Hard disks let alone SSDs are not often a bottleneck unless you are using uncompressed or minimally compressed media. Hard disks are more easily taxed with 4k media due to the much higher bitrates. A lot depends on how many simultaneous data streams are going. Heavy compositing is more taxing.

Just add up your simultaneous media bitrates to know what your project I/O requirements are.

Take for example a UHD data stream at 400Mbps data rate. That is about 50 Mbytes per second if read at real time speed. If you have a transition then that is two simultaneous streams during the transition so double that. This is within range of a 7200 RPM hard disk but it is being pushed. That rate will not even make an SATA SSD break a sweat. This is ignoring the system disk cache which can help out. This also assumes the media can be decoded at real time speed without any issue.

When we "render as" we are writing to the disk so that is another stream. It is also not real time speed limited but the render as most often does not make real time speed. That lowers the required throughput on the input side.

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply. I looked at my write speed during a render of my test project and I'm getting between 930-980 kb/s with my SATA SSD. This is from GoPro footage 1080p/30 rendering for youtube.

Ross

I/O is not a problem for you.

So you think that's as fast as I can go? No point in buying a 960 evo then

A Sandisk plus SSD is rated at around ~500MB/s sequential read and ~400MB/s sequential write.

GoPro 1080p30 footage is about 35Mbp/s (~4.4MB/s). At least with a Hero3/3+ in protune mode.

I'll not recommend more than a SATA SSD until you post the Mediainfo report for:

1) your source files

2) your rendered output

3) state whether you do multi-cameras edits or nested projects

80-90% is good utilization for vegas.

45% on the GPU is good as well.

GPU monitoring is generally slower than CPU, utilization is an average for the interval. There could very well be spikes to 95%. Windows will never saturate the GPU, else your interface display would be come sluggish or non-responsive. The CPU+GPU compute units calculate different math from the CPU, so only certain effects like Min/Max, blurs, FP-32 modes, or Floating Point image formats will load the CPU+GPU hybrid heavy.

8GB per CPU core is a good rule of thumb for memory amount. That would make 64GB across 2 DIMM modules to optimize the channels. "Winsat mem" from an admin command prompt will show you the memory bandwidth.

Windows makes great use of extra memory space to cache and buffer information, so that slower media like HDD and SSD do not have to accessed. SSD/NVME is 500MBs-1GBs, where as memory is 35-40GBs with much lower latency.

I'll not recommend more than a SATA SSD until you post the Mediainfo report for:

1) your source files

2) your rendered output

3) state whether you do multi-cameras edits or nested projects

 

no multi camera, not a clue what nested project is so I doubt I'm doing one lol edits may have images in them.

 

source file example
 

General

Complete name :GOPR0479.MP4

Format :MPEG-4

Format profile :Base Media / Version 1

Codec ID :mp41 (mp41)

File size :124 MiB

Duration :23 s 40 ms

Overall bit rate mode :Variable

Overall bit rate :45.1 Mb/s

 

 

Video

Format :AVC

Format/Info :Advanced Video Codec

Format profile :High@L4.2

Format settings :CABAC / 1 Ref Frames

Format settings, CABAC :Yes

Format settings, RefFrames :1 frame

Format settings, GOP :M=1, N=30

Codec ID :avc1

Codec ID/Info :Advanced Video Coding

Duration :23 s 23 ms

Bit rate mode :Variable

Bit rate :45.0 Mb/s

Width :1 920 pixels

Height :1 080 pixels

Display aspect ratio :16:9

Frame rate mode :Constant

Frame rate :59.940 (60000/1001) FPS

Color space :YUV

Chroma subsampling :4:2:0

Bit depth :8 bits

Scan type :Progressive

Bits/(Pixel*Frame) :0.362

Stream size :123 MiB (100%)

Title :GoPro AVC

Language :English

Encoded date :UTC 2017-09-23 14:15:40

Tagged date :UTC 2017-09-23 14:15:40

Color range :Full

Color primaries :BT.709

Transfer characteristics :BT.709

Matrix coefficients :BT.709

 

Audio

ID :2

Format :AAC

Format/Info :Advanced Audio Codec

Format profile :LC

Codec ID :mp4a-40-2

Duration :23 s 40 ms

Bit rate mode :Constant

Bit rate :128 kb/s

Channel(s) :2 channels

Channel positions :Front: L R

Sampling rate :48.0 kHz

Frame rate :46.875 FPS (1024 SPF)

Compression mode :Lossy

Stream size :360 KiB (0%)

Title :GoPro AAC

 

 

rendered video example

 

 

General

Complete name :rx 6300 v 17002.mp4

Format :MPEG-4

Format profile :Base Media / Version 2

Codec ID :mp42 (mp42/isom)

File size :483 MiB

Duration :6 min 19 s

Overall bit rate mode :Variable

Overall bit rate :10.7 Mb/s

 

Video

ID :2

Format :AVC

Format/Info :Advanced Video Codec

Format profile :High@L4

Format settings :CABAC / 3 Ref Frames

Format settings, CABAC :Yes

Format settings, RefFrames :3 frames

Format settings, GOP :M=4, N=15

Codec ID :avc1

Codec ID/Info :Advanced Video Coding

Duration :6 min 19 s

Bit rate mode :Variable

Bit rate :10.5 Mb/s

Width :1 920 pixels

Height :1 080 pixels

Display aspect ratio :16:9

Frame rate mode :Constant

Frame rate :29.970 (30000/1001) FPS

Standard :NTSC

Color space :YUV

Chroma subsampling :4:2:0

Bit depth :8 bits

Scan type :Progressive

Bits/(Pixel*Frame) :0.169

Stream size :476 MiB (98%)

Language :English

 

Audio

ID :1

Format :AAC

Format/Info :Advanced Audio Codec

Format profile :LC

Codec ID :mp4a-40-2

Duration :6 min 19 s

Bit rate mode :Constant

Bit rate :160 kb/s

Channel(s) :channel0

Channel(s)_Original :2 channels

Channel positions :Front: L R

Sampling rate :48.0 kHz

Frame rate :46.875 FPS (1024 SPF)

Compression mode :Lossy

Stream size :7.24 MiB (1%)