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Question

Hardware advice: HDD or SSD for source files?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 9, 2020
3 replies
368 views

UPDATE: Looks like I made a mistake while moving the original post. The original question is in the second post.

In my opinion, replacing the HDD with the SSD will surely help but that can be expensive as you stated in your post. I think you need expert advice from our hardware gurus so I am moving this post to the hardware community.

Thanks,

Rameez

Hardware or GPU

This topic has been closed for replies.

Rameez_KhanAuthor

Legend

OMG! Thanks for notifying me, Peru Bob. As long as I remember, I did it the right way 😮

Looks like I made a mistake in moving the thread.

Thank you, Arjen_van_der_Wal for posting here and Rick_Gerard for chiming in.

Best,

Rameez

Peru Bob

Community Expert

Only your post was moved.

John T Smith

Community Expert

I did a move/merge so all together again

Arjen van der Wal

Participant

Hey!

At our studio we've just switched to a compositing workflow using multipass exr sequences with cryptomattes. This new workflow comes with a lot of benefits to our old workflow where we used seperate passes for every channel and mattes. But, as we are also starting to work more on 4k animation projects I've noticed that the exr files are getting really big (around 500 mb per frame) which ofcourse slows down AE a lot.

Right now I've configured my workstation as follows:

System Specs:
CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K 3.6Ghz
GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Aero 8GB
RAM: 4 x Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 16GB

SSD: Samsung 860 EVO Basic SSD 1TB
SSD M.2: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB SSD NVMe M.2
HHD: Seagate IronWolf NAS 10TB

Config:
SSD M.2: OS bootdrive, Programs
SSD 1TB: Media Scratch disk, Cache, Databases
HHD 10TB: Media Source-files, Library

As we're using multiple computers to work on our projects we have all workstations equiped with HHD 10TB drives that sync over a secured dropbox environment, a bit simular to having a server. It just means that the source-files (exr sequences), once uploaded, are locally stored on my workstation. The only thing that I can think of to improve performance is to replace the 10TB HHD with say 3 4TB SSD drives that then are combined in one 12TB Volume. This is ofcourse quite a bit more expensive. So my question is if anyone knows how much impact it has to read your source files of a SSD rather then of an HDD? Or if someone has a better idea for a setup like this?

Many Thanks!

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

The bottleneck quickly becomes the interface with the HD array. My main work station has a Thunderbolt 3 redundant Raid 10 array with 5 8TB enterprise drives in it. This gives me redundant storage on two matched pairs of 8 TB drives and one spare drive that will protect from data loss on any of the drives automatically if there is a drive failure. Thunderbolt 3's max data rate is 40 GBPS and this array delivers a constant 35 to 39 even though the drives are only 7200 RPM ordinary 3.5" enterprise drives. Even is I converted all of the drives to SSD, and no matter how efficient the drive array was, I still could not exceed the transfer rate of the cable.

There are other interfaces that can give you higher sustained data transfer rates but the cost goes up astronomically. As long as you are sticking to external drives connected with a cable the limiting factor is going to be the connection, not the drive read/write speed.

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