Most economical Disc upgrade for current system?

[krisd20407581]

I'm driving myself absolutely nuts going over the options for this. I'm looking for the best way to upgrade my current drive setup for Premiere. My system is as follows:

i7 2600k (4c/8t) OC'd to 4.8GHz

32GB Gskill 1866mhz RAM

GTX750Ti

120GB SSD for Os/Programs

1TB 7200rpm HDD for Previews and Cache

1TB 7200rpm HDD for Project files and source media

(also have a few external drives lying around, like:  5TB Seagate Expansion USB 3.0, Hitachi 1TB 7200rpm Usb3.0, 2.5" 500GB 7200rpm notebook HDD, portable 5400rpm hitachi 500gb (which i think is failing) Not sure if these can be utilized at all. The 5TB i use for backup, and also have my OS SSD image backed up on it.

I've been reading up a lot and i'm not sure who to "trust". I built my system around the PPBM recommendations and am a big fan of that; i'm not sure if it still holds up with the changes made in flash memory.  But other sources i'm reading, namely reddit's r/BuildaPCVideoEditing, is a big proponent of the M.2 PCIe SSD route, along with an SSD for OS, and a larger mechanical drive to offload once the edit is done. To the point where they basically recommend this setup for nearly everyone. Their idea i guess is, rather than spreading the reads and writes across multiple drives, just get a blazing fast M.2 and use that for almost everything except the OS since it's so fast.  I don't like the idea of spending like $250+ for a drive and it seems inconvenient to have just a small 250GB or 500GB for my source video to edit off...along with the fact that the skyhigh read speeds, like 3GB/s seem like complete overkill. Especially since i'm not editing R3D or blackmagic 4k footage or anything like that. No doubt that the M.2 PCIe drives are excellent and the way of the future in editing, but it seems unnecessary at this point.

Most of what I work with is 4k or 1080 GH4 footage, along with Canon DSLR footage. Pretty low bitrate at this point, but i would like the system to be able to maybe handle slightly higher things like ProRes if need be. I know my system isn't high end by any means, but it needs to last me a few years until i have money for a proper one down the road. Currently, most of the projects I edit are between 30GB and 150GB. It's rare where i have an edit i'm working on where there is more than 150GB of source footage.

My main Goals are as follows:

1) See some solid improvement in read speed and editing, namely speed up whichever drive is being used for my video files/project

2) Achieve some type of redundancy for about 1TB of footage. Maybe RAID1 a couple of 1TB drives? Backup is tough when im constantly moving things around. I would love to be able to have a system where a drive could fail and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

3) Increase the overall working storage space of my internal drives. 2TB isn't a lot to work with.

I've been toying with the idea of just picking up a few other 1TB 7200rpm drives. Or maybe just another decent sized SSD. Or a 1tb and a smaller SSD. I have probably another two SATAIII ports to work with. I like the idea of cheaper mechanical drives, possibly in a RAID, because of the much larger capacity and affordability of them. Budget is super tight. Hopefully not more than $120.  A few possible configurations  I was thinking of:

A) pick up a few 1TB mechanical drives, and put two of them in RAID0 for working projects off of, and another two into RAID1 as a secure storage space.

B) buy another SSD and keep it simple by using that to primarily edit off, and move projects to the mechanical drives as needed, afterwards, maybe picking up

C) setting up a RAID 5 with Windows Storage Spaces with some (maybe four) 1TB HDDs and keep basically everything on that. Not sure if that would kill the Write speed, but also not sure if write speed is vital with my editing either.

D) Saying screw it and spending like $200 on a fast M.2 drive.

I feel like i'm going in circles as you can see, and any direction would be helpful.

[RoninEdits]

if you are after speed, then getting something like a 500gb sata ssd to replace your internal hdd's would be close to your budget and still hold your current 30-150gb projects. a sata ssd is multiple times faster than a single hdd, and for small files like cache files its even faster yet. the samsung 850 evo is a good ssd, but its closer to $160. then you could archive finished projects to your internal 1tb and/or external 5tb hdd.

if you are after capacity, then sticking with some hdd's in raid-0 will offer higher capacity and still gain some speed. if your current 1tb hdd's are ok for speed and 2tb of space is enough, then you could just keep your two 1tb and put them in raid-0. you might also take your 1tb external and put it inside the computer for cache. if your current internal 1tb hdd's are kinda old and slow, then new 1-2tb hdd's could be faster too. if you wanted higher capacity, 2tb hdd's start around $60-90, so two of those in raid-0 would give you 4tb of space but might go over your budget a little bit.

i would use your 5tb external usb hdd for backups, and forget the extra cost and trouble of raid 1 or 10. raid 1 and 10 are for system up-time and not for automated backups. if something happens to the file or raid, the data will be gone. only an isolated/independent copy of the data can avoid those problems and be a true backup, such as the usb external hdd.

[Bill_Gehrke]

See my PM and give us information on your motherboard

Unfortunately PPBM7.com is semi-obsolete do to the death of Harm Millaard a little over a year ago.  The site is so complex that that I find it hard to update and just have created a new web site PPBM8.com publishing mostly my test result with newer technology with the same PPBM project.

[krisd20407581]

P8Z68-V | Motherboards | ASUS Global 

thanks!

[Bill_Gehrke]

Your P8Z68-V has these capabilities

2 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x16 or dual x8)

1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black) *¹

2 x PCIe x1

2 x PCI

*1: The PCIe x16_3 slot shares bandwidth with PCIe x1_1 slot, PCIe x1_2 slot, USB3_34 and eSATA. The PCIe x16_3 default setting is in x1 mode.

Do you have any cards plugged in to the PCIe slots beside the GTX 750 Ti?

[krisd20407581]

The GPU should be the only thing plugged in. I'd have to open it up to double check later today but the rest should be free

[RoninEdits]

before bill recommends a samsung 960 m.2 to you, i would like to point out that its overkill for your computer. not only for a 4 core cpu, but also your specific cpu with pcie gen 2.0. another alternative that's sort of a mid point between the samsung 850 and 960 is the western digital black m.2. its a little more expensive than the samsung 850 evo, and would also cost extra for a pcie m.2 adapter card.

[Bill_Gehrke · Accepted solution]

Ronin, this time you guessed wrong this gentleman has said he does not want that class of device.  I definitely agree  as his motherboard is a PCIe gen 2 board so it would be a waste of a great device, but what I was about to do is suggest a much less expensive slightly used solution alternative that may be of interest.  How about a solution that would give a boost almost 10 times any single hard drive like this as tested yesterday in my i7-2660K.

I will PM krisd tomorrow

                 

[RoninEdits]

doh, i was so sure. you always pop in to recommend a gtx 1060 or samsung 960.

[krisd20407581]

Yea I'm pretty sure that my CPU is bottlenecking a lot of things for me. I mean I figured that 8 virtual cores at 4.8GHz was plenty fast for a lot of things. Didn't really have $300+ to spend on a newer CPU, and the 2600k was decently up there in terms of benchmarks. I think I paid all of like $200 for the CPU and Mobo. I built this system for probably around $800-900. I financed and later paid it off  so thinking back, I probably should have sprung for more around the $1500 mark. I don't know how much disc setup can save me in this case. My CPU is almost always at 100% for intensive things like 4k editing or AE work or rendering out, but I just figured that that's how premiere works, by utilizing as much of the CPU as possible.

I don't really see any CPU upgrade options that don't involve me dropping $500+ and gutting the entire Mobo. So that might have to happen later down the road when I build my next PC. Even throwing in something like a 3770k, i dont think there would be a ton of improvement over a 2600k at 4.8GHz

[RoninEdits]

the i7-2600k at 4.8ghz is going to be somewhat decent. it may be more of the platform features that hold it back some, like slower data buses and ddr3 ram. there was a somewhat decent performance gain in the ivy bridge release, but i doubt its worth the cost, trouble, and time of switching to. after ivy bridge intel hit a brick wall for cpu core performance gains, they are very minor performance upgrades. so you will only see big cpu performance gains by going to 6+ cpu cores.

if your current storage was a bottleneck right now it wouldn't hit 100% as instead it would be waiting on the disk drives for data. faster drives can sometimes help with timeline playback, seeking, and scrubbing. if your media is h264 it will be somewhat difficult to work with as that codec is not edit friendly. so for any h264/h265 media you could get better performance by transcoding to, or using proxies with, dnxhr or dnxhd.

[krisd20407581]

@ronin

So basically there's not much to be gained by upping my footage/project drive speed right now? At least not if i'm still using the compressed h264 type video from the panasonic and sony mirrorless and smaller Canon codecs?

My main concern isn't so much just basic editing of normal 1080 and 4k video in premiere. I can usually be pretty comfortable with it. The main issue comes up when i'm trying to edit footage that has effects, resizing, cropping, overlays, or color work. With 4k especially it does drag in these cases. I'm trying to get into more light VFX type work and work more with AE, masking, motion graphics, that type of thing. Honestly I hate AE. I'm not sure if it's my specs or what, but its so slow that i can't even create cool things in it.

As soon as i start messing with plugins and particles and motion and stuff, im looking at abysmally slow playback...some times it's a fraction of a frame per second, which is unbearable. Not sure if i have it set up right or if i'm just expecting too much from it. I do only have four cores and 32GB memory.

Would it be reasonable to assume that i could see an increase in performance by using a faster drive just for my disk cache and preview files? I could see how this might help with things like effects, because it would be reading and writing to these files quite a lot it seems.

Bill -

Okay sounds good. Thank you for taking the time to work through this with me. Really appreciated.

[RoninEdits]

So basically there's not much to be gained by upping my footage/project drive speed right now? At least not if i'm still using the compressed h264 type video from the panasonic and sony mirrorless and smaller Canon codecs?

h264/265 codecs are a nightmare for cpu's. they are heavily compressed (like zip files) and cpu's have a difficult time uncompressing those codecs and rebuilding each frame. transcoding or proxies would help unburden the cpu alot, but faster drives could also help with multiple layers of footage like multi-cam and overlays.

The main issue comes up when i'm trying to edit footage that has effects, resizing, cropping, overlays, or color work.

most of those functions are suppose to be gpu accelerated, so it might be your gtx 750 ti being a bottleneck. you can use gpu-z  to see the gpu usage (gpu load %) while working in premiere to see if the video card is being overworked. for 4k color work it could quickly be overloaded. you might also watch the memory usage in gpu-z, if you have a 2gb card it could be running low with 4k media.

Honestly I hate AE. I'm not sure if it's my specs or what, but its so slow that i can't even create cool things in it. As soon as i start messing with plugins and particles and motion and stuff, im looking at abysmally slow playback...

AE has always had performance issues, it wasn't originally made to perform in real-time, like a NLE. its an entry level vfx platform, also largely used for motion graphics. they are slowly upgrading AE's performance to use more cpu cores and even the gpu some, but that has been a very slow process for them. i don't use AE, but the regulars in the AE forums always seem to recommend a ssd for cache. if cached playback is poor, it might be helpful with playback. AE often doesn't use more than 4 cores and your cores are already at 4.8ghz. if you are using gpu accelerated plugins for AE, those might perform better with a faster video card. you would have to check with the plugin's forums or website for recommendations. also, if you are bringing linked AE project clips into premiere for your timeline, you may want to bring in a rendered out video clip instead, or use the render and replace function in premiere.