4 ms·
Linus' recommendation to buy the Intel X25-M still stands, because they have the fastest small-block random I/O performance. Why would you buy an SSD only to d
by Andys 17y ago
Linus' recommendation to buy the Intel X25-M still stands, because they have the fastest small-block random I/O performance.
Why would you buy an SSD only to do large sequential transfers with it? Just use a 1.5TB HDD to store your media files.
- DannoHung 17y agoWhy would your transfers have to be sequential?
- DrJokepu 17y agoIf you only access large media files (due to the very nature of media files, you want to read them sequentially from the beginning to the end) and your hard drive is not too fragmented, it is a reasonable assumption that you will mostly access the hard drive sequentially. However, if you need a large hard drive for a database and not as a media storage, obviously random access is just as important as sequential access.
- DannoHung 17y agoWhat about reading several large media files concurrently?
- Tuna-Fish 17y agoThat will be translated into a few sequential reads by the os & NCQ. No non-raid device gets any kind of speed boosts from concurrent reads -- ssd's just don't suffer as much from them.
- barrkel 17y agoSSDs are in a RAID0-like setup internally as it is.
- jrockway 17y agoWhy? Personally, I can only watch one TV show at a time...
- DrJokepu 17y agoI suppose he meant a media streaming server.
- anigbrowl 17y agoSure, but if you're making a TV show or the like, it's not unusual to be compositing multiple video streams. TV companies have massively expensive hardware for this of course, but this will be a real boon for anyone who makes a living with multimedia.
- DrJokepu 17y agoProfessional video editing has developed workarounds for that problem as far back as the 80's. Basically they do the editing on a low-res version of the footage (it's called an "offline edit"), then export it as an "Edit Decision List (EDL)" and then the big computers crunch on it overnight using the original, hi-res footage and produce an "online" edit. Companies like Avid sell specialized servers that have an in-built LCD screen on their case so that you can see the programme as it is being processed. Online editing is still quite CPU intensive so I don't think that SSDs alone will change that workflow but it might still help somewhat at offline editing.
- anigbrowl 17y agoQuite so, but if you're greenscreening or color correcting in, say, After effects it's nice to be able to work at full res whenever you can. Right now I use RAM preview to get a quick idea of how something looks, but I can see an SSD obviating a lot of the usual disk-bashing for longer previews. For final render, as you say CPU becomes the dominant factor.
- anigbrowl 17y agoWhy would you buy an SSD only to do large sequential transfers with it? Visual FX, video transcoding etc. Rendering times can often be disk-bound, and eat up a lot of time. It becomes aggravating once you start editing HD video, even on a quad-core. For that, the Crucial drive mentioned by Jeff is a win because of the price - the lower random-access performance compared to the Intel drive is not that big of an issue for this application, and even with that limitation it'll smoke my existing system drive too.