SSD Overhead and Performance

[ronbo613]

I've been experiencing some unusual video rendering problems and have noticed that the 128G Samsung 830 SSD in my Win7 64 bit system has 30G empty. My question is how much overhead is needed on an SSD before there are performance issues?

I have my programs on the SSD and all the scratch discs and temp folders on another drive, a WD 1TB RE4, but the Adobe Premiere CS4 software apparently still writes some temp files to the SSD, I don't know exactly how much. The video file being rendered is about 4G, so any temp files will not be exactly small.

Could I have a problem or am I just looking for an excuse to buy a new SSD like a 256G Crucial MX 100 or Samsung 250G EVO?

 

[Piotrsama]

Might be a configuration issue.
Have you properly optimized the OS?

http://www.disk-partition.com/kb/tips-ssd-optimization-windows7-1.html

 

[Elixer]

I've been experiencing some unusual video rendering problems and have noticed that the 128G Samsung 830 SSD in my Win7 64 bit system has 30G empty. My question is how much overhead is needed on an SSD before there are performance issues?

It is best to leave at least 15% always free, or things start to get really slow as it fills to capacity.
We don't know if it is SSD related, until you explain the rendering problem you are having.

 

[ronbo613]

I optimized the SSD when I installed it. It's the second SSD for the system and haven't had any issues with it. I also used the Samsung SSD Magician utility to optimize the system and to periodically check the drive. That being said, I still could have some kind of issue with the SSD.

I'm trying to render a video made with Premiere CS4 made with mostly .MP4 clips from GoPro cameras, one .MTS clip from a Panasonic Lumix camera and one .PSD still image. When trying to render a high quality MP4 video, the Adobe Media Encoder stops encoding at about 4G file size. I've removed the still image and .MTS file but the encoding still stops at 4G. If I split the video project in half, both halves will encode perfectly. I put the two halves together in Vegas Pro 9.0 and it won't render the video either, so there is something with my computer that is choking on the 4G file limit.

All my hard drives and SSD boot drive are NTFS. The OS is Windows 7 64 bit with 16G RAM and i7 2.8 CPU. I've transferred files much larger than 4G between my hard drives without issue. My programs are on the 128G SSD and the Adobe scratch discs and temp files are on a separate 1TB WD RE4 "work" drive with over 150G of free space. I haven't any problems with any video projects, or any other photo or graphics job, until I tried to make a video larger than 4G. I clear the %temp% files on the SSD before rendering but that didn't help.

Because I'm having the exact same problem with two different video editing programs and haven't had any problems with the software to this point, I'm thinking there is something with my system that is not right but I'm having a bit of difficulty trying to figure out what it is. The 4G figure makes me think it has to do with the file system, but if all the drives are NTFS, how can that be?

 

[VirtualLarry]

What is the container format you are using for your source and destination video clips?

AVI containers are limited to 4GB, I believe.

Have you tried rendering to an MKV?

 

[ronbo613]

What is the container format you are using for your source and destination video clips?

I think everything is some flavor of MPEG-4, not sure about the .MTS. The exported video is Main Concept H.264 which is rendered as an .m4v video file and .aac audio file that is muxxed to .MP4. The Adobe Media Encoder has plenty of options as long as you use one of the provided video codecs, I don't think it will render an MKV file. I don't use AVI if I can help it, the files are too large and trying to edit it is a real pain. Everything these days seems to use .MP4.

I have some analog video captures that are AVI, I have to figure out what the deal is with my system because those files are huge and producing files over 4G will be common.

 

[Elixer]

Because I'm having the exact same problem with two different video editing programs and haven't had any problems with the software to this point, I'm thinking there is something with my system that is not right but I'm having a bit of difficulty trying to figure out what it is. The 4G figure makes me think it has to do with the file system, but if all the drives are NTFS, how can that be?

Open up task manager, and while you are writing the file, look what it is showing you for RAM.

It is possible that you are using lots of VM (pagefile) (which I assume is on the SSD), and that could be leaving you with even less space.

If the program is aborting out, then, I would test by writing the same file to HD, and see if it still does it.
Also, check event viewer, for other errors/warning that it may show.

 

[ronbo613]

It is possible that you are using lots of VM (pagefile) (which I assume is on the SSD), and that could be leaving you with even less space.

The pagefile is on the SSD and is set at 8GB. I have 16GB of RAM so there should be enough memory, but at this point I am looking at every possibility.

If the program is aborting out, then, I would test by writing the same file to HD, and see if it still does it.

My programs are on the SSD and I have all the scratch discs and project folders on a separate 7200rpm hard drive. All the rendered project save files are here as well.

I'm thinking I might use a saved system image to a 7200rpm hard drive and take the SSD out of the loop and see what happens.

Thanks for all the suggestions, this problem has got me a bit baffled so I appreciate the input.