I have a pretty powerful system but want to upgrade my system drive (Drive C) to either a 10,000 rpm, or an SSD. I am not at all familiar with SSD's, and was wondering what people thought about getting one to better run CS6. Not having much luck using my 2tb 7200 rpm sata drive. I have been looking at the Samsung 840 series. Or, is something like the WD VelociRaptor a better bet?

My computer's controller is a Sata II, so I could not take advantage of all he speed improvements of a Sata III drive. But it would still be a big move up, wouldn't it?
Thanks in advance,
SW

I am using a Corsair 120gb SSD drive and it flies, I only use the the drive for the operating system and video application files, make sure you define a second drive for cache and file storage. I still use HD drives for the day to day computer work (Word, database, etc). but will add another SSD drive for this very soon.

Don't have premiere cs6 but my guess is that a fast bootdrive will only speed up start-up time of Premiere, you could get more speed gains by making a raid drive where your video data is located on.

Im using a G-Raid 4tb Raid 0 for that, seems to work well enough. Problem I am having is a lag in performance playing from the timeline. But if a SSD Drive C won't help that, then maybe I am barking up the wrong tree.

Steve, I'd be inclined to check out Tom's Hardware for their latest SSD multi review. Not all SSDs are created equal, and there's a lot of difference between the good and bad. This test is only a month old, and compares a range of price points.

Best SSDs For The Money: October 2012 : Best SSDs For The Money: October 2012 (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269.html)

There is another article here from just a week ago
Intel SSD 335 240 GB Review: Driving Down Prices With 20 nm NAND : Intel SSD 335 240 GB: Refreshing SSD 330 With 20 nm NAND (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-335-240-gb-benchmark,3332.html)

[EDIT] Just read a bit more, and thinking you might like to go have a look at the Adobe Prem Pro Hardware forum
http://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/hardware_forum

If Harm is around, he might point you to some specific threads or FAQs regarding best practice drive set up

But if a SSD Drive C won't help that, then maybe I am barking up the wrong tree.

The reading part is from the disks where your videofiles are located on so any bottleneck could be there but that's just a part of what could cause problems, I at least never heared the C-drives speed makes any difference in playback but the CPU/GPU and harddrive speeds does. Since your videofiles are on a raid the problem must be elsewhere, what exactly do you mean with "lag", does the footage stutter when played back and what type of footage are we talking about?

I am using a Corsair 120gb SSD drive and it flies

What flies? Can you render faster or can you scroll your compressed footage on the timeline without any stutter? I think SSD's for a bootdrive are overrated, everyone thinks it makes such a big difference but it doesn't. You get the impression that your system is so much faster but all it does is make your system feel more responsive when installing or starting up programs but it has a very small impact on the overall performance of your editing system. .

The boot up flies, other actions are a lot faster too. Maybe it is just my imagination. I will run a test later today as I still have CS6 loaded onto a hard drive on my system.

Just for further info. I do not have any anti-virus software on my video editing drives, this can slow your system down to a crawl.

I'll try to be as clear as possible, so there is no misunderstanding.

SSD's are very useful for a boot drive. They make loading a program much more snappy. However, once you are editing, their benefit is negligent. Your editing performance is determined by the rest of your disk setup.

If you want an SSD for OS & programs, these are the brands and models I would look at:

Corsair Performance Pro, Plextor M5 Pro and Samsung 840. These are all Marvell controller based SSD's, that show a much smaller performance degradation in the 'stable state' than Sandforce based SSD's, like the Crucial M4 or the Intel 520/335.

Keep in mind that SSD's have a limited number of writes and once these are used up, the drive is dead, so it is important to not use SSD's for cache files or temporary storage. This may mean you have to change your Windows environment variables and possibly even your user profile to point to another disk, in order to avoid repeated writing to the SSD.

In my own case, I tried to keep things simple, only 4 volumes in my system, see below. The advantage is that this limited number of volumes makes it easy to administer and everything video related, media, projects, media cache, preview files and exports go to one single volume. Admitted, this is a rather extensive volume, 3 x (7 disk raid3) striped to raid30 plus 3 global hot-spares, giving me effectively 18 TB space, using 1 TB disks, but it also gives me all the sustained transfer rates I may need.

This setup is fast, see Reflections - Page 3 (http://ppbm7.com/index.php/final-results?showall=&start=2)

Steve, in your specific situation, the performance bottleneck you are experiencing is due to the fact that the G-Raid is connected over eSATA or even slower and that causes major performance hits. Try the sustained transfer rates with HD Tune Pro and compare them to my transfer rates. I would not be surprised to see yours in the range of 200-250 MB/s, less than 10% of my system.

Keep in mind that SSD's have a limited number of writes and once these are used up, the drive is dead, so it is important to not use SSD's for cache files or temporary storage. This may mean you have to change your Windows environment variables and possibly even your user profile to point to another disk, in order to avoid repeated writing to the SSD.

This is news to me, where did you get this information from?

It is a limitation of the NAND technology, well documented all over the internet.

To quote an article: The reason behind this is simple; 34nm MLC NAND is good for 5,000 write cycles, while 25nm MLC NAND lasts for only 3,000 write cycles. To account for this drop in individual cell lifespan, manufacturers increase the amount of reserve capacity that replaces worn sections as the drive degrades. In layman's terms, an unformatted 120GB SSD with 25nm NAND is now 115GB (107GB available in Windows) compared to 120GB (111GB available in Windows) with 34nm NAND. Practically though, this change in write cycles should have little effect on SSD longevity for most users, with warranties and expected life spans staying the same. Most consumers won't write enough data to notice the difference over the course of an SSD's life. Some customers may feel cheated by this though, although the main concern is the loss of usable space, or more accurately, the marketing of the space available on a drive.

See http://www.storagereview.com/ssds_shifting_to_25nm_nand_what_you_need_to_know

I tried to keep things simple, only 4 volumes


I thought, Harm using only 4 Volumes? untill I saw the raid set up :D

I would not be surprised to see yours in the range of 200-250 MB/s, less than 10% of my system.


But that's still twice as fast as a single build in harddrive, no? Not sure what type of footage Steve is using, which why I asked him, but with most footage today and those harddrive speeds it sounds strange to me that this would cause a lag on the timeline? I mean I use a mixture of HD footage (compressed and uncompressed) with a 32bit NLE and a seperate single 2 TB drive with my videofiles and never experienced any lag.

Noa, see this answer, http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-creative-suite/510372-cs6-premiere-pro-choking-mundane-stuff-2.html#post1762349

Thx for the answer, might explain why I don't experience any problems because my editing system has only software related to editing on it and I used these tips to disable what's not needed: Win7 64bit Performance Improvement Tips for EDIUS users (http://www.videoproductions.com.au/html/win7-tips.html) (probably will work for other NLE's as well.)

Of course everything is relative, but I just tested a 25 GB, 2 hour export of an AVI file, using SD DV as source material and exporting to the same format. It took around 14-15 seconds for that 2 hour timeline, so that translates to a transfer rate of around 1700-1800 MB/s. Maybe that explains why I never see lags. However for Steve this may translate, assuming he has the same degree of tuning done as I have, to an export time of at least 150 seconds, but that is not taking into account the overhead of the OS.

It was said that there is a lag in performance playing from the timeline, are you saying that 200-250mb/s transfer rates is not fast enough for lag free performance in cs6? And whats the point of that sd dv export test you did? It just shows that your raid drives have a very fast transfer rate but what if you use avchd or dslr 1080p mov files and convert to a h264 file, does it really matter then if you use 10 raid drives or just one drive to export to? Do you get better playback on the timeline when playing highly compressed formats if you have a 10 drive raid?

The purpose of the test is for benchmarking disk I/O as cleanly as possible. Nothing more.

Harm, thanks very much for the detailed response. While I cannot afford at this time to try and build a machine like yours, I can budget for a couple more drives, and separate by function.


My G-Raids are attached using esata. Files I work with are AVCHD shot with Panasonic AG-AC160 and HMC150's.

Harm,

I notice from your screen shots that you are using Windows 8. I installed this a couple of weeks ago but un-installed it two days later, it was causing all sorts of problems with my other installations of Windows 7 (I run these on different hard drives and boot up into the OS that I need to work with). The problem was that each time I booted up into Win 7 after previously running Win 8, the CHKDSK routine would run on every hard drive and I presume re-index the drives, this would take approx 15-20 minutes.

Have you had any similar problems, or are you running Win 8 on your entire system? How is it working with CS6 etc. etc.

It baffles me that you need a very fast raid setup just to get lag free performance with avchd in premiere, my 2 year old machine handles avchd without a issue and I have just one separate internal 7200rpm drive for video. Maybe you could test with placing the videofiles on a separate internal drive and see if you still see the problem?

I only use Win8 on this new system and have never tried switching to Win7, so I have never experienced your CHKDSK problems.

I'm using CS6 Master Collection and have not had any problems. In fact my results on the Benchmark Results (http://ppbm5.com/DB-PPBM5-2.php) are till now the only Win8 results submitted.

I run these on different hard drives and boot up into the OS that I need to work with

Same here, have a dualboot with win7 pro and win8 with both on separate drives with no issues so far. Only if I need to boot win7 takes quite long as after selecting win7 it reboots and goes directly into windows 7 but beside that I didn't see the CHKDSK thing either.

Noa,

Thank you for that info. Do you have the OS Indexing turned On or Off. I suspect that this may be my problem . I am not sure if Win 8 uses a different indexing to Win 7, hence the Chkdsk on each boot up. For the time being I have un-installed Win 8 and have reverted back to 7

How did you install? After I downloaded I burned the iso to a disc and then installed replacing my winxp version I had on my dualboot disc (I had winxppro and win7pro before) and I have not changed anything yet to this installation.
I bought win8 because it was cheap now and want to start testing all of my programs related to editing, first impression is quite confusing with the metro and classic desktop opening depending on what application you start but I have all winter to testdrive and see if I switch permanently..

I just did an upgrade install over a copy of Win 7 - I didn't install the 64 bit version, I wanted to make sure everything was working OK first, so my Win 7 Pro drive stayed intact.

My initial thoughts on Win 8 were not very favorable, as you said "quite confusing with the metro and classic desktop opening depending on what application you start". I don't think Microsoft have given much thought to the end user experience. No doubt I will install it again at some future date, especially as I do a lot of screen shot tutorials and need to be seen to be using up-to-date industry standard applications and OS.

Just for info.

I have just done a search on a dual boot Win 8 & Win 7 and found this item

Windows 8 is designed to close and reopen by faster booting (Hybrid Boot), it has left your system in a hibernated state, with the drives mounted, open and ready to take off as soon as Windows 8 restarts. When a drive is mounted, a little piece of data is written to a standard place on the disk to show it is in use - it is called the "dirty bit"
.
This means that the "dirty bit" on the disks that Windows 7 checks on startup is showing on the disks. And then, chkdsk is automatically run to check the integrity of the disks with the "dirty bit" set. Please check the following settings.

1. Control Panel -> Power Plan
2. Select "Choose what the power button does" on left hand side.
3. Click on "Change settings that are currently unavailable".
4. Uncheck "Turn on fast startup" under shutdown settings.

Just re-installed Win 8 Pro and applied the steps in my previous post, problem solved :-)

OK, so after a few tests, it does boot up faster, especially with an SSD disk, but other than that I have to agree there is no other performance gain.

Vincent, are you the photo-i Vincent Oliver? Does not sound like a common name so I am guessing yes. It's a stand out website if you are him. (or if you are not him for that matter).

[EDIT] Just checked your profile and seen you are the same Vincent. I have also discovered that photo-i has become photo-i and video-i which is my bad as you'll now tell me that change happened way back. Looks like I need to visit more often.

I am indeed one and the same. photo-i is in the process of being updated with two new sections - INSTANT photographer and INSTANT moviemaker. These sections will be aimed at all levels of expertise, although mainly at the advanced user. They will be underway as soon as we agree on a sponsorship deal.

Thanks for the heads up. Perhaps you'll post something in the Open DV Discussion forum when it is all up and running.

Will do, thanks for your interest