Right now my 17" MBP has an SSD system disk, and the old drive as general storage. I'm looking at buying one of those little Seagate TB adapters and another SSD drive of maybe 250gb. Can I just dump my GoPro footage on there and see an improvement in speed? A full on RAID setup is really more than I can justify spending.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Looking to add a bit of speed to my editing
- Thread starter hitek79
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You will probably see a slightly speed increase because the video data will be accessible more quickly. However, your processor, RAM, GPU, may cap how quickly it can process that accessed data. However, I can't image that being an issue for 1080 GoPro video.
You could also RAID 0 two drives to (almost) double the read/write times for about the same as an SSD.
You could also RAID 0 two drives to (almost) double the read/write times for about the same as an SSD.
Rendering is CPU intensive (or GPU for programs that leverage the GPU). I would be surprised if chaining your scratch drive would give any noticeable speed increase.
i would suggest you not waste your money on the Seagate TB adapter. They are way overpriced and based on the disk speed tests i've performed on my 2.5" USB 3.0 Seagate portable (the current one that can be switched out with the TB adapter) you would experience 0 gain in read and write speed. The 2.5" drive they use is only 5400rpm, and a particularly slow model at that. For the $120 or so that the TB adapter costs, you could buy yourself a very fast external USB 3.0 SSD. Granted, it would only be around 120gb, but its a great way to provide portable storage that can be used on a per project basis to store your scratch and all your media without the need to worry about reading from and writing to separate disks. Keep in mind though, SSDs are have a limited read/write lifespan and while the cacheing is not detrimental to this, the media files are, so this should only be used as temporary storage for your projects, with consistent backups to other drives (possibly your current Seagate). Take a look at the speed difference between my external Seagate and a Samsung 840evo I use in an external enclosure (both over USB 3.0). Try and guess which one gets more use.
Attachments
By the way, if you are working with the 4gb files that those GoPros spit out without reencoding them first, that is just about the slowest format you could possibly edit in. The compression used for those h.264 GoPro clips is very taxing on the processor and will be your bottleneck before you even need to concern yourself with what type of drive they're on. That is not to say that an SSD is not a worthwhile investment for your cache. If you've ever noticed how scrubbing through the timeline seems smooth but clicking between the same span causes delays, its because your disk needs to spin up to wherever that spot is. If you're scrubbing, it's spinning with you. But it can't predict just where you're going to click next, so having an SSD cache means near instant reaction time, which actually can save quite a bit of time over the course of an edit.