We have recently bought a lot more hardware so we can more easily do endurance testing on different platforms, Windows 7, 64 bit Vista etc. This new hardware sports an 80 GB Intel X25-M Postville SSD hard drive. And for another project we have used a 60 GB OCZ Vertex SSD. We'd like to share some benchmarks and experiences with you.
We can actually be short about SSD drives. Buy one! Now!
SSD drives are SO fast. With average transfer rates of about 200MB per second they are WAY faster than any traditional hard drive, including 'fast' 10.000 rpm Raptor drives which 'only' get about 100MB transfer rate. This means you can comfortably play higher resolution video files and more layers when your footage is on an SSD drive.
Playing more video layers and higher resolution is nice but what really amazed us is how much faster you can trigger clips, or an entire column of clips. It feels so much more responsive. This is because the access time (the time it takes the drive to actually find a file) of an SSD drive is also much faster. We measured 0.1 ms for the SSD drive, ~14.2 ms for a normal 7200 rpm drive and 7.2 ms for a 10.000 rpm Raptor drive. This does not not sound like much because it is measured in milliseconds but it makes quite a difference.
We can highly recommend everybody to get an SSD drive, not just because it's measurably faster but it makes Resolume feel even more responsive.