I'm gearing up to work on another project in KDEnlive. I'm using 1080i AVCHD sources. Last year, doing a project with the same filetypes and approximate lengths involved a lot of time spent thumb-twiddling (while listening to my old HDDs thrash and thrash). So this year I've budgeted for a hardware upgrade, and have been considering an SSD.

What attributes would be the most critical for getting a speed boost - sequential read/write or random read/write? I would guess that sequential read/write would be the most important, but I really don't know how FFMpeg/MLT interact with files at the IO layer. Also, which of the modern Linux filesystems is best suited to the video editing workload (ext4, xfs, reiserfs, btrfs)?


Thanks for any input you can provide.

I now use ext4 and think that it is faster than ext3 (but of course that's completely subjective in my case since i also upgraded hardware at the same time). According to what I read ext4 should be be better for big files like video.

A few considerations though:
- For ext4 you really should be running a very recent distribution that fully supports ext4 and the 2.6.29.6, 2.6.30 or 2.6.31 kernel. If you are on ubuntu jaunty don't use the jaunty kernel, there have been reported problems with ext4. Have not heard this problem with other distros.
-I heard zfs is good for video, but don't really know anything about it. Ext4 would surely be easier to support.
-internal hard drives with more cache and 7200 rpm or higher are better
-maybe you could benefit from a faster processor and more ram also?
-don't know about SSD either, other than it would be too expensive for me if you want a large one.

I can't speak to the details of "sequential read/write or random read/write", etc. I usually just buy the best hard drive I can afford for around $100. Do that every couple years.


Hope that helps, Geoff