Rendering to and from same HDD

I3reeze

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Jan 23, 2015
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This is my 3rd post on similar topics, but I don't want to clutter threads with loosely related ideas.

I'm using Sony Vegas Pro 13 for editing and rendering.
I'm planning on recording gameplay in 1440p60fps to my main drive C:, which is an SSD (HDD can't handle 60fps at that resolution, it seems) and is also running my OS - First off, is this a bad idea? To record and run OS on same drive?
Then, I'm planning on pulling footage from my C: into Vegas Pro and saving it as a project on my E: (dedicated to recording related files) which is a 2TB HDD.
Then, I plan on rendering edited footage to E:.

Is it a bad idea for me to render FROM E: TO E: ? I don't fully understand how the process works, but I'm worried that reading and writing to separate places on the same disk will slow the process down quite a bit.

Finally, I also have a D: (HDD) which contains the majority of my applications. I could use this somewhere in the recording/editing/rendering process, such as saving my rendered projects or pre-rendered projects, depending on which would be smaller.
 

JaredDM

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If you plan to do this often, more than just an occasional thing, then you should know that it will put a lot of wear onto an SSD which can make the memory degrade prematurely. Just a warning on that. Performance wise, you never know how well it'll work until you try so go for it and see how well it works. You may ultimately find that you'll need a RAID array to accomplish this. While SSD's have a much higher 4K read/write rate (small random blocks) they aren't always a lot faster in the sequential read/write operations. You may ultimately find that putting two HDD's into a RAID 0 might be what you need to do.

As to rendering and saving back to the same disk, your assumption is correct. Reading and writing from the same disk can potentially become a bottleneck. I say potentially, because it really all depends on how CPU intensive the rendering you're doing is, and how well your CPU is able to keep up. Only way to really know again is to just try it and see which is maxing out first, your CPU or HDD.
 

Michael Trenton

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Feb 4, 2015
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I've even recorded 1920x1080 25fps MotionJPEG max quality setting onto my one internal 2.5'' laptop drive that was also running the OS and the game and that worked just fine so I think you should be more than okay recording to an SSD.

As far as rendering and editing from the same drive I used to do this a lot in the past and it worked fine for me, but back then I was mostly editing 1080p H.264 with some ProRes 422 thrown in every now and then so my drive bandwith requirements were not as big as yours probably (if that's high quality 1440p60fps footage you're editing). These days I use a dedicated SSD drive for rendering which works great. I mean you could always try without a dedicated render drive and then if you find out it bottlenecks your process you can get an additional drive I guess?
 

I3reeze

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Jan 23, 2015
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Thanks for the warning on memory degradation; I didn't know that was a thing for an M.2 SSD.
I've been looking for an HDD setup which could be optimized for Sequential Write so as to record to a single or RAID array of HDDs, but I haven't found much info on that; some people think SSD RAID 0 is required for 1440p60fps, others think an HDD RAID should do fine.

I'll do some testing for rendering, but from what I've already tested, my SSD (C: ) already hits very high percentage (70-90%), but I don't know if that means it's a bottleneck. I wouldn't think an i7-5820K would be the issue.
 

Michael Trenton

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This depends on what codec and bitrate you're recording in though.
I'm just recorded a game in 1080p 60fps Motion JPEG which I believe is somewhere around 260 Mbps (32,5 MB/s) which is a bitrate any normal HDD is more than capable of recording.
1440p is just shy of twice the resolution of 1080p so in MotionJPEG 1440p 60fps would be something like 65 MB/s which again any normal HDD should be capable of recording. So unless you're recording in some completely uncompressed RAW format I doubt you'll need a RAID 0 configuration (but you should test this out for yourself), and a single SSD ought to be more than capable of handling it on its own. Anyway, that's my opinion on the matter.


 

I3reeze

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Jan 23, 2015
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So could you tell me why people use SSD Raid arrays to record in high quality? It seems like HDDs would degrade in performance after a lot of use too, but you're making it sound like it happens much faster to SSDs.

Do you know of an HDD setup which could achieve a write speed of 200 MB/sec? And are there certian HDDs which excel at sequential read/write rather than, for example, lower latency?