Is it worth upgrading to SSD to improve slow performance

Hi all, firstly let me apologise for not having the spec of my PC to hand right now but I'll update this thread later if it is relevant.

My question is about HDD configuration. I have 4x 1TB 7200rpm drives in my PC, one for OS, scratch discs, premiere folder, etc. Basically everything except the video files. I then have 3x HDD with video files on. I realise this isn't the best way of doing things and in future I'll probably change this to keep the video files on external drives and only copy them over when needed. (as I generally only use one folder of video from say 20 in total and then the following month I'll move onto the next folder, so it's a bit of a waste of internal space keeping all of the video on the internal drives all of the time.

I think ideally I'd like to get some sort of housing to maybe keep these 3 internal drives in an external enclosure maybe connected with USB 3.0 or SATA and then replace all internal drives for SSD drives but what configuration would you recommend for this? For example 2x 256gb for cache files, 1x 256gb for video files and then a final one for OS and programs?

I am quite sure the slow down I'm experiencing is HDD related as I often hear a lot of noise coming from the drives (pretty much constantly) and although they're SATA2 drives they're quite good ones i think.

Thanks in advance

i don't have any raid set up. I did initially and start up time increased to over a minute so I abandoned it

Hi David,

You're on the wrong track - SSD drives are not suitable/recommended for video editing for various reasons, limit it to a boot drive.

We don't know anything about your PC hardware, or the material you are editing. Many possible reasons for performance issues. Please let us know your setup and what issues you are seeing.

At least, go to My Computer and Right-click the non-OS drives and check Properties - you will want "Indexing" set to OFF as this slows things down. Also, keep drives defragged and less than 80% full.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

Good question, but no, changing the Indexing setting will not harm existing data. Indexing simply means that Windows is constantly accessing the drive to build it's "index" that would aid in using the "Search" function. We don't want the drive being accessed by Windows though when capturing/playing back video streams, because we want maximum performance.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

Hi David,

Seems like the drives all being pretty full could be part of the issue. Are they all defragged? That can really mess things up if badly fragged. May not have enough free space to even defrag though. Could also try cleaning the Media Cache database (Edit > Preferences > Media).

Is the GPU Acceleration enabled in Premiere? Project > Project Settings > General

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers