HP Z400

[JEC474]

Hello, this is my first post in this forum. 
I have recently updated my old HP Z400 which I bought from new 14 years ago. My question is, would video editing performance be improved if I used a SSD for the video files? They are currently on a HDD.

Specs: W10, X5690, 24 gb Ram, SSD 480 GB. 1050 TI GPU. 2X2TB HHD storage

[Z440Roger]

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@JEC474 wrote:

I have recently updated my old HP Z400 which I bought from new 14 years ago. My question is, would video editing performance be improved if I used a SSD for the video files? They are currently on a HDD.

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No if you are editing footage from modern cameras. Yes if you are editing uncompressed HD but it will only affect the playback in the app you use. It will not make H.264 encoding dramatically faster than you are having today.

An SSD will not make your computer magically faster. As a boot disk it will however make the system boot up faster and feel more snappy.

[SDH]

Regarding getting a SSD for any Z400... that is a SATA II workstation so you could use either a SATA II SSD or a SATA III SSD (SATA III is backwards compatible with SATA II).  I would strongly recommend installing a SSD as your boot/applications drive.  Every once in a while I end up working on a HP workstation that is still using a HDD instead of a SSD and it is remarkable how much reduced the "user experience" is.

That is your day to day, minute to minute interface with your workstation.  You will never look back.

SSDs I recommend for the Z400:  Intel 320 series (a SATA II drive), and you can get those used off eBay in sizes up to 600GB... that one is great if you can get it for a good used price, however new prices have continued to come down.  Then, the Intel 545s... I like the 512GB one.  Finally, recent Samsung EVO... again roughly 500GB (or larger).

The respective utilities for these are the Intel Toolbox, now named the Intel Memory and Storage Tool (Intel MAS), and the Samsung Magician.  Both are kept updated.  These let you manage the associated SSD for best performance, and to easily update to the latest firmware.

If you go for the Intel 320 series type don't buy a HP one, with HP on the drive label... those usually have a HP firmware that cannot be easily updated.  If I get a used SSD (or HDD) I always first do a low level reformat with DBAN, and then a long type NTFS format after MBR partitioning (maybe GPT).  The DBAN process makes the drive raw like buying a new drive off the shelf and I invest the time because this can fix things nothing else could.  For DBAN it is best to burn a bootable DBAN CD, disconnect any other drives, attach the used SSD to SATA port 0, boot from the CD, and target the SSD manually for the low level reformat.  Rarely I've needed to go into BIOS and change from AHCI (or "SATA/RAID") over to IDE to get things going.  Don't forget to change that back in BIOS after the DBAN step is done.

[JEC474]

Thank you both for your responses. I will be editing footage from a Canon 5d ii. I’m not sure if this footage is classified as uncompressed or not, but will give it a try and see if there are any differences in speed of playback. 

Yes, I have a ssd boot drive and you are right, it made a huge difference straight away. 

many thanks, John 

[Z440Roger]

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@JEC474 wrote:

I will be editing footage from a Canon 5d ii. I’m not sure if this footage is classified as uncompressed or not, but will give it a try and see if there are any differences in speed of playback.

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That footage is heavily compressed and the CPU is the component that will do all the job there. Some editing apps can use the GPU as a decoder of H.264 footage as well. (The footage from 5D MkII is H.264) 

So if you buy and use a SSD drive for the source footage it won´t enhance playback performance/render times.

You can already try that today. Create a folder on the C:\ and place some footage and do some testing with a test project and time everything, iow time the exports and see how the playback performs. Then move that folder from your SSD to your HDD, open the same project and link up the files if promted, and do the same tests. The difference you will see is almost none.