In January I bought a LaCie 256GB SSD Thunderbolt RAID to replace my 1TB FW800 G-Drive, since I thought the G-Drive was a bottleneck, after all those posts telling you to buy RAIDs.
The fan in the LaCie is so damn loud that it's distracting, but I thought that I might as well work with it seeing as it's 'faster' than the G-Drive. The first thing I did was test it with Blackmagic speed test, the SSD RAID reads at about 400MBps, the G-Drive about 80MBps; it's definitely faster.
Just a couple of weeks ago I thought "Why not test it to see if it is actually any faster?", I was getting so tired of the fan and every time I turned my Mac on, the SSD would start as well...meaning I need to turn it off.
I tested it by rendering a sequence in Premiere Pro CS5.5*, turned off one drive, turned on the other, and rendered the same sequence, and surprisingly they rendered at exactly the same time! I then tried exporting, and, yep, same time again.
Then I realised that the videos I was using were already compressed to be uploaded to YouTube...and by then I had already put the SSD to one side. So this morning I finally plugged it back in and tested it again with clips from my Canon 650D which compresses clips into a .MOV at something like 50Mbps. I also put multiple layers on top which I set to different blending modes, just to give it more work. And still, they render/export at exactly the same times...well the HDD was 1 second slower, that's probably just the lag caused from finding the files. The SSD loads projects a heck of a lot faster, that's for sure.
So...why does a regular FW800 HDD have the same render performance as a Thunderbolt SSD RAID? Since everyone says that people ought to buy RAIDs and stuff.
I have the 2012 21.5" iMac with:
I can't imagine there's a bottleneck in that.
Anyone know any other tests I can perform? Example projects to render? Considering my tests used my regular workflow, I don't see much point in trying other tests anyway.
*Rendered the sequence within Premiere Pro, exported using Media Encoder.
The fan in the LaCie is so damn loud that it's distracting, but I thought that I might as well work with it seeing as it's 'faster' than the G-Drive. The first thing I did was test it with Blackmagic speed test, the SSD RAID reads at about 400MBps, the G-Drive about 80MBps; it's definitely faster.
Just a couple of weeks ago I thought "Why not test it to see if it is actually any faster?", I was getting so tired of the fan and every time I turned my Mac on, the SSD would start as well...meaning I need to turn it off.
I tested it by rendering a sequence in Premiere Pro CS5.5*, turned off one drive, turned on the other, and rendered the same sequence, and surprisingly they rendered at exactly the same time! I then tried exporting, and, yep, same time again.
Then I realised that the videos I was using were already compressed to be uploaded to YouTube...and by then I had already put the SSD to one side. So this morning I finally plugged it back in and tested it again with clips from my Canon 650D which compresses clips into a .MOV at something like 50Mbps. I also put multiple layers on top which I set to different blending modes, just to give it more work. And still, they render/export at exactly the same times...well the HDD was 1 second slower, that's probably just the lag caused from finding the files. The SSD loads projects a heck of a lot faster, that's for sure.
So...why does a regular FW800 HDD have the same render performance as a Thunderbolt SSD RAID? Since everyone says that people ought to buy RAIDs and stuff.
I have the 2012 21.5" iMac with:
- 3.1GHz i7
- 16GB RAM
- GeForce 650M 512MB
- 1TB Fusion Drive
I can't imagine there's a bottleneck in that.
Anyone know any other tests I can perform? Example projects to render? Considering my tests used my regular workflow, I don't see much point in trying other tests anyway.
*Rendered the sequence within Premiere Pro, exported using Media Encoder.