Help on relating storage usage scenario to benchmarks: advice on laptop responsiveness & video editi

Hi there wonderful community, have done research on SSD's performance/ features, read benchmarks as well, came here looking for additional input to understand my usage.

May I know under the scenarios below which portion of benchmarks should I be looking at:

1) Overall system responsiveness (very important to me): boot ups, browser launching, MS office file opening/ operation
- 4K read, write?

2) Video editing : importing approximately 10 2-5minutes (1GB each) videos into Premier Pro, editing smoothness/ previews
- sequential read?
- is SSD+HDD 2 drive setup sufficient or will 3 drive setup be significantly better?

3) Exporting 4minutes 1080p video downscaled from 4k file
- sequential write?
- will this scenario fills up Intel 600p cache?

4) Copying 64GB files from USB 3.0 SD card reader
- sequential write?
- pretty sure this will fills up Intel 600p cache, right?


Basically that sums up my computing. Currently using a life-torturing 1TB 7200rpm HDD and planning to use the 2 free m.2 slots (w/ pcie support):

Samsung 850 EVO: consistency, performance & power consumption
- will a 180GB monthly read/write exceed its endurance?
- for it to last 6-7 years how much read/write can be used per day?

Samsung 960 EVO: most expensive, best performance
- which scenario will I be experiencing significant difference with SATA III

Intel 600p - oddball, high seq read, 4k write, longer endurance than 850EVO but lower 4k read...
- which scenario will it be different from SATA III
- is understanding of cache fill-ups correct in usage (3), (4)?
- once cache fills up does that mean the whole system will suffer from laggy performance?

Budget depends but ideally £120 (250GB 960 EVO equivalent), which kind of purchase will you recommend? Maybe a dual SSD for raid or single SATAIII will do?

Thank you in advance!

 

Ignore BM's and portions of benchmarks too.

1) Any quality MLC 2.5", 1TB or larger SSD with 33% or more OP'ing will give you sustained, over time, overall system responsiveness.

2) How long are you editing the videos for? If anything longer than ~10 minutes or so of actual use of the storage subsystem, then having the storage subsystem be 100% solid state will make the most impact. Using programs across an SSD and a HDD is effectively using the SSD at the HDD level...

Advice: forget about multi-drive setups for your uses - a single SSD of 1TB or more is highly recommended.

3) Lose all hope of having any consistent and sustained performance from any drive with 'pseudo-SLC' cache - the best you can hope for is that the performance doesn't plummet (and it will) to at or below your current HDD levels.

4) See #3 above...

Assuming you have a current platform of at least an i7 QC with minimum 16GB of RAM or more in a chassis that doesn't throttle... the SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB SSD is what I would recommend (with 33% OP'ing and a clean install of your O/S - hopefully; Win10Pro or better).

If your platform is significantly less than my assumption above? Sell what you have and get something in the i7 QC range or better.

The storage subsystem is the least of your worries in your workflows as outlined above - the base platform has to be capable of handling the workflow/workload first; then you can think of increasing snappiness with an SSD.

The M.2 slots you have I would leave empty - unless they drives you install there will be properly cooled (again: I'm assuming this is a notebook). If they're not designed to draw the heat from the M.2 drives; not only will your SSD's throttle to below HDD levels - they'll most likely throttle other components in your system too.

For the reasons above; the 960 EVO would be far from my first choice in your setup - regardless of what BM 'scores' may suggest.

The biggest reason is the TBW rating on them: 100TB for the 256GB 960 EVO, 75TB for the 256GB 950 EVO and 144TB for the 600p.

Don't forget about something called WA (write amplification) which effectively doubles, triples or otherwise increases the writes done to the drive by the host system by an order of magnitude over what you may think you're writing to the drive.

Also, consider that 180GB of 4K Random R/W's is far harder on an SSD than 180GB of mere sequential read/writes. And... most writes to an SSD are random 4K R/W's... at least for one used with any O/S and/or programs.

If you really want 6-7 years with consistent, responsive and usable performance (let alone reliability...) - forget your current options and opt for a real SSD (MLC, 2.5") with minimum 25% OP'ing instead (yeah; I still recommend 33% OP'ing for the best balance between sustained performance vs. lost capacity).

Hope this helps.


Good luck.

 

As an aside: If storage performance really was an issue for you (it's not - you're looking for more 'snappiness'...), then grab a new platform along with up to 20x 600p drives and create a bootable Windows array (RAID0) like so:

See:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3199...le-crazy-raid-configurations-for-a-price.html

With 8 Intel drives, 13GB/s is achievable today. With 20 Intel drives 128GB/s is what is theoretically possible.

As I've stated before in my post above; storage issues are not your main problem (even if it seems like it is right now with a 'pokey' 7.2K drive).

But if you have a real problem; there is a usually a hammer big enough to fix it.

 

@tilleroftheearth Thank you so much for the reply! FYI, I'm using i7 QC, 8GB RAM (plan to upgrade that soon, but monitored and is not the bottleneck of my system performance), heat management is perfect.

Well, the thing is every time I boot the system it would take at least 2.5 minutes to be fully operational; every time I launch a simple application (Firefox for example), it would take another half a minute and I don't understand why.

Sure, I will look into higher capacity SSD, thanks for the advice. Cheers.

 

You're welcome and thanks for the additional info.

I hope your QC i7 isn't an 'U' model?

Trying to monitor your RAM needs with an insufficient amount of RAM installed is counterproductive. Windows is dynamically adjusting how much physical RAM is present and used and making use of the pagefile to compensate (which really brings down to a crawl).

When you have as much RAM as the O/S can use for itself, other background programs and for the main program you're currently using - then you'll have the fastest system possible (because the storage subsystem isn't being used...). For lighter workloads and one or two demanding tasks (concurrently), that capacity is 16GB of the fastest RAM you can afford. More is not overkill either, with video editing...

I know 2.5 minutes seems a long time for the system to be fully operational from a cold boot - but in the overall scheme of things, it is just a small %age of the time you'll spend using the system, for that session, correct?

Firefox taking another half minute to load I've seen happen with SSD based platforms too... which is why I don't use FF.

Save your $$$$ for the biggest SSD you can afford. The jump will then be worth it.

If you get what you can now (a puny, ~256GB SSD), you'll regret it almost immediately with your workloads - even if the system will boot 10x faster...

What i7 QC do you have? If you can put 32GB of RAM into your system... after the intial boot up (which will be sped up too with more RAM...) the storage subsystem performance (or lack thereof) can be mostly ignored.

Are you able to short stroke your HDD?

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...tachi-7k500-benchmark-setup-specifics.442289/

Don't forget the power of defragging your HDD (and SSD too...) on a regular schedule.

PerfectDisk is a great way to get a mechanical and solid state drive's 'snappiness' back. Highly recommended.


The above gives you ideas of making the most of your current setup while saving for a large SSD.

Hope some of them are useful.