To add yet another perspective to the SSD vs HDD discussion ...
Example of Why Hard Drive Speed Doesn't Matter in a Media Workflow
Here's a perfect example: This very minute I can't do any real work -- and it will probably be 2-3 hours before I can do anything significant. (If anybody online ever wonders why I post so much, in so many places, this is why. I have a lot of downtime, because I wait around on computers. Sometimes it's on encoding, sometimes it's on janitorial tasks.) I've completely filled every computer on site with a mix of streaming and HD H.264 video projects, and it's time to play "musical hard drives". Everything must be off-loaded from the workstations onto the local file servers. Some files even have to be swapped between servers, because of archive policy. Even with 1Gb (gigabit) connections, using the best switches + wires (none of that cheap bulk-grade crap), the hard drives are faster than the connection between systems.
Can this be fixed? Well, technically, yes. Reasonably, no! It would require upgrading everything to 10Gb or fiber LAN, which would run well into tens of thousands of dollars in hardware to setup up multiple switches, fit each system with a card, and wire it. And even then, such hardware only works with certain server/computer configurations. That's just not feasible. That's quite literally datacenter-grade hardware, possibly broadcast-grade hardware (for some of the higher end facilities, like cable news networks). For us mere mortals, it's as realistic as buying a mansion and a yacht.
Browse the 10Gbps products from
Newegg, to see pricing:
- 10Gb network cards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/10Gbps-network-cards
- 10Gb switches:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/10-gigabit-switches
All I can do is wait --- and it's not because of the hard drives being slow. It's everything else that causes the bottlenecks.
Even when it's high grade SATA workstations, the drives are not being used at full speed capacity -- i.e, data is not being read continuously. The computer's CPU and RAM request data as needed, and when you're processing videos.
Performance Benefits of SSD
The real benefit to high speed drives is when lots of small files (or database queries) are being requested by multiple sources. This is referred to as "disk I/O" and is a common tell when distinguishing a good web host from an inferior/bad one.
However, that's already achieved with HDD solutions, such as 15k SAS or SCSI in a RAID, and by using ample RAM with decent caching.
Non-Performance Benefits of SSD
The other non-performance benefit of SSD is a lack of noise (nothing spinning), and supposedly a lack of fragmentation issues (i.e, read delays due to fragmentation, as found on HDDs). The drives are small, lighter, cooler, and consumer less power.
SSD is the future, but not until lifespan (limited writes) can be re-worked, and costs significantly lower to at least competitive pricing ranges. Maybe not as cheap as HDD, but at least no more than 2x the cost.
Note:
Quote:
the CPU and RAM will spend most of their time waiting for the hard drive whenever you first open a program or begin a new task
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This is most definitely true.
However, once the program has loaded itself into memory, the benefit of the SSD is largely ended at the workstation level. The actual task itself, for which the software was opened, will reverse the role of CPU/RAM and HDD, in terms of which one becomes a bottleneck.
An exception to this rule may be gluttonous video games, which are constantly calling up new maps and data for the players. However, I would suggest some of this is based on poor coding, which lacks decent caching as found pretty much everywhere else in the computing industry. I've seen video games barf themselves trying to load video clips, whereas a good NLE can render a preview effortlessly. The common blame is "video playback is greedy", and while there is truth to that, it doesn't necessarily have to choke a system.
If your workstations is mostly used for something automated, like creating thumbnails of photos, SSD would improve performance. But those are very narrow scenarios, and not the most common workflow for users.
3D modeling -- be it for CAD/architecture, gaming or movie/TV graphics -- may or may not benefit from SSD. Again, it really depends on what you're doing. How big and complex is the 3D model. Sometimes funds are better spent on larger CPU and RAM here, and 15K SAS RAID will suffice for storage write/read speed.
Example of an SSD Myth / Misinformation:
I get rather annoyed by myths and misinformation. I'd call this a misdirect:
Quote:
if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost
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That's quoted from an article I saw online. When you're using "multiple applications", some of them tend to be idle in RAM. For example, I have Outlook open, and it's doing nothing, minimized. There's several system tray programs running in RAM, but I/O performance is zero or near-zero. If you were running several programs at once, and both of them needed heavy-handed I/O, then by all likelihood both tasks would be fighting over RAM space and CPU time. So again, the bottleneck ends up NOT being the drive!
Unless you're Sally the soccer mom, your computer generally has more than one hard drive -- especially those cheap USB2 externals. So when you're downloading files to drive D, drive C is not affected by I/O. And if drive D is an external USB drive, you're pulling at the CPU because USB drives all run through CPU cycles. Firewire and eSATA, of course, do not access via CPU.
Quotes like that are misleading at best, lies at worst.
SSD as demonstrated by CF or SD cards:
Cameras shoot lots of tiny files, which are initially stored in onboard RAM, processed by the CPU, then offloaded to the storage card. This is a great example of "lots of small files" being moved at a rapid pace. Consider my high-end Nikon DSLRs, like a
D3 or
D3s. Those shoot 2MB JPEG to 20MB RAW images, and then pass them quickly from RAM to CF. Speed is an issue when I start to run the shutter at 7fps or 9fps.
When you think of a computer, consider this: Are you "shooting" at 9fps, or are you working at a more human-like speed of 1fps (one thing at a time)? In most cases, you'll find yourself in the latter category. And that, in turn, will somewhat help you consider SSD vs hard drive.