Are SSDs not ideal for video editing over HDDs?

[Siderz]

I've got a LaCie Little Big Disk 240GB Thunderbolt SSD RAID, and I'm not too sure if it's ideal.

When researching this stuff a few months ago, there was little to be found about people's opinions on using SSDs for video, but I think I remember seeing people saying negative things, but not going into detail on why.

Anyone know much on the subject?

 

[phrehdd]

I've got a LaCie Little Big Disk 240GB Thunderbolt SSD RAID, and I'm not too sure if it's ideal.

When researching this stuff a few months ago, there was little to be found about people's opinions on using SSDs for video, but I think I remember seeing people saying negative things, but not going into detail on why.

Anyone know much on the subject?

SSD for editing remains an issue of $ vs volume. Also in the past was issues related to TRIM and some SSD didn't fair well in striped RAID. There are SSD that work well now with RAID and also prices are going down. The one facet that does impact SSD as an option is that over time, the read and write speeds do drop and given that editing is a constant read/write of the drive, the more work one does and the larger the segments of video, the fast the SSD drives reach a critical point and slow down.

Best bang for the buck are high speed electro-mechanical drives (typical hard drives) that are RAIDED together. 7200 and 10,000 rpm drives are the most useful. WD has their 1 tb raptor drives that do very well in RAID and are 10,000 rpm.

Most of the above information is readily found on the Internet and various forums.

 

[Siderz]

The one facet that does impact SSD as an option is that over time, the read and write speeds do drop and given that editing is a constant read/write of the drive, the more work one does and the larger the segments of video, the fast the SSD drives reach a critical point and slow down.

Oh yeah, I sort of remember reading that up. That's almost good enough for me to get an HDD RAID.

Any idea how long this could take? A few months? A year? 10 years?

 

[Siderz]

Just now I've decided to switch back to my HDD.

I discovered that, while the Blackmagic speed tests shows the SSD is a huge amount faster, actually rendering and exporting stuff is no faster whatsoever.

However, loading projects is faster.

Loading projects isn't worth more than the size of the SSD nor the fan's noise...the fan on this thing is unbelievably loud...

Not too sure what to do with this SSD now. I'm not gonna plug it into my iMac and just use it for general storage since, every time you turn the computer on or wake it from sleep, the SSD (Including fan) decides to start up...

 

[omnimoeish]

Even as SSD write speed decreases over time, it's still going to be much faster than an HDD even after several years. If you need 1+TB of space, then obviously unless you have more money than you know what to do with, SSD isn't an option. I am working with a lot of "DV" video with my Canopus box which runs like 1GB/5 minutes or something. Putting dozens of video tapes of hours worth of video on the computer to then be encoded to high bitrate h.264 just wouldn't work on my 256GB SSD. Luckily I'm doing that on my desktop which has a 256GB SSD + 10TBs worth of green drives for storage.

I have about 100GB unused space on my 256GB SSD in my Macbook Pro and that's more than enough for putting together promotional videos that I do as a side job, and it's a lot faster and nimble and exporting seems to be a lot faster. Plus just the fact that I don't have to have crappy computer running an HDD. I wouldn't be surprised if rendering was faster with an SSD. I ran a novabench, and granted this is a synthetic benchmark, but my processor benchmark was higher with the SSD, and the video frame rate doubled from 56 to 106 fps.

I guess it depends if you're talking about a laptop or a desktop (wherein you can just add a mechanical HD while running your OS on an SSD).

 

[Siderz]

I am working with a lot of "DV" video with my Canopus box which runs like 1GB/5 minutes or something. Putting dozens of video tapes of hours worth of video on the computer

I'm assuming you're putting the clips on a separate drive from the OS, right?

I wouldn't be surprised if rendering was faster with an SSD.

That's what I thought, and I decided to test it out today. The SSD just isn't any faster whatsoever for me. The noise it makes (From the fan) and low capacity made me go back to my HDD.

However, I was using clips that were already compressed...and now I've unplugged the SSD. I'm gonna try again with clips straight from a camera when I'm less busy. Mind you, the clips did have a lot of compositing on top (Text, some 'film burn' stock footage, and a countdown timer).

I have about 100GB unused space on my 256GB SSD in my Macbook Pro and that's more than enough for putting together promotional videos that I do as a side job

I hope you don't mind me asking more personal (and unrelated) stuff, but does this 'side job' pay decently? And what's your main job like? And, are these promotional videos easy to find and easy to edit together? I'm not a professional, I'm a College student, and I want to get some more stuff on my CV ASAP.

(I'm either going to do some extremely basic, low-paying stuff, or go to an internship)