SSD v RAMDISK

petersmart

petersmart

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I have just put together a new i7 3770 PC and am thinking of putting in a 128Gb SSB (possibly Samsung 830 128Gb) but I have a few questions which maybe someone on here can help me with.

I'm running XP Pro and have 6 HDDs (3x2Tb and 3 others) with a combined total of just under 8TB and a DVD re-writer and A Blu-Ray re-writer.

I have an i7 3770 CPU on an AsRock B75 Pro3-M board with 3 sata 3 connectors and 5 sata 2 connectors.

At the moment all the HDDs are sata 2.

I have 8Gb of DDr3 1330 memory.

I also have 4 partitions all running XP Pro to give me 4 (computers) on a single drive all dedicated to seperate things: Surfing, Fims, Photos and Music.

Now on the FILM partition I have created a Ramdisk of 4Gb using the memory XP Pro can't use and can load various things onto this Disk - Program Files, DVD files (as long as they're less than about 3.4GB) and X-Vid files)

Everything on this disk runs at lightning speed - using a File shredder (which overwrites a file twice) a 3.5 GB file is deleted in approx 10 secs as opposed to several minutes on a normal HDD and rendering a DVD into X-Vid using a two part process completes in approx 3-4 times faster than on a HDD.

Startup times are increased due to the Ramdisk but normal start up times were about 20 secs (I have gutted XP Pro with NLite).

What I'd like to know is will an SSD give me the same times as the Ramdisk does on my programs or is it better buying more memory and creating a larger Ramdisk?

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neil_g said:
a ramdisk would be faster, however initial boot would be much slower, using the ram for the disk could mean you end up paging more slowing the system down etc.
Click to expand...

I don't use pagefiles and the Ramdisk doesn't either - it just loads from an image file at start and then loads everything on itself to the same image file at closedown.

When it finishes rendering a film I simply move it from the Ramdisk onto one of the ordinary HDDs.

And a slower start doesn't really bother me either since I have another, slower PC for ordinary usage while my i7 is working on other stuff.

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so essentially you just copy a video to it temporarily to play the video?

any reason for that (running it from the mechanical disk shouldnt have a performance issue).

edit - ah misread, youre encoding an xvid from dvd
 
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im wondering whether the heavy partitioning is slowing the OS drive down, i encode blurays to mkv on a mechanical 1tb disk and the biggest issue is maxing out the i7 CPU.

i think we may have discussed it before (?) but is there a need to have that many OS?
 
neil_g said:
so essentially you just copy a video to it temporarily to play the video?

any reason for that (running it from the mechanical disk shouldnt have a performance issue).

edit - ah misread, youre encoding an xvid from dvd
Click to expand...

That's right - I encode to X-vid then usually burn to a DVD where I can usually get 6 full length feature films or proportionally more episodes if they're a series eg, NCIS etc.

I can then watch them on an ordinary TV, or indeed, on my monitor.

But I also can do this with my photo editing when batch processing several hundred photos through Neat Image etc.

Since I have the equivalent of 4 "computers" on a single HDD I can create Ramdisks on all of them if I want.

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neil_g said:
im wondering whether the heavy partitioning is slowing the OS drive down, i encode blurays to mkv on a mechanical 1tb disk and the biggest issue is maxing out the i7 CPU.

i think we may have discussed it before (?) but is there a need to have that many OS?
Click to expand...

By having different partitions for different purposes I find that the "computers" all run as fast as possible.

So far the only time the i7 maxes out is if I'm rendering more than 4 or 5 films or episodes simultaneously then it maxes at 100% all the time, BUT the pagefile stays well below it's limit.

But I can render up to 24 films at a time with no problems except the time it takes.

And if I'm doing that I usually start them all going and simply go to bed to let it run all night - even an i7 is not going to finish all that in a few hours - lol.

But most times, using Windows Task Manager, the i7 is rarely working above 1-2% like most PCs and the only times the 8 threads are all being used is in rendering.

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You need to seriously rethink how all this works. You are optimising the wrong parts of the system at the expense of others in the mistaken belief it will speed things up. Disk I/O is NOT a major overhead on video encoding. Moving to a modern 64bit OS and a single machine install would be a good start.

BTW: the best way to securely delete a RAM disk is to turn the power off. It happens instantaneously ;)
 
arad85 said:
You need to seriously rethink how all this works. You are optimising the wrong parts of the system at the expense of others in the mistaken belief it will speed things up. Disk I/O is NOT a major overhead on video encoding. Moving to a modern 64bit OS and a single machine install would be a good start.

BTW: the best way to securely delete a RAM disk is to turn the power off. It happens instantaneously ;)
Click to expand...

agreed, the need for 4 separate machines these days is completely unnecessary.
 
arad85 said:
You need to seriously rethink how all this works. You are optimising the wrong parts of the system at the expense of others in the mistaken belief it will speed things up. Disk I/O is NOT a major overhead on video encoding. Moving to a modern 64bit OS and a single machine install would be a good start.

BTW: the best way to securely delete a RAM disk is to turn the power off. It happens instantaneously ;)
Click to expand...

Well I have to disagree about the I/O part - I have already tried out various drives etc when encoding and the difference is vast compared to the Ramdisk - for example analysing an episode of "Chancer" using DVDx 3.2 and X-Vid codec 1.2.2 just using the HDDs gives a speed of approx 67 Frames/sec - using the same setup on the Ramdisk gives a speed of 110 frames/sec.

And I didn't want to delete the DVD files on the Ramdisk, I was trying out the speed.

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neil_g said:
agreed, the need for 4 separate machines these days is completely unnecessary.
Click to expand...

Well I use them to keep my desktop uncluttered and easy to work on - also I can assign just the HDDs associated with each "computer" to that computer and turn off all the others - so when using the film "computer" all I have showing in My Computer are the HDDs for films - much easier to work with.

I have been using this system for about a year now and it works perfectly for me.

The System disk I have created using Nlite allows me to install a fresh partition in about 13 minutes totally automatically with all drivers loaded and the desktop already set to 1024 x 768 px and a load of other things also setup the way I like them.

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petersmart said:
Well I have to disagree about the I/O part - I have already tried out various drives etc when encoding and the difference is vast compared to the Ramdisk - for example analysing an episode of "Chancer" using DVDx 3.2 and X-Vid codec 1.2.2 just using the HDDs gives a speed of approx 67 Frames/sec - using the same setup on the Ramdisk gives a speed of 110 frames/sec..
Click to expand...
And if you were using a modern OS, you might find that it was all cached in memory anyway hiding the need to manually configure the RAM disk in the first place... ;)
 
i would say for rendering purposes an SSD drive would not slow the process down
if you look at your figures 110 frames a second is just over 4x real time ( 25fps real time ) i would have thought even a slow hard drive would be able to manage that sort of data rate easily
maybe the bottleneck is elsewhere ??

i know if i render a home grown dvd / slideshow to dvd my average render speed is 7/8x realtime which would be around 200fps going to an SSD drive

rendering bluray is an entirely different story though rendering speeds are about .5 real time on a good day :(
 
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arad85 said:
And if you were using a modern OS, you might find that it was all cached in memory anyway hiding the need to manually configure the RAM disk in the first place... ;)
Click to expand...

Well I have a copy of Win 7 (64 bits) so am going to give that a try on a smaller HD and see how it goes.

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cosmicma said:
i would say for rendering purposes an SSD drive would not slow the process down
if you look at your figures 110 frames a second is just over 4x real time ( 25fps real time ) i would have thought even a slow hard drive would be able to manage that sort of data rate easily
maybe the bottleneck is elsewhere ??

i know if i render a home grown dvd / slideshow to dvd my average render speed is 7/8x realtime which would be around 200fps going to an SSD drive

rendering bluray is an entirely different story though rendering speeds are about .5 real time on a good day :(
Click to expand...

Well rendering to X-Vid or Div-X has always been a slow process no matter what PC I have done it on and 4x is in fact very good.

That is when analysing the film before applying the analysis to each frame which is the second part of the process which is always slower.

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I don't see how keeping 4 installs tidy is any different to keeping 1 install tidy to be honest. It's a completely inefficient use of disk space and time if you want to do something else.

As Andrew said modern os are much more efficient. But I'm starting to seriously wonder if the partitions are causing the bottleneck.
 
I tend to use x264 for encodes which is threaded. Xvid and Divx aren't generally coded to be threaded (certainly not if done with ffmpeg which is used in quite a lot of codec systems). Having said that, I don't have any backwards compatibility to worry about as all my renders are PCs or tablets.

I also only tend to work with HD files but x264 encodes of SD material can reach close to 300fps here on the first pass (from a mechanical drive). The disk meter hardly moves off idle (but I'm generally only reading one file at a time, perhaps 2).
 
neil_g said:
I don't see how keeping 4 installs tidy is any different to keeping 1 install tidy to be honest. It's a completely inefficient use of disk space and time if you want to do something else.

As Andrew said modern os are much more efficient. But I'm starting to seriously wonder if the partitions are causing the bottleneck.
Click to expand...

Well I can't see how and even before I started using partitions rendering x-vid or div-x was a very slow business.

And which is the more inefficient - using a 500Gb Hd to run everything on with a vast waste of space (I don't play games) and much more programs running in the BG or using partitions?

And 264 cannot (as far as I'm aware) be used on DVD players whereas X-Vid and Div-X are supported on most nowadays.

I should mention that I encode X-Vid using the highdef setting and set the size to 728x576.

At lower sizes and resolutions the encoding process is, of course, much faster, but I get a good compromise between filesize and quality with my settings - just over 1Gb for a 2 hour action film and about 350MG for a 45 min episode of a serial eg 24.

When played back on my TV they look as good as a DVD and only a direct comparison would show the difference in a slightly softer look, but virtually no pixellation or artefacts.

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