Storage for Video recording/editing

platypus · 10 Mar 2016 at 16:52

I'm looking for a decent solution for HD 1080p recording and editing. From what I can gather most hard drives will be up to the job really, the bottleneck is more the cpu/gfx card?

Would I get better performance out of a 1/2TB disk and using an SSD as a scratch disk or would I be better raiding two hdds?

Rendering speeds on my computer aren't great but its something I can live with really; I've got an i7 and 16GB of Ram, and whilst I can fit in another 16GB I don't think I'm hitting that sort of memory usage.

Boogieman_WD · 11 Mar 2016 at 08:31

Hey there, Platypus.

Basically I don't think that the SSD is a pretty good idea for a scratch drive. Depending on the size and how frequently you record/edit those videos it might drastically shorten the life expectancy of an SSD. If you think that the GPU might bottleneck the process anyway, perhaps 2 7200RPM drives in a RAID configuration would be a better idea, both in terms of performance because the SSD might be an overkill and regarding the budget and the overall capacity.
At least that's my point of view. I'd be interested to hear what the guys from the community have to say as well.

Hope that helps. Cheers!
Boogieman_WD

platypus · 11 Mar 2016 at 08:52

Thanks Boogieman, I just thought of using SSDs because I've got some spare ones lying around, but its a good point nonetheless.

Would it matter which drives in raid? For example both the WD blues and blacks have spin speeds of 7,200RPM, but the blacks are almost double in price. Would it matter if I did run them in raid?

Also would I see much benefit in a software raid or should I be looking at a hardware raid controller?

Thanks.

Boogieman_WD · 11 Mar 2016 at 11:28

Well between those two drives there are quite a lot of differences regarding their performance. The WD Blue drive is general/everyday usage HDD, while the WD Black drive is the high performance model, which has a dual-processor and additional features, which you can check here: WD Black. It also has a 5-year limited warranty compared the the WD Blue drive, which has a 2-year limited warranty.

Anyway, if you're looking for a WD drive for this purpose, I'd suggest that you go with 2 WD Red drives WD Red. They're firmware (NasWare 3.0) has been specifically optimized for NAS/RAID environments and even though they are not 7200RPM drive, I think you should have no issues with their performance in RAID 0 for the purpose you need them.

About the hardware vs software RAID. There have been a lot of discussions regarding this one. Basically it really depends on the hardware controller you're going to get. If it's a low-end one without cache, then you might be better off with a software RAID. However with a mid-range/high-end card you should be able to get better performance compared to a software RAID.
Anyway, you should be OK with a software RAID in my opinion.

Semple · 11 Mar 2016 at 11:34

Agreed with the points made above regarding excessive wear on the SSD, however with SSD's being fairly cheap nowadays it's a performance vs live expectancy consideration.

Depending on how much recording/editing you'll be doing, i think i'd rather sacrifice the life of the drive in order to get the optimum performance.

platypus · 11 Mar 2016 at 12:34

Would you go for RAID on top of that? eg two 256gb ssds in raid0? I don't care about redundancy.

I'm not going to be doing that much more video editing than I do now, but its increased recently to the point that I'm looking at performance.

rtho782 · 13 Mar 2016 at 21:55

3x4TB WD Blacks in RAID0 gets me over 500mb/sec sequential read and write.

I have a pair of 6TB WD Red Pros in my server, they perform better than the blacks, probably due to data density.

If you're doing video it's all sequential access, I'd say a couple of drives with RAID0 is ideal.

John24 · 14 Mar 2016 at 14:52

What is your workflow? If your editing and encoding at the same time then the CPU will be the bottleneck, but if your editing the file and saving it before encoding the edited file them fast storage will speed up the file save before then encoding it.

The latter is what I do, since Dec 2014 I've been using 2 x 256GB Samsung 850 PROs as source and destination for recording and saving 1080 HDTV. They can sustain 500MB/s between them and close to that copying back to themselves.

This is copying an 11GB file between them:

I use them everyday, on the source drive so far I've written 17TB and on the destination 12TB. The destination drive also has my OS on it. The drives are rated at 150TBW so at my current usage I've got many more years before it even begins to think about wearing out. Tests have seen these do petabytes of writes.

If I was buying today I'd go for a single NVMe SSD and add a second depending on file copy performance while recording to the drive.

It really comes down to how much you want to spend and how much space you need. RAID only really makes sense here if you need the extra space and so use HDDs, want better performance vs a single HDD and can't afford large enough SSDs. RAIDing SSDs will get you even more performance but if your wanting more than SATA speed M.2 is even quicker than a couple of RAIDed SATA SSDs.

platypus · 31 Mar 2016 at 09:29

I'll edit then queue things up for render, go make a brew/go do something else.

I don't really need much space, as storage wise I'll dump things off on my server, but obviously I want enough space for recording large files (in HD) and then enough for editing/rendering.

I've got one 850 pro sitting lying around so buying another might be a good solution. If the life of them is as good as it seems now that shouldn't be a problem.