Using SSD as a rendering drive.

[SgtKenzo]

Hey guys, I am thinking of buying the PNY CS900 as a rendering drive due to the higher write speeds for all of my YouTube videos and therefore, large capacity isn't exactly required. The OBS raws are stored on a 2TB Seagate Barracuda 256 Mb Cache HDD.

 

The 120Gb model is currently going on Amazon for £17.06 or roughly about $20.77 USD.

 

Will this SSD be good enough for this purpose to help reduce rendering times?

[Princess Luna]

How do you expect to reduce rendering time with the SSD exactly?

[NunoLava1998]

I'd get a larger SSD and put OS and programs on it too. 

[SgtKenzo]

3 minutes ago, Princess Luna said:

How do you expect to reduce rendering time with the SSD exactly?

Wouldn't the SSD help by increasing the writing speed and reduce rendering time?

 

 

Edited August 6, 2019 by SgtKenzo

[SgtKenzo]

1 minute ago, NunoLava1998 said:

I'd get a larger SSD and put OS and programs on it too. 

My OS and Movie Studio and other things are already on my WD Blue 500Gb M.2 SSD already.

[Origami Cactus]

1 minute ago, SgtKenzo said:

Wouldn't the SSD help by increasing the writing speed and reduce rendering time?

 

 

How fast are your videos rendering exactly?

Most of the times videos render at max 2x realtime speed, so about 20-50MB/s. HDD can write that fast easily.

 

The only way SSD helps video performance is the timeline scrubbing, that is the way for example Linus uses them.

 

But for rendering it makes no difference.

[Princess Luna]

2 minutes ago, SgtKenzo said:

Wouldn't the SSD help by increasing the writing speed and reduce rendering time?

It depends entirely on the type of rendering you are doing and the specs of your computer. Bottle necks can occur in many different parts of the rendering pipeline. Generally speaking, rendering is very GPU or CPU intensive, depending on if the render engine is CUDA (or similar) enabled. If the renderer is able to utilize a GPU, then GPUs and/or dedicated encoding cards will generally provide the largest boost to performance if they have not already been optimized, if not GPU enabled, then CPU becomes the biggest factor if not extremely fast or doing very light rendering.

 

Memory is a potentially large factor as well and would compound with the hard drive. If there is not enough storage space for the CPU or GPU to work on the video stream, then it will have to spend much more time moving data on and off the hard drive. In this case (if the memory is showing high utilization during render) then increasing the amount of memory is likely to yield a significant improvement in performance.

 

Data transfer rate is still potentially a bottleneck though. If rendering is very minimally CPU/GPU intensive and/or the system already have very high performing CPUs or GPUs, then it is possible that a HDD would not be able to keep the render engine supplied with data to process.

 

An easy way to tell if your disk drive is a problem is to look at how long the render takes relative to the rate at which you can playback video in the editor. If you are encoding to a different drive than your source material is on, then if the HDD is a bottleneck, it would be expected that render speed should move at the same rate as you are able to playback. If you can playback footage at 20fps, then your HDD is capable of feeding at least 20 frames per second (with no effects applied). If the render engine is processing less than 20 frames a second, the processing speed is the limit. If it is processing 20 frames a second, then it is entirely possible that the HDD is failing to keep the render engine supplied with data to process.

 

If you are storing the render on the same drive you are reading your source from, it becomes much harder to tell as a HDD requires moving the read/write head between where it is reading the source data and writing the render results.

 

This extra seek time will drastically slow the performance of the drive. As a rule of thumb, I'd say to consider looking in to disk related solutions if your render time is better than 1/3 of the playback rate when reading and writing to the same drive, though I'd encourage trying to do a test on different drives for source and output to be more certain. So, if you are reading and writing to the same drive and you can play back 30fps, then if your encoding is running at 10fps or higher, an SSD might be helpful. (As might more memory as that would reduce how often the system has to switch between reading and writing and help cover the gap.)

[NunoLava1998]

1 minute ago, Princess Luna said:

It depends entirely on the type of rendering you are doing and the specs of your computer. Bottle necks can occur in many different parts of the rendering pipeline. Generally speaking, rendering is very GPU or CPU intensive, depending on if the render engine is CUDA (or similar) enabled. If the renderer is able to utilize a GPU, then GPUs and/or dedicated encoding cards will generally provide the largest boost to performance if they have not already been optimized, if not GPU enabled, then CPU becomes the biggest factor if not extremely fast or doing very light rendering.

 

Memory is a potentially large factor as well and would compound with the hard drive. If there is not enough storage space for the CPU or GPU to work on the video stream, then it will have to spend much more time moving data on and off the hard drive. In this case (if the memory is showing high utilization during render) then increasing the amount of memory is likely to yield a significant improvement in performance.

 

Data transfer rate is still potentially a bottleneck though. If rendering is very minimally CPU/GPU intensive and/or the system already have very high performing CPUs or GPUs, then it is possible that a HDD would not be able to keep the render engine supplied with data to process.

 

An easy way to tell if your disk drive is a problem is to look at how long the render takes relative to the rate at which you can playback video in the editor. If you are encoding to a different drive than your source material is on, then if the HDD is a bottleneck, it would be expected that render speed should move at the same rate as you are able to playback. If you can playback footage at 20fps, then your HDD is capable of feeding at least 20 frames per second (with no effects applied). If the render engine is processing less than 20 frames a second, the processing speed is the limit. If it is processing 20 frames a second, then it is entirely possible that the HDD is failing to keep the render engine supplied with data to process.

 

If you are storing the render on the same drive you are reading your source from, it becomes much harder to tell as a HDD requires moving the read/write head between where it is reading the source data and writing the render results.

 

This extra seek time will drastically slow the performance of the drive. As a rule of thumb, I'd say to consider looking in to disk related solutions if your render time is better than 1/3 of the playback rate when reading and writing to the same drive, though I'd encourage trying to do a test on different drives for source and output to be more certain. So, if you are reading and writing to the same drive and you can play back 30fps, then if your encoding is running at 10fps or higher, an SSD might be helpful. (As might more memory as that would reduce how often the system has to switch between reading and writing and help cover the gap.)

How the fuck did you type that in 7 minutes?

[SgtKenzo]

I shall have a look tonight, when im rendering another video and make my decision from there. Thank you all for your feedback as always.

 

rock on!