On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 12:49 PM, Craig Smith <craigallynsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> QUESTION
>
> Since this is disk-intensive, I trust performance would improve if Jpegs
> were written-to and read-from solid-state drive (SSD) as opposed to
> traditional spinning mechanical-platter hard disk (HD).  I plan to continue
> writing the final MP4 to HD.  Looking at RAID for faster reads serving the
> final product.

This may not be true, since your usage case sounds like it would
actually primarily be transferring your data over ethernet, the
ethernet will almost certainly be more of a bottleneck than your
storage device. Since you said something about 5GB/day, neither is
likely to be an issue.
I have used HDD for similar types of things without any problems.  At
this point, spinning disks are still enough cheaper than SSD that cost
for capacity would be a bigger factor than performance for something
like this.
For decent playback performance, HDD drives tend to actually be quite
good at sequential read performance.  Sequential write is also pretty
good.  Spinning disks are not so great at random read/write.
Your MP4 calculation is likely CPU bound, as the input is probably
mostly sequential and the output would also be sequential.  I would
guess that if you are using an older CPU, a new generation multi-core
(and possibly hyper-threaded) CPU would be the best bet for improving
the conversion performance, and performance of other simultaneous
processes.  Newer CPUs have a lot of compressed video optimizations.
The biggest advantage I would see for an SSD would be reliability,
since decent SSD drives have actually become more reliable than HDD
drives, which manufacturers just don't seem to take any pride in
anymore.  (I've had good luck with Samsung drives)
The type of volume you mention shouldn't cause premature failure of an
SSD, but could eventually cause degraded performance. Manufacturers
still say this would take decades, but that might be best case
scenario.  A higher capacity SSD would take longer to run into any
possible wear leveling issues.
- Justin