By Brady Betzel
If you talk to any post nerd, myself included, about building their own computer or which internal components speed up editing, color correcting and VFX workflows, you’re bound to get a bunch of different answers. But in truth, it’s the combination of CPU speed, GPU, memory and hard drive speed.
For this review, I am focusing on hard drive speed. If you have a spinning hard drive in your system and are trying to edit video, you should look into switching that out for an SSD drive. If you already have some sort of SSD drive installed, the next step is to add an another drive and make it as fast as possible. The Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe card can take additional storage to the next level and retails for $199.99 (without the U.2 SSD drives you’ll need to get up and running).
Whether you are looking to expand your fast storage with two additional SSD drives or are looking to add a super-fast RAID-0 set of drives, the Fusion PCIe card is up to the task. What’s interesting is that typical SSD PCIe cards need additional drivers and/or BIOS updates, but the Sonnet Fusion does not, which makes installation easy. The card is compatible with Windows, macOS and Linux. And if you are a legacy Mac Pro 5,1 user (aka the cheese grater), this can allow you to install the macOS on one drive and use the other for storage. (Note that Windows and Linux cannot boot from this.)
When I first opened the box, I noticed that the Fusion card is full-length, measuring 12.283 inches long, so if you have a small computer tower, this card will be a tight fit. The card itself actually has an aluminum grip on the side to help when installing, but it can be removed by unscrewing the Torx T8 screws. In fact, when installing in the 2019 Mac Pro the grip helps you push the card into the PCIe slot much easier than just the card itself.
Please note that this card does not come with the two 2.5-inch U.2 SSD drives that are required to be used with the Fusion Dual U.2 PCIe card. In addition, 2.5-inch SATA and SAS SSDs are not supported, so it’s the U.2 SSD drives or nothing. Keep that in mind when contemplating purchasing the Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe card. Sonnet sent the Fusion card with two Micron 7.68TB U.2 SSDs already installed. These are enterprise-level SSD cards that can retail for over $1,400 apiece, but there are cheaper SSD cards you can use. Here is a list of compatible SSDs from Sonnet’s website.
How Fast Is It?
Now onto the actual numbers. Without changing anything about the card — including using each drive individually and not in a RAID configuration — I ran a speed test using Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test. I took a few readings and saw that I was getting over 3000MB/s write speeds and over 2300MB/s read speeds. Incredibly fast. Then I formatted the drives as a RAID-0, meaning I combined the two drives and made one large drive, which typically leads to increased speeds. With the drives configured using a RAID-0 format I was getting write speeds of over 4700MB/s and read speeds of over 4600MB/s! Those speeds are incredible. If you are looking to lose any hard-drive bottlenecks, the Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe card is a must-have.
But what do these speeds mean in the real world of production and post? As an online editor who deals with high-resolution files for finishing and color correction, my most used tools include Blackmagic Resolve, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere. So the Sonnet Fusion card really comes into play when putting my source material on these drives.
While not a typical workflow for me (I usually work with source files or DPX/TIFF transcodes), creating proxy files and/or caching files in Resolve to these drives is where the speed picks up. To test this out, I created a one-minute test sequence: UHD (3840×2160), 23.98fps, basic color grade, 110% resize to scale to fit footage (regardless of source frame size) with no audio. I tested it three ways. One: all source footage and exports using an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD. Two: all source footage and exports using the Sonnet Fusion, with each drive formatted separately (one drive for source media and one drive for exports). Three: all source footage and exports using the Sonnet Fusion formatted in a RAID-0 configuration.
Here are the details on the footage I used:
- ARRI Raw: 3840×2160 24fps – 7 seconds 12 frames
- 4448×1856 24fps – 7 seconds 12 frames
- BRaw: 6144×3456 24fps – 15 seconds
- RedRaw: 6144×3072 23.976fps – 7 seconds 12 frames
- 6144×3160 23.976fps – 7 seconds 12 frames
- Sony a7siii: 3840×2160 23.976fps – 15 seconds
Sonnet Fusion two drives – BMD Disk Speed Test
I used this same sequence in both Resolve 16.2.7 and Premiere 14.5 (built in Resolve, exported as an XML and relinked in Premiere). However, in Resolve I also added a test using the Neat Video 5 noise reduction plugin applied to each clip — noise reduction is one of the most taxing things you can render in video. I only have the plugin for Resolve, so that is why I didn’t also test this in Adobe Premiere.
Here are my results:
Resolve Studio 16.2.7
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD
– Without Neat Video noise reduction
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 1:32
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 2:50
– With Neat Video noise reduction
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 18:39
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 17:47
Sonnet Fusion individual drives (no RAID)
– Without Neat Video noise reduction
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 1:24
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 1:10
Sonnet Fusion Striped – BMD Disk SpeedTest
– With Neat Video noise reduction
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 18:49
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 17:49
Sonnet Fusion RAID-0
– Without Neat Video noise reduction
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 1:27
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 1:09
– With Neat Video noise reduction
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 19:33
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 18:17
Adobe Premiere Pro
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 3:39
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 4:12
Sonnet Fusion Individual Drives (no RAID)
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 3:16
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 4:47
Sonnet Fusion RAID-0
- DNxHR HQX 10-bit QuickTime: 3:16
- DPX RGB 10-bit: 4:46
The two big takeaways I have from these results are that hard drive speeds didn’t help much with the compressed files, like the DNxHR HQX QuickTime file, as much as they did with the much-less-compressed DPX files that have a higher bandwidth. Also, with the Sonnet Fusion, my bottleneck was definitely the memory, GPU and CPU. I was seeing no speed increase in the Resolve DPX exports between the Sonnet Fusion formatted as two hard drives and the RAID-0. So the moral of the story is: While this speed demon of a PCIe x16 Sonnet Fusion U.2 SSD PCIe card throws out ludicrous transfer speeds, it is only part of the puzzle. You will want to match it with higher-end GPUs, CPUs and memory to speed up that noise reduction export fully.
I also did some less scientific file transfers of the resulting DPX files, QuickTimes and source media files from my tests above. The files resulted in 136GB:
- OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD > Sonnet Fusion Striped drive: 6 minutes and 15 seconds
- Samsung SSD 960 Pro > Sonnet Fusion Striped drive: 2 minutes and 35 seconds
- Sonnet Fusion Striped drive > OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD: 6 minutes and 14 seconds
- Sonnet Fusion Striped Drive > Samsung SSD 960 Pro: 3 minutes and 2 seconds
- OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD > Sonnet Fusion individual drives: 5 minutes and 57 seconds
- Samsung SSD 960 Pro > Sonnet Fusion individual drives: 2 minutes and 25 seconds
- Sonnet Fusion individual drives > OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD: 9 minutes and 31 seconds
- Sonnet Fusion individual drives > Samsung SSD 960 Pro: 2 minutes and 38 seconds
- Sonnet Fusion individual drive 1 > Sonnet Fusion individual drive: 2 minutes and 22 seconds
Something to keep in mind … If you are planning to use a Thunderbolt 3 external PCIe enclosure for the Sonnet Fusion, the maximum bandwidth you will get is 2750MB/s. This is the maximum Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth, and Thunderbolt 2 will be about half of that.
Final Thoughts
In the end, $199.99 for the Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe card is a pretty cheap price by itself. However, if you don’t have the U.2 SSD drives lying around, you will need to account for that bite out of your wallet as well. But the speeds you can achieve will eliminate many little errors and application errors that stop your machine from running smoothly.
If you also have a high-end Intel i9 or Xeon processor paired with an Nvidia RTX 3000 series GPU, you can create your own time warp with the speeds you will attain. If you are lucky enough to have a new 2019 Mac Pro but wish you had more storage with faster drive speeds, this card will likely be cheaper than buying the OEM drives from Apple. I wish I could tell you what speeds a Sonnet Fusion card could attain with an Intel Xeon and RTX 3090 or Mac Pro 2019, but, unfortunately, I don’t have that equipment at my home.
As a colorist, the biggest obstacles I encounter are bottlenecks in the computer systems I’m using. Typically, those are network connections for shared storage and CPUs. Eliminating those bottlenecks is what will get you to a fluid and efficient color correcting state … the point where the tool becomes an instrument. If you are looking for color correcting to become more fluid and not to be held back by slow drive speeds that can cause errors and crashes, then the Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe card might be for you.
Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on shows like Life Below Zero and The Shop. He is also a member of the Producers Guild of America. You can email Brady at bradybetzel@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @allbetzroff.
