Rendering Videos - Should I use SSD?

[TDT-Alpha]

Hi there!
I'm working with 3D and Video Production (Mainly After Effects)
Rendering taking a lot of time on my (pre-upgrade to I7 3770K) current I3 2100.
I use normal seagate\wd HDD's.
Should I buy additional 256GB SSD for just rendering onto it?
I don't really have extra money for that upgrade, is it really essential?
(By essential I mean by increasing AE Render speed by 30% or more)

 

[Wamphryi]

It wont make any difference. The CPU is the bottleneck. 7200 RPM HDD's are fast enough. Rendering is processor intensive. The upgrade to the i7 Core is what you need.

I have tested a variety of programs and compared my 2 TB RAID 1 to RAM Drive and there was no gain.

 

[TDT-Alpha]

It wont make any difference. The CPU is the bottleneck. 7200 RPM HDD's are fast enough. Rendering is processor intensive. The upgrade to the i7 Core is what you need.

I have tested a variety of programs and compared my 2 TB RAID 1 to RAM Drive and there was no gain.

Thank you for saying, I thought that the bottleneck was the HDD while rendering uncompressed video..
I got this conclusion because I accidentally rendered once onto a Disc On Key, and it was SUPER slow.. referring it is the speed bottleneck..
Thank you very much!

 

[Wamphryi]

A USB Key Drive is very slow compared to a 7200 RPM HDD so you really would notice the pinch that would occur using such a drive. In time gone by people needed scratch drives to compensate for the smaller RAM configurations that were the norm of the day. Now with 4 GB 8 GB and 16 GB configurations HDD's barely exert themselves in the rendering process.

If you upgrade to an i7 your system will really improve. 8 GB RAM at least but no more than 16 GB is also desirable. An SSD will really make a difference in progran load times but they are not really rendering material as the constant writes wear on a SSD and rendering would use a fraction of its capabilities. So as you have a budget go for the i7.

 

[popatim]

When you get the i7 you will likely be able to render faster than a mechanical disk can write and you may need to upgrade to raid0 arrays.

You can monitor your system while the rendering is going and if your cores aren't pegged at 90%+ and your hdd is running at spec for sequential write then thats when you know its time. its jsut a mater if you can live with the hassle of raid0 and the extra time you need to wait.

 

[Wamphryi]

It is unlikely that an i7 will push your HDD's.

Consider this. I have been converting old media to HD Format. Each clip is about 5 mins long and averages around 80 MB. My i7 is maxing out on all 8 cores (hyperthreading) It takes a few minutes to convert the file. The final result is the 80 MB file. The CPU executes the required code in RAM. As this is going on the HDD is not in use for swapping data thanks to 16 GB RAM. Over the course of the rendering an 80 MB file is written to the drives at a rate of say 80 MB over 5 minutes. The drives are capable of 100 MB a second writes. So what the drives are being asked to do is over minutes when they can do it in seconds.

What is more important is redundancy which is gained from RAID 1 and reliability which is gained through using enterprise drives if one wants to be particular and as the OP is using uncompressed files we need capacity. All these things are provided by HDD's without a requirement for RAID 0 and the corresponding loss in redundancy and reliability. The drives will be working to a tiny fraction of their performance capabilities.

 

[FireWire2]

It is unlikely that an i7 will push your HDD's.

+1

 

[popatim]

I find that strange considering my 6 core amd 1055t overclocked to 3.5ghz pushes over 100mb/s on my raid 0's. I just upgraded my slowest pair of drives and need to retest.

 

[FireWire2]

I find that strange considering my 6 core amd 1055t overclocked to 3.5ghz pushes over 100mb/s on my raid 0's. I just upgraded my slowest pair of drives and need to retest.

I guess depend the rendering output.
H264 codec is CPU intent, where MPEG2 is pretty easy

 

[Topemu]

This is wise, but not scientific factual evidence.
you don't actually know in what way the cpu/ram is dumping the rendered data to the hd over that 5 minutes.
could it be that every other moment or so it sends a chunk of the 80mb and that slow hd bottlenecks for that moment.
each chunk could add up to a time savings or a loss?

It is unlikely that an i7 will push your HDD's.

Consider this. I have been converting old media to HD Format. Each clip is about 5 mins long and averages around 80 MB. My i7 is maxing out on all 8 cores (hyperthreading) It takes a few minutes to convert the file. The final result is the 80 MB file. The CPU executes the required code in RAM. As this is going on the HDD is not in use for swapping data thanks to 16 GB RAM. Over the course of the rendering an 80 MB file is written to the drives at a rate of say 80 MB over 5 minutes. The drives are capable of 100 MB a second writes. So what the drives are being asked to do is over minutes when they can do it in seconds.

What is more important is redundancy which is gained from RAID 1 and reliability which is gained through using enterprise drives if one wants to be particular and as the OP is using uncompressed files we need capacity. All these things are provided by HDD's without a requirement for RAID 0 and the corresponding loss in redundancy and reliability. The drives will be working to a tiny fraction of their performance capabilities.