drive death

[fork-media]

it may just have been coincidence - but my experience in the past was not to run video off system drive- since it tended to reduce drive life drastically,,

I succombed to temptation aboout a month ago on my mac mini and the spinner has gone bad... actually was the kick I need to put SSD in both bays ( that was joy in it self )

I did partion the 1tb to 2 500's for the yemt drive ( I thought I might try upgrading OS in stepping stone manner )

my question..


will a SSD handle running the sytems on one partition and video on another?

was it a mechanical issue? I mean running vid and system 16 hours a day may tax the poor little platters?

[reichman]

Those 2.5" conventional drives are awful. My kids had an old Mac mini that went through three of them, crashing more than once a year. My recent experiences with 3.5" drives have been amazing. Long life, great performance, even while getting battered traveling.

Even at their slowest, SSDs have 4 times the throughput of conventional platter drives, so your approach should work fine. But keep Time Machine running on that boot drive just in case.

Obviously the best setup is 3 separate drives: OS, audio, video.

[fork-media]

for sure I have run 3 drives min since the 90's - was the only way!

great reminder on time mchine.. I have been using CCC on data - shied away from time machine,.. but with SSD I might have to go there..

a precursor to this was losing my audiofinder bookmarks suddenly... not an experience I want to repeat!!!

altho in someways was a good kick up ***** to reorganise - big changes for me in the last year so this was the last area to 'modernise' the work flow..

Any benefit of sticking SSD into USB? thunderbolt? I got a spare 500 SSD! not sure what to do with it! I can say this much - I dont fancy changing the internal drives on macmini anytime soon~!!!

[Darryl Ramm]

Nobody here can likely help you as we really follow what you are saying in useful detail.

What exact make and model SSD? SSDs vary *hugely* in performance and quality.

Sticking what exact SSD into what? USB what USB2 USB3? Compared to what? e.g. What SATA controller is in your current computer?

A SATA SSD like a Samsung 850 Pro will run better on an infernal SATA III port, since that is it's native interface. Also SATA supports TRIM (which you should turn on). USB does not. A thunderbolt dock will give you both native SATA III performance and TRIM support). USB 3 performance (you have USB3 Ports?) may be so close you won't notice. USB 2 sucks.

If you want high performance SSD IO there are much better options than SATA based SSDs. PCIe SSDs, PCIe slot cards, M.2 and U.2 drives, including M.2 based drives used by Apple in recent Mac computers and M.2 based drives used by Lacie in their Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2.

What exact Mac mini model/date code?

What video? in what format? how many concurrent streams? Mostly just reading? Or are you actually editing video on this? What performance do you need to stream that? You should be able to search online and do your own back of envelope calculation or IO bandwidth as a starting point.

Is Disk Cache tuned on? Set to what? 'Normal' is off.

Partitioning the boot SSD with a video partition is not required from a performance viewpoint, and on a HDD would likely make performance worse.

Time machine is the last thing I would use to protect a boot partition. Carbon Copy Cloner is the first. Separating video files from the boot partition to make backup/archiving easier *is* a good reason to partition the drive like that. i'd not use Time Machine to back up large video files (noticing I'm not a fan of time machine? It's OK for backing up basic stuff, user accounts, basic documents, audio sessions etc.). But for large sessions and video I'd usually want something different. Including direct manual/batched copy to a NAS box or removable external drive.

[Schottlandru]

Just to add a thought - aren't SSDs meant to be filled only to half or 2/3 of their capacity?
Maybe worth considering when thinking about where to put videos...