Beachball for 30 sec after pressing Play

Trying to plod my way through a project on 10.0.5, Lion 10.7.4, 2010 Mac Pro 16gb RAM, 8 core.

It's literally a 30 second edit with zero effects- and maybe six transitions. I did move the original project over from FCP 7, but the beachball is killing me. Every time I want to play it just spins and spins and for some reason I can't even scrub audio.

I've trashed prefs and all that...

Taken care of disk permissions?

What are the capacities of all connected hard drives?
How much of each is free space?
Do not put events and projects on system drive.
What codec are the clips you're editing with?
Is background rendering turned off?

I have repaired permissions- didn't make a difference.

Using a 2TB internal RAID w/ an Apple RAID card. There's plenty of space. There are no events or projects on the system drive and I've used Event Manager X to keep down the number of open projects and events.

All footage was recorded directly to ProRes so I did no conversion. I did not create proxies because I still don't see the purpose in doubling up on all the footage. Background rendering was turned off.

I've been cutting these 30 second spots all week and when I start a new project the system runs fine- no beach ball. The further I get into it, adding a few shots, pulling a few from the storyline, adding a few transitions- the speed gets slower and slower until I'm back to waiting 30 seconds just to play something. I do think compound clips affect the system adversely, but geez I have 16gb of RAM- that should cover me, right?

What flavor of ProRes? What device exactly recorded this stuff? At what bit-rate?

What does "plenty of space" actually mean? What percentage?

Only other item to verify is what GPU you're running.

1TB of space remaining.

Recorded on PIX 240 in Prores 422. I'm on a 2010 8-core Mac Pro.

Long as it's not ProRes HQ.

What graphic card are you running?

ATI Radeon HD 5770

Seems the system is beefy enough. If there's enough free space on all connected drives (including the RAID). No media or events or projects are on the OS drive. Everything is ProRes 422. I'm not sure what the delay would be unless there's some background processing going on.

You could always run Disk Warrior to repair the directories on all attached drives, see if that improves anything.

Are you running dual monitors off of that GPU?

Not sure if an update to ML would help at all, either.

I mean it's separate partition that I made specifically for FCPX so I can't imagine any things getting too messed up directory-wise.

I am running dual monitors. And I have Blackmagic SDI card feeding a FSI 17" broadcast.

Sorry- update ML? Not sure what this is...

Uh oh... you said "partition"... that's not good...

Why is your OS drive partitioned?

You STILL shouldn't have your media, events, and projects on the physical OS drive, even if it's partitioned. It's about the limited bandwidth and audio/video data streams, not about capacity or directory locations.

Partitions can even cause a performance hit on a system, too.

I took a drive and I created a partition for Lion and FCPX. There's nothing unusual there. It's very common. All of my events and projects are on my RAID volume.

This could be a bit of a long shot, but is your raid going to sleep and getting the beachball while re-wakening?

Interesting thought. Though I think I turned off all energy saver prefs to put hard drive to sleep. Unless there's some override I've not heard about...

Sorry I can't help you with if there is or not, just throwing it out there a possibility. I use an external raid and had similar problems for a while, I use "Disksomnia" to keep it awake when FCPX is running but it wouldn't help you unless you can find out if it is your problem.