Video Editing: Scratch, Cache or Both?

[CallMeDrJones]

Woohoo! Refund season, time for a new PC!

 

For my upcoming (waiting for Ryzen) build I'll be doing a combination of photo editing, 4K video editing and graphic design in Adobe, as well as some gaming. For internal storage I'll be installing two 500GB m.2 NVME drives in RAID0 as my boot drive, a few 500GB SATA SSDs (also in RAID0) for games, and a 3TB HDD for photo/video mass storage. I'm also prepared to allocate as much as half of my boot volume as either a scratch volume for my programs or cache for my HDD–I don't really anticipate any projects larger than 300GB in total size, but I'd like to have a bit of headroom. If I'm not mistaken a scratch disk should be more consistent for fast reads within the designated programs, but a cache volume would (somewhat less consistently) speed up reads in a wider variety of uses. Is this an accurate summarization?

 

Which configuration makes more sense for a video editing workflow? And does 500GB of total scratch/cache space sound reasonable, or way too much/too little? Some sage storage advice is greatly appreciated

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, CallMeDrJones said:

two 500GB m.2 NVME drives in RAID0 as my boot drive

Don't run raid 0, just get a single 1tb drive. There will be basically no speed difference.

 

Id just copy the files to the ssd to edit, then copy off when done.

 

Use the ssd as a scratch disk aswell to store all previews and temp renders.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Good lord, please don't use a RAID 0 boot drive as part scratch disk, it's a terrible idea. Why so much RAID 0? You're not going to get any extra performance for the uses you've described, it's just going to make loosing your data much more likely. 

I would advise having a single 500GB NVMe drive for boot. Another NVMe (maybe not as large) as a dedicated scratch disk and then a large SSD for your games. It would be more cost effective that way and you're much less likely to end up loosing data. Real world speed will be basically the same for the uses you've described. 

[Qwweb]

7 minutes ago, CallMeDrJones said:

I'll be installing two 500GB m.2 NVME drives in RAID0 as my boot drive, a few 500GB SATA SSDs (also in RAID0) for games, and a 3TB HDD for photo/video mass storage...

I don't really anticipate any projects larger than 300GB in total size, but I'd like to have a bit of headroom.

Well... that is quite a bit of headroom there. If you are looking at 300GB projects, the active project could easily be stored on one 500GB SSD (that would only use 60% of the drive). The HDD should likely only be used for storage of the completed projects. In which case, transfer speeds don't really matter all that much. Also, 300GB is an extremely large amount of data, how long are these videos you are making? 

Keep in mind that uncompressed 4K video takes up ~22GBs/hr so 300GB translates to 13.6 hours of uncompressed 4K video. If compressed with the h.265 codec, that turns into 42.9 hours of 4K video.

[CallMeDrJones]

13 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Good lord, please don't use a RAID 0 boot drive as part scratch disk, it's a terrible idea. Why so much RAID 0? You're not going to get any extra performance for the uses you've described, it's just going to make loosing your data much more likely. 

I would advise having a single 500GB NVMe drive for boot. Another NVMe (maybe not as large) as a dedicated scratch disk and then a large SSD for your games. It would be more cost effective that way and you're much less likely to end up loosing data. Real world speed will be basically the same for the uses you've described. 

Thanks for the advice. I should add that my entire system will be backed up to a NAS. Since I'll be keeping my "mission critical" data on my HDD, I figured it would just be more of a headache than a real "loss" if my boot volume dropped out. I do understand that RAID0 carries a risk of failure–are you suggesting my particular setup would increase the risk, or that RAID0 is just a bad idea in general?

 

I was looking at the SATA SSDs from a cost perspective already–SK Hynix SL308's are super cheap and have solid performance but only go up to 500GB capacity. Since I'd need more than one anyways I figured I would just RAID them as well.

 

Would you still advise against this setup?

[Qwweb]

35 minutes ago, CallMeDrJones said:

For my upcoming (waiting for Ryzen)... For internal storage I'll be installing two 500GB m.2 NVME drives in RAID0 as my boot drive

Well you will truly need to wait for Ryzen as no motherboards have been officially announced, we don't know how many M.2 NVMe slots Ryzen will support.

25 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Good lord, please don't use a RAID 0 boot drive as part scratch disk, it's a terrible idea.

Yeah... what would you do if one of the drives crashed...other than lose your OS and scratch volume.

 

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, CallMeDrJones said:

Thanks for the advice. I should add that my entire system will be backed up to a NAS. Since I'll be keeping my "mission critical" data on my HDD, I figured it would just be more of a headache than a real "loss" if my boot volume dropped out. I do understand that RAID0 carries a risk of failure–are you suggesting my particular setup would increase the risk, or that RAID0 is just a bad idea in general?

 

I was looking at the SATA SSDs from a cost perspective already–SK Hynix SL308's are super cheap and have solid performance but only go up to 500GB capacity. Since I'd need more than one anyways I figured I would just RAID them as well.

 

Would you still advise against this setup?

If you're going to be using part of your boot drive as a scratch disk, it will increase the chances of failure due to the nature of scratch disks. It's better to have a dedicated scratch disk that can simply be replaced if it fails. 

 

RAID 0 is bad in general. While there are some uses for it, like long sustained writes and reads, for loading games, booting the OS and running programs, it offers very little performance benefit over a single drive on its own. I just wouldn't use it as it's more of a headache than anything else. 

 

Last time I checked, I believe the MX300 2TB SSD was the best in terms of price per GB, so maybe look into one of those. You could just have multiple drives if it works out cheaper, but I just wouldn't put them in RAID 0. If you want them to all appear as one drive, you can do that through software, but it makes more sense to just be able to replace a single drive and only replace the data on that drive than have to rebuilt a whole array anytime a drive fails. 

[Qwweb]

19 minutes ago, CallMeDrJones said:

Would you still advise against this setup?

Your NAS would not necessarily back up your OS, if anything occurred the loss of your OS would at best require you to reformat both NVMe SSDs and re-install your OS. I would suggest using RAID 1 or Hybrid RAID 01 for your mass storage and sticking without RAID for the boot and scratch SSDs, and putting the SATA SSDs (if you have 4) in a RAID 10 array.

[CallMeDrJones]

6 minutes ago, Qwweb said:

Well you will truly need to wait for Ryzen as no motherboards have been officially announced, we don't know how many M.2 NVMe slots Ryzen will support.

Indeed. The showcase at CES did feature some boards with multiple M.2 slots (AsRock X370 Taichi, MSI X370 Titanium) but RAID support I believe is still unknown. Wish they would just announce all the damn specs for Ryzen already, given it's supposedly like 3 weeks away.

 

8 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

If you're going to be using part of your boot drive as a scratch disk, it will increase the chances of failure due to the nature of scratch disks. It's better to have a dedicated scratch disk that can simply be replaced if it fails. 

 

RAID 0 is bad in general. While there are some uses for it, like long sustained writes and reads, for loading games, booting the OS and running programs, it offers very little performance benefit over a single drive on its own. I just wouldn't use it as it's more of a headache than anything else. 

 

Last time I checked, I believe the MX300 2TB SSD was the best in terms of price per GB, so maybe look into one of those. You could just have multiple drives if it works out cheaper, but I just wouldn't put them in RAID 0. If you want them to all appear as one drive, you can do that through software, but it makes more sense to just be able to replace a single drive and only replace the data on that drive than have to rebuilt a whole array anytime a drive fails. 

Sounds good. I don't need to save a few seconds here and there if it's going to mean hours of inconvenience later. And I'll look into that 2TB drive as well. Not sure what my final configuration will be for game storage but it definitely sounds like separate NVME is the way to go for boot and scratch. Thanks!

[CallMeDrJones]

@Oshino Shinobu One more question, would you consider it acceptable to use a 1TB NVME drive as both boot and scratch, as @Electronics Wizardy recommended? Slightly more cost effective than two 500GB drives and also the 1TB version seems to be the best performer among 960 EVOs.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, CallMeDrJones said:

@Oshino Shinobu One more question, would you consider it acceptable to use a 1TB NVME drive as both boot and scratch, as @Electronics Wizardy recommended? Slightly more cost effective than two 500GB drives and also the 1TB version seems to be the best performer among 960 EVOs.

I personally wouldn't. It just puts extra writes and load on the OS drive. If you ask me, you don't need a 500GB scratch drive as you'll never be using 500GB of files at once. A 250GB should be more than enough, given that scratch drives are for loading up files to work with then offloading when you're done. For me, I wouldn't want to be using my OS drive for that. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I personally wouldn't. It just puts extra writes and load on the OS drive. If you ask me, you don't need a 500GB scratch drive as you'll never be using 500GB of files at once. A 250GB should be more than enough, given that scratch drives are for loading up files to work with then offloading when you're done. For me, I wouldn't want to be using my OS drive for that. 

you have way more than enough iops on a nvme drive to to that though.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

you have way more than enough iops on a nvme drive to to that though.

I still wouldn't do it myself. I like keeping my OS drive pretty much exclusively for the OS and a few programs. 

 

To me, having a dedicated scratch drive makes more sense. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I still wouldn't do it myself. I like keeping my OS drive pretty much exclusively for the OS and a few programs. 

 

To me, having a dedicated scratch drive makes more sense. 

but it won't make any performance difference.

[CallMeDrJones]

3 hours ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I still wouldn't do it myself. I like keeping my OS drive pretty much exclusively for the OS and a few programs. 

 

To me, having a dedicated scratch drive makes more sense. 

 

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

but it won't make any performance difference.

Seems like we're at a bit of an impasse, eh?

 

Anyways, I just completed the order. Two 960 EVOs: one 250GB for OS/programs and one 500GB as a scratch disk. Saves money and keeps scratch on a dedicated drive. I might allocate ~100GB as cache for the HDD.