4K Monitoring or 1/1 Playback in Full HD

[barker85]

Hi there,

I work with 4K R3D files and am considering upgrading my system to enable either:

4K monitoring at 1/1 or 1/2 debayer

HD monitoring at 1/1 debayer

Currently, my system's output is 1920x1080 - mostly smooth at 1/2, perfect at 1/4.

Specs...

MB: ASUS X99-A

CPU: I7-5930K (Asus Turbo setting)

RAM: 32GB DDR4

GPU: GTX 970

Media: 7200RPM drives (considering setting up RAID)

I'm not exactly sure where any bottlenecks might be...

Any thoughts on what component upgrades are required for either option, or adequate system specs in general would be hugely appreciated.

[Peru Bob]

How many drives, how full, and what is on each?

[barker85]

5x 5TB, 90% full. Footage files/folders only. Thanks!

[Peru Bob]

barker85  wrote

90% full.

That is very likely a bottleneck.

Where is the OS and cache?

[barker85]

Thanks for the responses.

My OS and Cache are on separate SSDs.

My present system isn't even capable of monitoring in 4K so I'm interested in what the recommended system specs are for that (and whether this would entail upgrading everything in my system) and also if being able to monitor in 4K is significantly better and worth it?

[Bill Gehrke]

The best thing for you to do is to buy a Samung M.2 960 Pro (or if money is a real problem the EVO version) and use it for you current Project(s).  As Peru Bob said you have a real storage problem.  Get off any hard disk drives when you are editing.  They are only for archiving and backup in this day and age.

What is your OS/Applications drive.  If is not a SSD get a good SATA III one for that also.

[RoninEdits]

raid-0 would give some additional performance boost to the hdd speeds and could be done for free with the motherboard or windows. before spending $1200-2600 to upgrade the hdd's to ssd's i would investigate the cpu and gpu for possible upgrades first. the cpu and gpu both are being used for red media decoding and debayering. you can check how your current cpu and gpu are performing with windows task manager to see the cpu % and gpu-z for the gpu load %.

[Peru Bob]

But will RAID 0 at 90% full make a difference?

[RoninEdits]

there is a performance penalty with having the hdd's nearly full, raid should have higher speeds even with that penalty. freeing up disk space and implementing raid would both contribute to performance.