Would an SSD speed up editing in FCP X a lot?

[Nostromo]

How much difference would an SSD make instead of a spinning hard drive when editing in FCP X?

Or would the difference not be that great and it's more important to have your 8 Gb RAM in you MBP?

Add-on: What are you expecting of the new MBA in regards to editing? Not up to it yet because of its low-voltage CPUs?

 

[grooveattack]

SSD's are great, fast and low powered.
BUT, they are dammed expensive for any meaningful size and if in a MBP then just no (macpro for example you could have 3 all in there. FAST but $$$)
I dont know how it would hold up to sustained read and writes, someone clear that up for me?

MBA's would be a stretch for editing. if its just home movies, fine. 2Hr documentary at 1080p? no.

i would get my RAM up and if i had the option of a thunderbolt HDD i'd use that.

 

[MisterMe]

...
I dont know how it would hold up to sustained read and writes, someone clear that up for me?

...

That is the $64,000 question. We have HDDs that have been in use for decades. We also have HDDs that have failed after a relatively short time. For long-term durability measures of SSDs, we have only simulations because they have simply not been around that long. I have no doubt that SSDs have a spectrum of lifetimes. This means that any personal experience reported may be perfectly valid, but totally irrelevant to what the average user might expect. We just have to wait until their is enough data over a long enough period to perform meaningful statistics.

 

[Nostromo]

But what is the speed gain using an SSD for editing applications?

e.g. if the scratch disc was an SSD... (you could then use a regular spinning hard drive with large data storage capability, and an SSD as a plug-in as a scratch disc).

 

[cgbier]

Especially as a scratch I wouldn't it, because of the unknown life expectance with too many read/write cycles. For speed, a solid RAID cluster still is more secure.

 

[Nostromo]

I'll probably hold back on SSDs for now.

We're only at the beginning of the SSD era, and they are still too expensive to risk a failure with using it as a scratch disk.

 

[martinX]

What advantage does an SSD have over a HDD?
Faster access to files.

When does slow access have an impact (i.e. become a bottleneck) on video editing?
When you have either high bitrate video (e.g. uncompressed) or lots of concurrent streams. Or both.

FCP will drop frames or ask for rendering if it can't keep up with things as they are.

You know what bitrates you are dealing with and you know if have a bottleneck. You also know if it's worth lots of your money to relieve that bottleneck.

 

[Nostromo]

What advantage does an SSD have over a HDD?
Faster access to files.

When does slow access have an impact (i.e. become a bottleneck) on video editing?
When you have either high bitrate video (e.g. uncompressed) or lots of concurrent streams. Or both.

FCP will drop frames or ask for rendering if it can't keep up with things as they are.

You know what bitrates you are dealing with and you know if have a bottleneck. You also know if it's worth lots of your money to relieve that bottleneck.

So one could edit small projects like short films with only one 128 Gb SSD without a RAID set-up? As long as you have all the media files on that SSD?

 

[THX1139]

So one could edit small projects like short films with only one 128 Gb SSD without a RAID set-up? As long as you have all the media files on that SSD?

You are paying a major premium for fast access for limited storage. Not wise when you consider that it's total overkill for most situations and there are adequate solutions that are much cheaper for a lot more storage. You would be much better off spending your money on more ram, or a raid solution using standard 7200 drives. Even RAID is more than most people need for standard editing practices.

 

[martinX]

^ What he said.

Barefeats has connected some amazing SSDs together and obtained some incredible results, but it's big bikkies. (I just realised that is a local idiom: it means "costs lots of money", where a "bikkie" is short for "biscuit" or what Americans call a "cookie").

128 GB is a fairly small size and you wouldn't fit much (in duration) on there especially if it's ProRes.

So the (rhetorical) question is: are you dropping frames with your current setup?

 

[Nostromo]

I don't have a current set-up for FCP X.

My current machine can't run it.

I'm planning to get an MBP to run FCP X and was checking my options.

From what I have gotten from this and other threads I won't do an SSD at this time.

SSD's are great, but still too expensive to make sense at today's file sizes in both still and motion.

So I will put a large spinning hard drive in.

Thanks for your input.

Now the decision is a 2011 13" MBP or a 2010 refurb 15" MBP.