Quote: Just a general question...

Thinking of upgrading my traditional hard drive to a solid state. Would this have any positive effect on production speed? I'm guessing "no" as that's probably ram, processor, and video card, but just thought I'd ask.

Great product!!!

Depends. I have a large (500Gb) SSD on my laptop and it is definitely faster than it was befoe with a disk type hard drive.
I have a 250 GB SSD on my desktop with a 1T internal disk (where the resources are) and it is not as fast as the laptop but it is faster than just a disk type hard drive That is an empirical "feeling". I did not time anything. .
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BoilerPlate: To posters who ask for help -- it is nice to thank the volunteers who try to answer your questions !
Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

Quote: Just a general question...

Thinking of upgrading my traditional hard drive to a solid state. Would this have any positive effect on production speed? I'm guessing "no" as that's probably ram, processor, and video card, but just thought I'd ask.

Great product!!!

Editing from the SSD drive should speed up many things such as producing.

You do want a SSD drive that is large enough.
File transfers will be faster.

I believe in a 256 GB or larger SSD drive.
Small SSDs were a problem in the past because SSD drives were too small.
Powerdirector needs about 100 GB of free space on the OS drive to operate with speed and efficiency.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Everybody's got an opinion and here's mine. My 1st generation i7 computer had an HDD, and the WEI score of the HDD was 5.9 while the processor score was 7.5. Replacing the HDD with an SSD brought the Primary Hard Disk score up to 7.9, making my overall score 7.5 (the processor score). As a result my computer, including PD, ran much faster and smoother. I don't know if there is such a thing, but if my HDD had scored 7.5 I don't believe I would have seen an improvement in performance.

You can see below that the laptop I'm now using to edit videos only scores 6.9, which is its processor score, but even so it performs much better than the other computer. I believe the reason for this is that the WEI score doesn't take into account the Lenovo Turbo-boost feature. Dell Precision 7510 Laptop
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit | Intel(R) XEON(R) CPU E3-1505M v5 @2.80 GHz
RAM: 32 GB
Windows Experience Index 7.5

Quote: Just a general question...

Thinking of upgrading my traditional hard drive to a solid state. Would this have any positive effect on production speed? I'm guessing "no" as that's probably ram, processor, and video card, but just thought I'd ask.

Great product!!!

If by "production speed" you mean the elapsed time for PD to convert a timeline to a final product with the "Produce" tab or the PD "Create Disc" and the "Create a folder" option, you will see no reduction in elapsed time with a SSD, internal HD, or external USB drive. For the current class of computers and encoding technology, the I/O speed in not the limiter during CPU encoding of a timeline.

On the other hand, if by "production speed" you mean how responsive is Windows OS, application launch, editing experience and such, yes, a SSD can improve your user experience significantly.

A practical look at disk I/O capability and PD was presented here http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/25978.page and might be of interest. Test 3 are results for PD producing to various speed devices.

I'm sure you have a USB flash drive, use PD to produce your timeline to a file on it vs your internal hard drive and see if you see a difference. USB2 flash drive, at best 30MB/sec, a internal HD, depending on what you have, probably at least 80MB/sec. Below is a test to my external Corsair 16GB flash drive with a mere 20MB/sec capability and my SSD at about 300+MB/sec, a 15x performance improvement between drives.

157 seconds for PD to CPU encode and produce a given timeline to Corsair
157 seconds for PD to CPU encode and produce a given timeline to my SSD

Jeff

I do not have experience with SDD still very U $.
Got a siginificativa improvement when I switched my HDD Sata II by another Sata III AMD-FX 8350 / 8GB DDR3
SSD SUV400S37240G / 2-HD WD 1TB
AMD Radeon R9 270 / AOC M2470SWD
Windows 7-64 / PD16 Ultimate

Quote: I do not have experience with SDD still very U $.
Got a siginificativa improvement when I switched my HDD Sata II by another Sata III

I do not know the prices for 256 GB SSD in Brazil, In the USA you can buy 256 GB SSD drives for as little as about $110 USD.

Yes, the difference in transfer speed for SATA II VS SATA III is about double.
You do need a computer that supports SATA III.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

YES to SSD! PowerDirector 17. Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770 (8M Cache, up to 3.90 GHz); Hard Disk: SSD 250Gb + SSD 500GB.

My YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndresRootsi