MP 7,1 What are you using your NVMe SSD drives for?

[chfilm]

Hey,
after reading through all those super exciting threads about Raid cards and NVMe Adapters, and since I got my Mac Pro today I'm wondering, what you all are using your SSD setups for.
I'm a video editor / After Effects animator and so far have been working almost exclusively off my Promise Pegasus2 R6 and Lacie Little Big Disk2 on the trashcan. They deliver consistent speeds between 600-900mb/s read and write which ain't bad at all, but I could imagine that a built in card with SSDs on it are more snappy.

The thing is, for actual editing projects I would need at least 8 TB to have enough room to breath for a regular project, and I'm not sure if the disk speed is currently my bottleneck.
So maybe you could give me some examples of how you profit from your insanely fast SSD raid?
Help me figure out if I need something like this too!

 

[Adult80HD]

Hey,
after reading through all those super exciting threads about Raid cards and NVMe Adapters, and since I got my Mac Pro today I'm wondering, what you all are using your SSD setups for.
I'm a video editor / After Effects animator and so far have been working almost exclusively off my Promise Pegasus2 R6 and Lacie Little Big Disk2 on the trashcan. They deliver consistent speeds between 600-900mb/s read and write which ain't bad at all, but I could imagine that a built in card with SSDs on it are more snappy.

The thing is, for actual editing projects I would need at least 8 TB to have enough room to breath for a regular project, and I'm not sure if the disk speed is currently my bottleneck.
So maybe you could give me some examples of how you profit from your insanely fast SSD raid?
Help me figure out if I need something like this too!

Video would benefit more than almost anything else, as you're moving huge files. I personally got it for hosting my Lightroom photo library, caches and for a stacking application that is reading/writing a lot of large files to disk. They have all seen a nice performance bump, but video would see a much bigger bump.

I got a HighPoint 7101A-1 card and 4 Samsung 2TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe drives in a RAID 0 array--so that's the 8TB you need. Total cost was about $2200 for the card and Samsungs; not bad considering the speed. See attached; a little faster than your Promise arrays.

 

[chfilm]

haha, a LITTLE faster indeed - the question is - does it actually help with video playback - as I feel the bigger bottleneck sits in decoding the video..

 

[bxs]

Hey,
after reading through all those super exciting threads about Raid cards and NVMe Adapters, and since I got my Mac Pro today I'm wondering, what you all are using your SSD setups for.
I'm a video editor / After Effects animator and so far have been working almost exclusively off my Promise Pegasus2 R6 and Lacie Little Big Disk2 on the trashcan. They deliver consistent speeds between 600-900mb/s read and write which ain't bad at all, but I could imagine that a built in card with SSDs on it are more snappy.

The thing is, for actual editing projects I would need at least 8 TB to have enough room to breath for a regular project, and I'm not sure if the disk speed is currently my bottleneck.
So maybe you could give me some examples of how you profit from your insanely fast SSD raid?
Help me figure out if I need something like this too!

Plan for the future.

If you're ingesting camera raw data created with 4K today, and tomorrow 6K, and then the next day 8K, and with higher and higher frame rates, the storage space for say 1 hr of filming simply get huge and into the multi TB. Then this data has to be read at incredible speeds/rates to the editing software for ease of use.

On our 2013 MP67,1 we can hardly deal with 4K. On our iMac Pro we can deal with 4K, and now we are looking at 6K and 8K soon, so need something like this MP7,1 along with the necessary internal fast storage to feed the software editing tasks.

One reason to install lots of RAM is to give the kernel the ability to cache the needed data using its dynamic RAM resident buffer cache. Pulling in data from RAM to the processor is the very best speed you can get.

 

[TheRealAlex]

Hav not gotten my Mac Pro yet, I wish it was PCI Express 4.0 like on X570 motherboards. I digress, Nvme thanks to PCI Lanes being closer to the CPU, hit the CPU up to 40% less cycles to access data.

I couldn’t even imagine running Nvme drives in Raid 0 sadly, Nvme tops out at 4-8GB/sec
I thought it was close to DDR4 RAM but RAM is 25GB/sec

Maybe Apple will allow PCI Express 3.0 x16 drives at 32GB/sec

 

[chfilm]

Plan for the future.

If you're ingesting camera raw data created with 4K today, and tomorrow 6K, and then the next day 8K, and with higher and higher frame rates, the storage space for say 1 hr of filming simply get huge and into the multi TB. Then this data has to be read at incredible speeds/rates to the editing software for ease of use.

On our 2013 MP67,1 we can hardly deal with 4K. On our iMac Pro we can deal with 4K, and now we are looking at 6K and 8K soon, so need something like this MP7,1 along with the necessary internal fast storage to feed the software editing tasks.

One reason to install lots of RAM is to give the kernel the ability to cache the needed data using its dynamic RAM resident buffer cache. Pulling in data from RAM to the processor is the very best speed you can get.

Thanks- well yes I feel relatively comfy with 192gb ram for now.
about planning for the future, I get that thought, though I’m thinking maybe it’s better to buy the storage when I actually need something so insanely fast,j just because the prices per gb are coming down all the time... I made the same mistake buying the lacie little big disk 2 back then with my old Mac Pro, because I thought, hell yes soon I’ll edit 4K and then I’ll need this speed- well, 4K came but with it came the amounts of data that never could fit into that small drive so it ended up being a very expensive dust collector that was my main cache disk for after effects...

Now it’s not even so far anymore and the power supply is making weird noises sometimes. I’d like to get one of those fancy internal NVMe cards like the Highpoint and out at least the lacie sticks onto that, but I’m not sure if I can safely remove the sticks from that drive.. would be a good way to test the waters. Having such a card can’t hurt for sure, and then I could put bigger disks inside when they become available.

In general I like the Speed and especially the stability and redundancy of the Pegasus Raids- but they are noisy and require a lot of cooling inside my little raid cupboard, actually not that the Mac Pro is so quiet, I wish I didn’t have them anymore..

 

[Average Pro]

Video would benefit more than almost anything else, as you're moving huge files. I personally got it for hosting my Lightroom photo library, caches and for a stacking application that is reading/writing a lot of large files to disk. They have all seen a nice performance bump, but video would see a much bigger bump.

I got a HighPoint 7101A-1 card and 4 Samsung 2TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe drives in a RAID 0 array--so that's the 8TB you need. Total cost was about $2200 for the card and Samsungs; not bad considering the speed. See attached; a little faster than your Promise arrays.

View attachment 885732

Those numbers are Millennium Falcon speeds.