Duo 7200rpm RAID 0 vs SSD for video editing

[A Furry Peanut]

Will one have a significant speed difference to edit off of?

 

[atljsf]

the raid will not offer the same performance of a good ssd

 

[RealBeast]

You can use HDDs for project storage, but if you do a lot of editing running the OS/program on one SSD and a scratch disk on the second gives much better performance than HDDs. And RAID 0 does not really matter in the comparison. For large project storage RAID 5 *can* be useful but really only for storage and not for frequent reads/writes.

 

[rhysiam]

Just bear in mind though, my understanding is that unless you're working with extremely high bitrate video (like RAW, or high bitrate 4K60 content), your storage drive really won't be worked that hard. Scrubbing through a timeline can absolutely load up a HDD and depending on your workflow and it can get frustrating to have to wait even a quarter of a second when scrubbing, but that depends totally on the bitrate of the video you're working on.

I'm distinctly amateur in this area, and I realise many people have higher requirements than me, but I regularly work with 1080P @ 60hz content from a Canon DSLR. I shifted my scratch disk to an SSD because I had a spare one and honestly couldn't tell the difference. Maybe with the native video it was every so slightly faster, but as soon as I started to add effects and transitions to the content the live CPU/GPU rendering for the preview clearly became the bottleneck. Now there are plenty of 4K or higher RAW formats that have bitrates exceeding 1Gbps. Obviously if I (or you!) want to work with that sort of content then a standard HDD will absolutely NOT be up to the task. But I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not in that category because someone who's working on that level has already spent so much money on camera gear, storage and an editing workstation that the price of an SSD is a drop in the ocean.

TL DR -> what bitrate video are you working with? As long as it's well below the sequential read speeds of your storage drive, you'll probably be fine and any poor performance you get in your workflow will be caused by something else (GPU, CPU or RAM).