SSD (Solid State Drives) for Encoding?

[Anonymous30]

Hello 1st post here does anyone have any experience with encoding with any of the new SSD drives.....

Differences I see are the following

Most SSD drives are expensive = Cost vs GB Room

But are these differences worth it for the speedup in encoding time saved?

Thanks
AJ

[guns1inger]

Most encoding is CPU bound, not I/O bound, so the advantages would be minor compared to the cost differences. You would be better off at this stage investing in a faster CPU (i7) than SSD drives. In the few instances where it may be of benefit, the quantity of disk space needed (TB's) would make in prohibitively expensive.

That said, 1TB SSD drives will hit the market later this year, and will be affordable within my lifetime.

[redwudz]

I would also go for a faster CPU instead of a SSD drive. They would be nice for a boot drive, and would probably give you some improvements in boot speed and program loading. I've looked at a 60GB, which is in my price range, but it's not quite big enough for my Vista boot setup. I'll wait a bit longer.

And welcome to our forums.

[jagabo]

Drive speed makes very little difference in encoding time unless you are working with uncompressed video.

[RabidDog]

Probably better to get more RAM (even tho that seems to be the same price as SSD these days). I was wondering aboot this, and then thought NO, A better CPU with a large Cache and bags of RAM (8gb? on W7/64) would be a more cost effective speedup.

[TBoneit]

I'll go with suggesting the I7.

I changed up from a Q6600 to a I7-930 (Income tax refund) using a 7200 rpm drive and it flies through encoding showing me it was the slower CPU holding back the performance. Could be the DDR3 vs DDR2 and the GT250 vs the old built-in Intel video.

TMPGEnc Xpress does show some % usage of CUDA on some encodes so that may be helping too.

[redwudz]

Since my previous post, I did buy a 60GB SSD. I found it much too small for using as a boot drive with Vista or W7. Since it was a early SSD, it didn't have the TRIM function and quickly got corrupted. SSDs can't be defragged, they use other methods and defragging damages them. Mine also didn't operate properly in AHCI mode.

In my experience, they need to have about 50% freespace to keep them at optimum performance. As mentioned, they won't speed encoding, but they can greatly speed program and OS loading. But they also require much more care than a rotary drive to keep them running correctly. W7 and somewhat Vista are optimized for their use. XP and many other OS's aren't.

I use mine now as a scratch drive and also run my paging/temp files on it. I use a 150GB 10K RPM Raptor for boot and it's fast enough and has about the right size for my boot drive.

If you are considering using a SSD, do a bit of reading up on them first.