Adam or EposVox here and today I wanted to show the benefits of using a SSD or Solid
State Drive as a “scratch disk” of sorts to improve video editing performance.
Western Digital was kind enough to sponsor this video and send out one of their brand
new WD Blue SSDs for me to use for this project.
WD has been my go-to brand for hard drives for a long time - I especially love their
Black line of hard drives - so I’m glad to see them entering the SSD game.
It’s no secret that SSDs are loads faster than hard drives, but can that speed benefit
something other than boot times or game loading screens?
Today, let’s take a look at a couple video encoding scenarios - exporting or (rendering)
a full 4K video project, and transcoding (or converting) a video file from its native codec
to the GoPro Cineform codec.
I’ve created a full 4K, 60 FPS project - a tutorial I’ll be posting at some point soon
- 5 minutes in length, downscaled to 1080p to remove CPU and GPU bottlenecks, as this
is rendering on a slower PC than my main rig.
This is to showcase a more realistic situation than my big i7-6900K and GTX 1080 rig, which
most people won't have.
That's a lot of data, and I'm rendering it to a high bitrate file.
I tested rendering it from a normal hard drive to itself (for a normal use case scenario),
then from the WD Blue SSD to a normal hard drive (showcasing using the SSD as a scratch
drive), rendering it from the WD SSD to itself (showcasing using the SSD full time), and
then from a normal hard drive to the WD Blue SSD as its destination, and compared the render
times.
As you can see, anything involving the SSD was faster than just the hard drive, but even
just rendering from the WD Blue SSD to itself was faster than going from the hard drive
to the SSD.
The WD Blue SSD has read speeds up to 545 megabytes per second and up to 525 megabytes
per second write speeds - so it leaves hard drives in the dust not just for boot times
or game loading screens, but for transferring data of any kind.
And you don’t have to worry about using SSDs for video editing anymore, they live
a lot longer now.
This Blue SSD has a 400TBW or “terabytes written” endurance rating - which means
a long life, even for my extreme data usage.
That's still a really, really long life cycle.
I will probably never kill this drive.
400 terabytes is a lot of data, even for me.
Not to mention, using the SSD as your OS boot drive will allow you to multi-task much better
- rendering videos, playing games, using software - your system will be able to keep up with
a lot more by running from a SSD than an old hard drive, which struggles to keep up with
demanding multi-tasking loads.
I've used this to breathe a lot of life into old laptops just by replacing the slow, 4500
RPM hard drive with a SSD - videos on that coming shortly.
If you’ve been running hard drives in your video editing computer, I definitely recommend
at least setting up a SSD scratch disk like I’ve done here with the WD Blue and moving
your active projects to the drive.
Your workflow will become a lot more efficient.
I hope this video has been helpful for you.
Thanks to WD for sponsoring, and thanks to you for watching!
Smash that like button if you enjoyed, subscribe for more awesome tech videos, and I will see
you in the next one.
Hopefully I’ll be set up in the new studio soon.
A lot of work is going into it.
Stay tuned.