How to assess SSDs vs Raid 5 for read speeds.

[Alan_AEDScripts]

Hey there, not an expert so would just like some 'real world advice' if that's ok... re setting up kit.

I was going to set up a RAID 5 on an older machine, replicating what I have at work.

4 sata 1TB on raid 5 -old machine, giving solid read speeds of about 230mbs.

Blackmagic disk speed test software.

So then I hopped on to amazon and saw...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-inch-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B00P738MUU/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8...

Single SSD giving read speeds of 540mbs

So in the real world is the 540mbs halved ?

It would cost me the same to buy the cheap HDs as the SSD, if it can perform the same...

Just for DATA, this drive, OS on another SSD and backup,cache etc on a usb drive.

Thanks

A

[Bill_Gehrke]

STORAGE 101

For real world Premiere Pro performance data I many years ago developed my Premiere Pro BenchMark (PPBM) and if you would like to see real world data on CPU testing, GPU testing and Storage system testing usin Premiere Pro go to my blog.

1. Never,ever use RAID 5 for video editing files, it is designed for high I/O with small files like database searches  Also the onboard Intel RAID is software and as such uses lots of CPU cycles.  For great performance using RAID you should be using a hardware RAID controller saving the CPU for editing functions
2. Forget hard disk drives except for backup and archiving.  Not only are they much slower transfer rates but average access time to get any file is microseconds for an SSD where the average access time for get a file on a rotating platter hard disk drive is milliseconds
3. SSD's, there are essential two kinds SATA III and PCIe x4 interfaced SSD's.  SATA III interface is rated 6 Gbits/second anf the newer M.2 PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface is 32 Gbits/second.  Now the question is, What interfaces are available on your "older machine"?.  If you only have SATA II (3Gbits/second) and/or PCIe Gen 2 or no PCIe x4 slots available you cannot achieve these good results
4. Yes you can get ~540 MBytes/second out of a SATA III SSD see my Storage page above.
5. Here is the performance of a good M.2 PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSD.  And yes indeed with this device you can write data from Premiere Pro at almost 2000 MB/second as you can see in my blog.

Yes go with a minimum of 2 SSD's for editing purposes but only if you can get full SATA III speeds

[RjL190365]

I second your question about which CPU, chipset and ports it does have. You see, into the Ivy Bridge era not all chipsets that supported RAID had all of their SATA ports running at SATA 6.0 Gbps (aka SATA III spec). In fact, the majority of the SATA ports those earlier Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge chipsets had, as well as all of the SATA ports on the earlier Intel chipsets in between the Core 2 and the first-generation i7 eras, only ran at SATA 3.0 Gbps (SATA II) bandwidth. And well into the Haswell era the DMI connection between the CPU and the chipset's PCH permitted only PCIe 2.0 support from the PCH. Moreover, the budget chipsets in the Skylake/Kaby Lake era supported only PCIe 2.0 bandwidh from the PCH.

[Alan_AEDScripts]

Thanks a lot for the reply, reading your blog now.

I have educated myself with your help and threads and a lot of youtube benchmarks.

Probably going to use an NVME drive on PCIe (v2 - older) to achieve up to 1200mb/s  read speeds, not bad on an older sata II machine. Then, I may get an interface for sata 3 to PCIe and attach some drives (SSD).

With built in RAID (there is hardware control on motherboard) the read speeds max out at say 3-400 mb/s, so think that is defunct.

So my only decision is to RAID 0, say 2 SSDs  and do nightly backups, or I could just RAID 1.

BTW, I presume Windows 10 storage spaces etc being software solutions, is always going to slow things down, so stick with harware raid ?

Moving from Win7x64 so not familiar with that yet, surely it doesn't make a huge difference now... ?

Thanks for the help.