just added 1TB SSD - how best to utilize it?

Stopped in at a Staples when I was last in the city and saw the Samsung EVO 850 1TB was on sale for C$349 so I picked one up. My drives now consist of a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD (OS and Programs), EVO 1TB (yet to be determined) 1TB Toshiba 7200 rpm drive (storage), and an older (about 5 years old) WD 7200 black 2TB drive (storage).

I plan on replacing the older WD 2TB with a 6TB newer WD Black drive, in fact was going to do that first but bought the SSD when I saw the sale price.

How best can I use this new SSD drive for using with Resolve - should I use it for proxy files, or put my unedited 4K video files on it, or use it for a rendering destination? My biggest concern/issue with Resolve (14.1) now is getting smooth playback while editing. Sometimes I get nice smooth video without even generating proxy files, sometimes even with proxy files generated I can't get smooth playback.

I'm running an i7 6800 3.4Ghz 6 core processor, 16GB ram & 8GB RX480 GPU.

Thanks in advance..

I use an external SSD as a cache/Gallery stills drive, and it seems to work pretty well.

Playback speed is a function of CPU speed, disk i/o, GPU power, and the nature of the source files. There are a bunch of factors affecting it. I'd say in your case, getting much faster GPUs will help, but there's a lot of "it depends" to the ultimate answer.

Really depends on your source media, but in your case, you would probably benefit greatly from using the SSD for media storage. One 7200rpm drive is slow, imo.

Make at last a 3x 7200 HDD RAID 0 for storage, and the EVO use as a cache drive. This will always be most effective configuration.

Piotr

Make at last a 3x 7200 HDD RAID 0 for storage, and the EVO use as a cache drive. This will always be most effective configuration.

Piotr

I was debating whether to add a 6TB Western Digital Black for storage and use the SSD for cache, but wondering if I should spend the extra money on a 4 bay NAS drive and stripe disks as you suggest. With your 3 X 7200 HDD are you connecting via ethernet or USB3 or firewire?

There is almost no point of making RAID 0 and connecting it over firewire (this is old now) or gigabit- this is just way to slow.
USB3 is a minimum, but you ideally want USB3.1/TB2/TB3 to actually use speed of few drives in RAID 0.

Make at last a 3x 7200 HDD RAID 0 for storage, and the EVO use as a cache drive. This will always be most effective configuration.

Piotr

I was debating whether to add a 6TB Western Digital Black for storage and use the SSD for cache, but wondering if I should spend the extra money on a 4 bay NAS drive and stripe disks as you suggest. With your 3 X 7200 HDD are you connecting via ethernet or USB3 or firewire?

I mean an internal (SATA) RAID 0 - this is the way I work (large, triple HDDs in RAID 0 for fast and capacious storage; not so large but at least as fast SSD for caching). Of course - if you have enough space inside your PC - you may always add more HDDs (or use the number of HDDs in a redundant kind of RAID, like RAID 5).

If your goal is to use external box - the same applies but keep in mind your port speed so that it doesn't bottleneck your system. I personally prefer everything which is used at actual editing to be internal; of course a RAID 0 which holds your project's footage must be backed up frequently as it doesn't provide any redundancy at all.

Piotr