SSD useful for compressed video files?

[bonehead666]

Have read some threads saying SSD's compress data and are not suitable for reading and writing compressed video files?

Any thoughts ?

 

[bonehead666]

And i have an agility 3

 

[bonehead666]

This is only true of SSDs that use the SandForce controller (e.g. Vertex 2/3, Agility 2/3, Corsair Force 3, etc.). Although incompressible files read/write slower over the SandForce controller, it's still about as fast as most other SSD controllers are anyway (e.g. Intel).

The main issue is that lots of heavy incompressible writes without giving the SSD idle time to recover will cause it to "throttle" future writes, slowing them down. In short, if you're going to be writing lots of incompressible files to your SSD, it's probably best to steer clear of SandForce ones, or at least make sure you get a newer one based on the latest SandForce controllers (Vertex/Agility 3) - these have less issues with long-term throttling.

So i would probably be better off investing in the fastest 1TB mechanical drive i could find and keep the SSD for booting (which is always good for overclocking bluscreens) ?

 

[bonehead666]

The thing is the throttling only affects incompressible data, there is no performance loss for compressible data. If you compare AS benchmarks to ATTO and you'll see this quite clearly. Whilst writing videos accelerates the process, most users will pass the threshold under normal usage anyway (I did it writing windows and linux to my ssd).

Basically don't worry about it , even with the massively reduced write speeds for incompressible data, you'll never notice any performance loss in watching videos (for example), it's still faster than a hard drive.

Would that still apply to streaming files for video editing where scrubbing would cause loads of R/W ?

 

[bonehead666]

What do you mean by this?

I mean it boots really fast after i have over done the Multplier and volts

 

[bonehead666]

Games are suppose to be fun why the blue face ?

 

[bonehead666]

I'll admit I've not got any experience of this so I don't really know. However, assuming the ssd has had time to trim properly I doubt you'll notice any significant performance degradation when dealing with compressible data. At worst you'll shorten the lifetime of the ssd, which to be honest seems to be a long time regardless.

You do need to weigh up whether for your usage a throttled ssd is fast enough for video editing. To put this in perspective my vertex 2 gets about 80MB/s sequential write with AS benchmark (which uses incompressible data). My F3 outperforms this, and if sequential writes are important for video editing I'd be looking at using a hard drive instead.

Ok im getting 48MB/s-write 162 MB/s-read on the SSD and 113 MB/s-write and 114 MB/s-read on the HDD using AS benchmark. Pretty conclusive i think, thanks.