Any reason to use SSD over HDD for render output?

Howdy!

I bought an 8tb external HDD to focus on VEAI upscales, however, I do have multiple SSD drives I could use.

Will I see any realistic benefit in terms of speed using SSD’s as opposed to HDD? be it where the source file, and output file will be located, or both (I recognize that general copy and pasting between drives is faster on SSD, but I’m not so sure about VEAI upscaling)

Any experience or theoretical knowledge would be appreciated :slight_smile: Thanks!

I think you’ll need a very fast ssd if you wanna save a video to single frames and put them together again to a video because it might take a long time to read thousands of images. In some cases the application might look like frozen! In terms of VE AI I haven’t noticed any big difference when saving to the same drive or another.

Hey, thanks :slight_smile:

I have actually managed to turn a 300gb VEAI image files folder on VirtualDub, but you’re right it did freeze for a while at first. Do you reckon the actual rendering of images-video would take longer on a HDD? or more so the reading itself (where the freeze is introduced when loading them into the program?) I I was mostly wondering about the upscale itself. I think I can put up with some freeze/lag on the external HDD when adding files to VD, if there is no real benefit in terms of speed.

I haven’t noticed a speed increase by working on the ssd yet, but I speeded up VE AI processing by starting a second instance of VE AI working on the second half of the video simoultanously!

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It depends on your output format.
If you export it as TIFF, then “YES” you will see big improvement if your use fast drive such as NVMe.
If you export in MP4, then I doubt you will notice any difference.

I am trialing the software on SSD, but I actually intend to move to mechanical drives for the actual processing. My plan is to input from video and output to images.

I expect to see very little difference when the input/output is video as the vast majority of time is spent encoding video in memory. The reads are largely sequential so the OS will be able to cache data ahead of its use.

If you’re batch processing hundreds of files as I intend to, it’s going to eat through a significant chunk of a SSDs design life. A HDD will happily take years of such abuse.

You could use the Software Primo Cache for Caching the HDD with an SSD (instandly also).

Instandly means that you can setup PrimoCache to load the file instandly to the ssd instead after a while.

I do that with my Picture Archive (tiff files) and Primo Cache makes a big difference.