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Not at all - SSDs are much faster. One of the fastest HDDs on storagereview.com is the WD Black 6TB, with a sustained 218MB/s. While one of the faster SSDs is a

Not at all - SSDs are much faster. One of the fastest HDDs on storagereview.com is the WD Black 6TB, with a sustained 218MB/s. While one of the faster SSDs is an Intel 750 at 2400MB/s.

ddorian43 8y ago
If you have some HDD, and you RAID them, processing video should be mostly sequential read/write, so it should work on HDD. I know SSD is faster, but it depends on what the workload requires.
Dylan16807 8y ago
So let's say you're working on ten hours of 8k footage. If you go with 1.2TB 750s... oh you can't actually fit 20-100 of those in a single workstation.[1] So maybe we back off to a NAS attached over a 40Gbps cable. 40 of those hard drives will be a lot cheaper than 20 of those SSDs. If we grossly overestimate seek times, despite how big the frames are, we might estimate 125MB/s per drive. That's enough to completely saturate the connection. Oh, and the array has 10 times the capacity. [1] 20 assumes a lower framerate and generous compression. 100 assumes 60fps 12-bit at a lossless 3:1 compression. If "raw" is taken completely literally then 10 hours of footage could require 300 of them (and some of the math would have to be redone).
- akvadrako 8y ago
  I don't question that HDDs are much cheaper - but even with your franken 40-drive stripping solution, you are only getting as much performance as 3 SSDs (40Gbps < 3 * 2.4GB/s). Of course for video production you would choose slower, larger SSDs but still get an order of magnitude more performance, very handy when seeking through footage.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    How much performance do you actually need, though? As long as you can load 60 * k arbitrary frames per second then you can skip around at will. Being capped at the equivalent of 3 or 10 high-end SSDs isn't problem if there's no good way to fit more than that with any tech. And you don't exactly need to stripe them all. You could set it up as a blob storage, maybe storing each blob twice so you can distribute reads better.

Not at all - SSDs are much faster. One of the fastest HDDs on storagereview.com is the WD Black 6TB, with a sustained 218MB/s. While one of the faster SSDs is an Intel 750 at 2400MB/s.

ddorian43 8y ago

If you have some HDD, and you RAID them, processing video should be mostly sequential read/write, so it should work on HDD. I know SSD is faster, but it depends on what the workload requires.

Dylan16807 8y ago

So let's say you're working on ten hours of 8k footage. If you go with 1.2TB 750s... oh you can't actually fit 20-100 of those in a single workstation.[1] So maybe we back off to a NAS attached over a 40Gbps cable. 40 of those hard drives will be a lot cheaper than 20 of those SSDs. If we grossly overestimate seek times, despite how big the frames are, we might estimate 125MB/s per drive. That's enough to completely saturate the connection. Oh, and the array has 10 times the capacity. [1] 20 assumes a lower framerate and generous compression. 100 assumes 60fps 12-bit at a lossless 3:1 compression. If "raw" is taken completely literally then 10 hours of footage could require 300 of them (and some of the math would have to be redone).

akvadrako 8y ago
I don't question that HDDs are much cheaper - but even with your franken 40-drive stripping solution, you are only getting as much performance as 3 SSDs (40Gbps < 3 * 2.4GB/s). Of course for video production you would choose slower, larger SSDs but still get an order of magnitude more performance, very handy when seeking through footage.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  How much performance do you actually need, though? As long as you can load 60 * k arbitrary frames per second then you can skip around at will. Being capped at the equivalent of 3 or 10 high-end SSDs isn't problem if there's no good way to fit more than that with any tech. And you don't exactly need to stripe them all. You could set it up as a blob storage, maybe storing each blob twice so you can distribute reads better.