would just be a starting place. My bottleneck is definitely in my storage system (the most I push my i7 is ~70% when editing), which will be releaved when I upgrade to 2TB drives in RAID1 and a 240+GB SSD system drive. My current 1TB drives (currently my content drive, and my scratch/render/storage drive) will become a RAID1 for data storage and rendering. That should balance everything again and get the most performance out of all my parts.
For someone just starting out I would suggest an i5, 16+GB of RAM, an SSD for the system drive, and then either a RAID1 for documents/rendering/content, or 2 seperate drives and have one as documents and rendering, and another for content. CUDA processing makes things nice (better quality and speed), but is limited to specific filters and usages, so I would not get it to start with, but would get it down the line if you can afford it. Onboard graphics are plenty until you get something to do CUDA. P67 or Z68 (or better as the Ivy bridge procs come out) chipsets are a must for the features they bring to the table, but the specific brand of board dosnt matter so long as it is stable, and follows the upgrade path you want to follow.
Good luck
For example, the blueray movie is said to have an average of 264.91 MB/sec.
When calculating the 43 min 58 sec with 12.12 GB that leads to an average rate of 4.59 MB/sec. And even if they wrongly means megabits/sec it is still around just 38 megabit/sec.
Anyway, for me dabbling with some DAW stuff, like using Cubase and reason running a with several different streams running software samplers triggering samples, multiple audiotracks and combining it with triggering videoclips (in Archaos) the harddrives aren't even near a bottleneck.
But I have it all running on separate drives (which is the key). 1 SSD for system/programs. 2 other drives for streams.
For the "dabblers" among us, however, or those thinking about getting their feet wet, this article was very interesting.
Concerning palladin9479's remark, I think there are some good points there, but they are the sort to be explored in an article comparing QuickSync with alternate methods. The charts that they produce are still showing usage patterns which might be useful, not as a directly comparative benchmark between the methods, but to consider the storage subsystem best suited for each method.
Ohh I'm not commenting on these charts, honestly QS using less or the CPU method using more won't make much difference. I was just pointing out that if their past "benchmarks" were producing those results, then those past bench's were invalid. I remember a few ones where they were praising how much faster the QS was and never mentioned the output file size, only the input file size.
Math is wrong. Disk busy time. Not elapsed time.
Your argument is if I transcode a higher bitrate, QD, transfer size, and seek distance will change? O_o? That's not how storage works.
Taking one of the most popular SSDs against one of the most popular hard drives. It's a very apt and simple comparison. If you're suggesting a Caviar Black, it's not like the single op transcoding job will be any different. Same on Caviar Green and Vertex 3 means same on Caviar Black. Hell a WD Raptor would be the same.