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423 points speckx | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.969s | source
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dylan604 ◴[] No.44533476[source]
SSD speeds are nothing short of miraculous in my mind. I come from the old days of striping 16 HDDs together (at a minimum number) to get 1GB/s throughput. Depending on the chassis, that was 2 8-drive enclosures in the "desktop" version or the large 4RU enclosures with redundant PSUs and fans loud enough to overpower arena rock concerts. Now, we can get 5+GB/s throughput from a tiny stick that can be used externally via a single cable for data&power that is absolutely silent. I edit 4K+ video as well, and now can edit directly from the same device the camera recorded to during production. I'm skipping over the parts of still making backups, but there's no more multi-hour copy from source media to edit media during a DIT step. I've spent many a shoot as a DIT wishing the 1s&0s would travel across devices much faster while everyone else on the production has already left, so this is much appreciated by me. Oh, and those 16 device units only came close to 4TB around the time of me finally dropping spinning rust.

The first enclosure I ever dealt with was a 7-bay RAID-0 that could just barely handle AVR75 encoding from Avid. Just barely to the point that only video was saved to the array. The audio throughput would put it over the top, so audio was saved to a separate external drive.

Using SSD feels like a well deserved power up from those days.

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jorvi ◴[] No.44535471[source]
It's not really the SSDs themselves that are incredibly fast (they still are somewhat), it's mostly the RAM cache and clever tricks to make TLC feel like SLC.

Most (cheap) SSDs their performance goes off a cliff once you hit the boundary of these tricks.

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1. redman25 ◴[] No.44535978[source]
It can be good to know that SSDs are fast until you exhaust the cache by copying gigs of files around.

It doesn’t hurt to be aware of the limitations even if for the common case things are much better.

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2. jorvi ◴[] No.44536012[source]
Not sure what warranted such an aggressive response.

I grew up in the 90s, on 56kb modems and PCs that rumbled and whined when you booted them up. I was at the tail end of using floppies.

I never said I didn't love the speed of SSDs, and when they just started to become mainstream it was an upgrade I did for everyone around me. I made my comment in part because you mentioned dumping 4K into the SSD and/or editing it. It can be a nasty surprise if you're doing something live, and suddenly your throughout plummets, everything starts to stutter and you have no idea why.

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3. dylan604 ◴[] No.44536780[source]
We're talking about devices capable of >2GB/s throughput, and acquiring footage <.5GB/s. No caching issues, but I'm not buying el cheapo SSDs either. These are all rated and approved by camera makers. It wasn't brought up because it's not an issue. For people that are wondering why camera makers approve or not particular recording media, this is part of the answer. But nobody was asking that particular question and instead the reply tried to rain on my parade.
4. PartiallyTyped ◴[] No.44540235[source]
It wasn’t. IMHO the best feature and only real reason I hang around HN is exactly because I get to interact with others who know more.

The magic is in knowing how the trick works.

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5. jorvi ◴[] No.44541011{3}[source]
A bit further down the comment chain, martinald has a great succinct explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44538489