Video editors... Would you take a 256GB SSD as a boot drive over a 1TB fusion drive?

[zm15]

Please forgive as this is a quasi-cross posting from the iMac thread. I know many professional videographers hang out here in the Mac Pro thread and I appreciate your real world perspective as a fellow professional, if you happen to be one.

Seeing they are just about the same price, curious if getting a 512GB Evo 850 SSD as an external drive and running my After Effects and Premiere Pro cache from that and then the smaller internal SSD drive would be the best value. (considering buying the iMac 5k i7 with M295x, 24GB RAM. Or a refurb Mac Pro.)

Other than launching applications faster with a pure SSD, would I see an advantage of the SSD over the fusion? I'd like to store and render out the source files on the fusion drive if i get that.

I also use Dynamic Link a lot in my projects, how much does SSD play into that?

 

[pierrox]

I work as a film editor. Current setup is a cMP with a SSD for boot (faster for the system and saving project files is quicker). And I use internal and external drives dedicated to media storage. I would never put those on the boot drive.

 

[lclev]

I use Premiere Pro and After Effects every day at work. I also do a lot of Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign work too. I have a Mac Pro 5,1 with 2 - 6 core processors and 32GB of memory. My main boot drive is a 480GB SSD with a second internal 480GB SSD for cache files. I also have a wide variety of storage drives both internal and external. External drives are attached to a USB 3.0 card.

I do not like fusion drives because I have read too many time of people having trouble with them so I have no experience with their speed or ability. Speed is irrelevant to me if the drive could fail. I just don't think they have nailed down the technology yet with this type of drive. That is just my opinion.

The speed increase from using an SSD as the main drive is significant. Enough so to convince me to add an SSD main boot drive to my Windows 7 editor (I started with a beefy Windows machine then purchased the Mac Pro.) The speed increase for the Windows machine breathed new life into it. Now I use it for a small reoccurring video project and most of my Photo work.

Lisa

 

[JesterJJZ]

I don't know anyone who uses Fusion drive.

 

[NOTNlCE]

I use Premiere Pro and Logic 9 constantly, and I would never write my projects to my boot drive, especially a Fusion Drive. Sure, they're quick and offer quick, high capacity storage, but there are two points of failure in a Fusion Drive, and it does detract a bit from the speed. I used to use a custom one (home made Fusion Drive) on my 3,1 when I still had it, but I don't think I would go back to one, especially for a video editing machine.

 

[IowaLynn]

Please forgive as this is a quasi-cross posting from the iMac thread. I know many professional videographers hang out here in the Mac Pro thread and I appreciate your real world perspective as a fellow professional, if you happen to be one.

Seeing they are just about the same price, curious if getting a 512GB Evo 850 SSD as an external drive and running my After Effects and Premiere Pro cache from that and then the smaller internal SSD drive would be the best value. (considering buying the iMac 5k i7 with M295x, 24GB RAM. Or a refurb Mac Pro.)

Other than launching applications faster with a pure SSD, would I see an advantage of the SSD over the fusion? I'd like to store and render out the source files on the fusion drive if i get that.

I also use Dynamic Link a lot in my projects, how much does SSD play into that?

the 'classic' Mac Pro has people spoiled: 4-6 internal hdd SATA ports (but SATA II not III), but there are 3 open PCIe slots for a 2nd GPU, or SATA III, or the fastest SSD devices available. So you could have 4 x 1TB SSDs running off SATA III AND still have a boot drive (slot #2 maybe) of 256-1000GB blade PCIe-SSD @ 1500MB/sec. Spoiled. Absolutely ruins any thought of Fusion.

You should try to find the MacIntouch: Storage: Fusion area of their reader reports. The iMac 'use to?' offer a 2nd SATA internal port but to force users (customers) into using a single internal drive (even the nMP has only one which is point of consternation and forced ppl into spending even more $$ for Thunderbolt external storage.

USB3 does not offer TRIM over interface, TB though I *think* does. A cMP though can have SATA III wtih eSATA ports and support SMART and TRIM.

Spoiled bunch. Even the option of taking a 6 year plus old workhorse, throwing in new GTX 980 GPU, upgrade madness.