SATA connections

Ulodesk wrote on 9/28/2013, 10:54 AM
While I am known to have a control-freak streak, the computer and digital world outstripped my learning rate long ago. That disclaimer provided, I discovered, in the course of installing a BD drive recently, that my motherboard has more SATA ports that I had realized. The board (Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3) has two SATA3 ports and four SATA2 ports. This led me to wonder if the transfer speed difference between them would make an difference in my video editing; that is, does it make a difference which of my drives is plugged into which port. The drive on which I keep my video files is a second internal hard drive, my primary hard drive having OS, programs, and all other files. Thus, I have two internal 7200- rpm drives,and an internal DVD and recently added internal BD writer (as well an external USB3 HD for backup).
From what I can tell from my self-education, the HD video (Vixia 1920x1080) I deal with does not approach even the 1.5G transfer rate of the slower SATA ports; that any stuttering in MS would be caused by CPU, GPU, and/or RAM limitations. Perhaps it would make a difference in rendering speed, though I would suspect that, also, would hit the three other mentioned factors first.
My system specs are in my profile. I would be grateful for any guidance that might be useful in optimizing what I have, as well as any suggestions for first line of upgrade when affordable, e.g., RAM before GPU. I can add about 4G of RAM with ReadyBoost from a USB3 thumb drive. I have heard varying opinions on how effective this is versus actual installed RAM.
Thanks, folks.

Comments

TOG62 wrote on 9/28/2013, 11:46 AM
I don't see any specs in your profile.
videoITguy wrote on 9/28/2013, 12:09 PM
Your SATA and type of SATA connections taken individually will make very little difference in editing from one drive to another with the common compressed video formats. As far as what your motherboard offers and what you are doing now, the concerns here are at a moot point.

However, if you want to join the big boys, and begin editing large numbers of video streams concurrently and need the output for money, you might get into SATA RAID. That is for another day.
Markk655 wrote on 9/28/2013, 1:19 PM
I ran a similar test with rendering to a SATA III SSD instead of a 6 GB/s SATA III platter-type HDD. No difference in rendering speed. A lot of the bottleneck will depend on the footage you choose to edit/render. I typically edit 1920x1080 AVCHD and the bottleneck appears to be the CPU (even on a 3770K Ivy Bridge CPU running at 4.2 GHz) when rendering to AVCHD or to mp4. I do agree with your conclusion.

Depending on the files you edit, I would suggest CPU>RAM>GPU in terms of spending your money. CPU will help increase processing speed (real time editing preview and rendering), RAM helps somewhat with that (it is pretty inexpensive to add) and also gives more space for dynamic RAM preview. GPU is used a bit during rendering and for some (but not all of the FX or transitions - especially for some partner FX like NewBlue). GPU tends to decrease rendering times by about 10-15% from my and others' testing (do a search on the forum).
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 9/29/2013, 6:02 AM
Your drive speed only minimally affects render speeds. It is the cpu and the compression of the video file that are determinant here. My 5 year old pc works fine with Canon's mov files, while it is terrible with Nikon's mov files. (Yet, the image quality of the Nikon V1 files is superior - no moiré, no aliasing). Unless you are in the news business, rendering speed isn't such a big issue.