what's more important when encoding videos? (storage specs question)

[mrjayviper]

Is storage a major bottleneck in a video encoding process?

I'm thinking of something like a 5xHDD RAID0 setup vs a single SSD? or perhaps the bottleneck is still the CPU and a good/great storage doesn't make much difference?

Thanks

[jagabo]

Drive speed usually isn't an issue unless you are working with uncompressed or losslessly compressed video.

[Krispy Kritter]

usually not an issue unless you are reading and writing to the same drive. If you read from one drive and write to another drive, then even a normal spinning disc drive will work just fine.

[SameSelf]

Striping hdd's has a diminishing rate of return. IOW, they will likely hit a limit around 700 MB/s (assuming you have a gnarly RAID controller) which is only marginally faster than a modern SATA3 ssd and nowhere near the performance you can get with pcie ssd's. However, striping lots of spinning rust does provide massive amounts of ssd-like storage on the cheap. This can be a boon for post production workflows that rely on high bitrate assets. Will it help encoding times? Absolutely not. Encoding is limited by your cpu/gpu and in reality the settings you choose for the encoder. If you are not happy with your encoding speeds, you could experiment with faster settings (e.g. higher crf, lower bitrate, etc). But then again, how much time does your PC actually spend encoding? Firing off an encode overnight is a much better approach than throwing more hardware at the problem. I would never spend money on a RAID 0 setup or even an ssd if I was chasing faster encode times.