Question Premiere Pro: Scratch Disks, NVMe SSD in a 2012 Mobo?

[dsc106]

Hi,

Sorry, it's been a while since I built my last system. I have a 2012 Asus Rampage Extreme IV (running a 2nd Gen Core i7 Sandy Bridge Extreme 6-Core):

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/RAMPAGE_IV_EXTREME/

I believe all my shorter black PCI-E slots are used up (these would be the 1x and 4x, slots yes?) Leaving the 16x RED ones intended for GPUs and 4x Crossfire or what not open.

I'd like to install (I think??) a Samsung 970 evo (or pro, if it's worth it?) m.2 SSD:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07C8Y31G1/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

And I believe I need a PCI-E to M.2 Adaptor?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N78XZCH/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A32S73DAZ970X4&psc=1

As well, I'd like to replace a very old 512gb SSD from 2010 with a new SATA based Samsung 860 EVO (or pro, if its worth it?):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078DPCY3T/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

My questions are as follows:

I am a video editor using Adobe Premiere Pro CC. As I begin to venture into more 4K work, and more VERY large projects (i.e. 50+ hours of h.264 HD footage, mixed with hours of 4K footage, taking about 500-750gb of HDD space) I am wondering about the move to an SSD based edit workflow.

1. For the NVME M.2 drive, is this technically possible, or problematic, in my system? What Adaptor or BIOS settings would I need for a larger 16x slot intended for GPU?

2. Will I see benefit from moving BOTH my Scratch Disk / Media Cache disk to SSD, or only my scratch disk, with minimal impact for having my media files on HDD? I need to clarify this question: most videos I see focus on the ability to click play and playback a 4K file, or, how many simultaneous streams of such. This is not what I am primarily interested in performance wise if I were to move my MEDIA drive to a large SSD. What I am interested in is how fast the program would respond to SEEK TIMES across a HUGE, 500-750gb video project on a 10-15 minute timeline which contains 350+ flips shot over the course of 9-12 months, all spread out on the HDD, running back to back in the timeline. (I will be traveling internationally over the year, capturing a ton of video for documentary). Will moving to SSD make my performance notably snappier in Premiere for these large files if it does not have to access an HDD? Do you see how this is different than a playback stream question? My very large projects with media/footage stored on HDDs (good, fast HDDs like the WD black or HGST Ultra) tend to get sluggish and laggy in Premiere today.

3. If I get ONE nvme drive and ONE sata based drive, due to budget reasons, which drive should get what? Should Media Cache / Scratch Disk receive the faster NVMe Drive, or should the media drive receive this? The secondary priority would get the cheaper SATA SSD.

4. Is the PRO worth it over the EVO? I understand the Pro may last longer, but I also understand the EVO may last so long as to negate this benefit and that for the money difference, I could buy a new, better, faster SSD by the time the EVO dies in a decade or so from all the read/write?

Thank you for the help.

As well, feel free to offer up any suggestions on an alternative Edit SSD configuration, alt brands, or any other thoughts which may be helpful to optimizing my Large Project / 4K Video Edit rig with SSDs.

Other Notes:
- I have an 840 Pro 1TB SSD as my System Boot
- I have 50gb+ of HDD storage. A potential Media/Footage drive would be to store just my primary large project on the SSD to optimize speed, small side projects and backups would remain on the HDDs.
- I know my processor is getting old, but still holding up well. I plan to upgrade my CPU/Mobo within the next 2 years, probably next year with Ice Lake. This should assist with h.265 4K more at that time.
- GPU is GTX 1080 TI. I believe my specs should show up in my signature.

Much thanks!!

 

[Billy Tallis]

Almost any SSD that's large enough to hold your projects will be far faster than any single hard drive, with sequential access speeds a minimum of 2-3x faster, and random access speeds hundreds of times faster. You should treat your hard drive as archive storage, and keep all your working files on SSDs. From the SSD's perspective, seeking around in an editor with many clips open is actually pretty similar to playing back many clips simultaneously; in each case you're sequentially reading large blocks (tens of MBs) from numerous files at at time. Your video editing will be doing very little small-block (eg 4kB) random IO.

You can definitely rule out MLC SATA drives, because their extra write endurance isn't needed, and the SATA bottleneck means they cannot provide any meaningful performance advantage over TLC drives.

You should have no trouble using a NVMe SSD as a secondary drive. Since you're limited to PCIe 2.0 on that system, you won't be able to get more than 2GB/s out of any one SSD, and that means you again won't be able to see much if any performance advantage for a MLC drive over a nice fast TLC drive. So you definitely shouldn't get anything more expensive than a 1TB 970 EVO (Plus), and you probably wouldn't notice the difference between that and the much cheaper 1TB HP EX920. The EX920 is currently going for $160 on Newegg, which is a steal and almost certainly worth the small premium over a SATA SSD.

So I recommend getting a nice cheap 1TB NVMe SSD and using that for all your editing and as the editor's scratch disk. Keep the 840 Pro as your boot drive, and keep the hard drives for your archives and backups.

 

[dsc106]

Thank you for this thorough response Billy!

I thought my motherboard was PCIe 3.0 though? Wouldn't that make the faster NVMe drive a better choice? Did that M.2 Adapter I linked look good?

Regarding the MLC vs TLC drives, for a Scratch Disk / Media Cache there are a lot of files written with Premiere. Like, a lot. Does this make a difference in your assessment?

As well, are you recommending to simply stay away from SATA SSDs for this then? Both Media drive, and Scratch Disk drive? If one had to be a SATA, which would you choose?

Again - THANK YOU!

 

[Insert_Nickname]

You should have no trouble using a NVMe SSD as a secondary drive. Since you're limited to PCIe 2.0 on that system, you won't be able to get more than 2GB/s out of any one SSD, and that means you again won't be able to see much if any performance advantage for a MLC drive over a nice fast TLC drive. So you definitely shouldn't get anything more expensive than a 1TB 970 EVO (Plus), and you probably wouldn't notice the difference between that and the much cheaper 1TB HP EX920. The EX920 is currently going for $160 on Newegg, which is a steal and almost certainly worth the small premium over a SATA SSD.

So I recommend getting a nice cheap 1TB NVMe SSD and using that for all your editing and as the editor's scratch disk. Keep the 840 Pro as your boot drive, and keep the hard drives for your archives and backups.

I agree with Billy here. If you're planning on eventually upgrading your system, it can always be reused. Perhaps in conjunction with a small NVMe drive for boot?

I thought my motherboard was PCIe 3.0 though? Wouldn't that make the faster NVMe drive a better choice? Did that M.2 Adapter I linked look good?

It is. But like all X79 boards, only when used with an Ivy Bridge E CPU. Sandy's PCIe controller isn't PCIe 3.0 compliant.

I'd stay away from the absolute cheapest PCIe to M.2 adaptors, but other then that anything will do really.

Regarding the MLC vs TLC drives, for a Scratch Disk / Media Cache there are a lot of files written with Premiere. Like, a lot. Does this make a difference in your assessment?

The consumer 1TB 64L TLC Samsung drives are already rated for 600TBW. That is 600 Terabytes written. It's an awful lot of data. I doubt any type of consumer workload will ever reach that in any reasonable time frame.

Just to put it in perspective, you can fill the drive completely every day for 600 days. Or just about 1 2/3rds year. If you need more, it's time to look at enterprise level gear.

As well, are you recommending to simply stay away from SATA SSDs for this then? Both Media drive, and Scratch Disk drive? If one had to be a SATA, which would you choose?

There isn't anything inherently wrong with SATA drives, but the interface does provide a hard limit on performance. You can see it clearly with the brand new 860QVOs. Even the lowest QLC NAND is fast enough to saturate the interface.

The short version? Any mainstream SATA drive will do, so you pick the cheapest at the time. The 860EVO and MX500 are very decent drives.

There is also the problem of booting from an NVMe drive. Unless you mod the UEFI, your board can't boot from such. For out-of-box support, you need either a Z97 (mainstream), X99 (HEDT) chipset or newer.

 

[Billy Tallis]

I thought my motherboard was PCIe 3.0 though?

You mentioned Sandy Bridge and I missed the fact that this is Sandy Bridge-E in an LGA2011 socket, rather than the mainstream SNB. So yes, you will probably be able to get PCIe 3 speeds working on at least some slots with PCIe lanes that are coming off the CPU directly, but not through the X79 chipset. The does make NVMe slightly more appealing, but there won't be many occasions where 3-3.5GB/s instead of 2GB/s will make a noticeable difference.

I don't think you need separate media and scratch drives, unless it's a matter of needing more than 1TB if you use one drive for both purposes. Don't worry about the write volume; unless you work really long days and keep your drives full and busy with writes the entire time you're using the machine, any TLC drive will last for years.

 

[dsc106]

Thanks a bunch! This makes sense.

I need more space for sure. I’d need 2TB for media and a minimum of 512gb for scratch disk and cache, so probably 1 TB.

1. Could my system handle 2 NVMe drives?

2. do they make a dual adaptor to use 2 m.2 drives in one PCI slot?

3. For cost or system reasons, If I had to choose nvme for one (media storage vs scratch) and one SATA for the other, which would you keep on the separate drives?

Again, since I really need the additional space it makes sense to also follow the best practices guide of a separate drive for media storage and scratch (though I understand it is no longer strictly necessary with how fast these drives are, if storage requirements were a non issue).

Thank you again,

 

[Fernando 1]

1. For the NVME M.2 drive, is this technically possible, or problematic, in my system?

It is not only technically possible, the performance boost is worth the efforts and the money for the NVMe SSD.
You will get the best benefit, if you configurate the NVMe SSD as bootable system drive and install the OS onto it in UEFI mode. This requires the presence of an NVMe EFI module within the BIOS, but it is not a big problem to add it into the BIOS. >Here< is the guide about how to do it.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

2. do they make a dual adaptor to use 2 m.2 drives in one PCI slot?

You can use as many as there are available adaptor compatible slots. Just keep an eye on the 3.3V supply on your PSU.

Unfortunately multiple-M.2-per-slot adaptors require PCIe bifurcation support, which aren't available on most consumer boards.

 

[dsc106]

Awesome. So I’ll confirm ports I have open but I should have two 16x slots open unused from crossfire.

So perhaps I’ll do 1 HP 1tb m.2 drive for the scratch drive $160, and then a $500 970 evo 2TB for my media/project drive?

What adaptor for pci to m2 would you recommend (I know you said anything that’s not absolute cheapest - but what is the price point for a good one?).

 

[Insert_Nickname]

What adaptor for pci to m2 would you recommend (I know you said anything that’s not absolute cheapest - but what is the price point for a good one?).

Unfortunately, I can't help too much with specifics, unless you're in Europe. I simply don't know what's available in the US.

Generally, I'd go with something with a known brand name. The cheaper Chinese no-name ones might have various issues due to poor quality PCB and iffy tracing.

If everything else fails, you can check customer reviews. It's not foolproof, but people tend to be verbose when they have problems with something.

 

[dsc106]

Shoot. Well I went to purchase and all the prices went up. $50 more for the 2TB 970 evo, and the HP 1tb appears to be gone now.

Drat.

How often do these sales occur?