7200 vs 5400?

Great, thanks! I'll do that.. but first I take a few tutorials about organising my stuff and so, but thank you, i'll get a WD!

Lucy, you can have Events and Projects on any drive you want.

On the system drive, since many different users can log in, the Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects folders are in your Movies folder. On all other drives they are at the root level.

Media Manager X is vital to anyone doing serious work in FCP X.
assistedediting.intelligentassistance.com/EventManagerX/

Have you done either the macProVideo.com training, or the Ripple Training? Either will walk you through a lot of media management stuff. I even have a whole course (currently being updated) at macProVideo.com about media management in FCP X.

Video editing drives are simply the fastest drives you can afford. Thunderbolt is best, FW800 is second after that. Not enough real world feedback on USB 3 for me to personally recommend it yet. But all your drives should be 7200rmp SATA drives in whatever external enclosure (T'bolt or FW) you purchase.

The reason is that the OS and apps eat up a good bit of hard drive bandwidth. Just like your home Internet connection, a drive has a set limit on available bandwidth to run data both ways. So we put our Events and Projects both on a secondary drive to gain performance. Those multiple video and audio streams will eat up tons of bandwidth.

Have a third (both drives backed up to one drive) and possibly a fourth drive (both drives backed up to they're unique backup drives) as backup for everything.

Very simple, once you wrap your head around it.

Thank you so much, Ben, for clearing this basic matter up for me. I will -indeed- start by doing some basic training, like the one(s) you mention, and of course now also your course. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with me, it really helps me to get a clear starting point to get grip on these basics. Have a real good weekend and greetings from a sunny Netherlands!

My own understanding is that for single drives, there may not be much difference between Firewire 800 and Thunderbolt since the fastest transfer speeds are significantly less than Firewire 800.

For RAID systems Thunderbolt would be a clear advantage as striped drives and the media throughput demands can easily exceed that of Firewire 800.

I'm also unsure about USB3. I believe part of the issue with USB2 was that despite supposedly having slightly higher bandwidth than Firewire 400 (480mbps vs 400mbps) was that its "dumb" interface was not very good at sustaining that speed. I'm not sure if that holds true with USB3. The AJA test software might reveal that.

cseeman wrote: My own understanding is that for single drives, there may not be much difference between Firewire 800 and Thunderbolt since the fastest transfer speeds are significantly less than Firewire 800.

Um, FW800 still does not transfer data streams (not data bursts) at the top speed a single SATA drive will deliver. T'bolt will let it operate closer to full speed. I'd still demand 7200rpm for a T'bolt drive, no matter what.

USB's issue was data streams vs. data bursts. Most drive benchmarks/specs are based on the burst rate, which are alwasy faster. This is great for static files such as photos and spreadsheets. A data stream is when video/audio (or scientific monitoring equipment) is streaming data real-time to/from a hard drive. This is always a lower speed than the burst rate. Cause of packet errors and such. I've yet to see a USB 3 real world test for video editing.

Real world performance is never the same as tech specs.

But T'bolt is the fastest, even with a single drive. But yes, RAID is where you'll milk all the speed out of a T'bolt cable possible.

cseeman wrote: Offhand that looks like it's intended to be a boot/system drive given that it's hybrid. I'm not sure how a hybrid really benefits as a media drive.

You might want to look at OWC kits.
eshop.macsales.com/shop/drive_bracket/datadoubler/

You are correct: Hybrid drives have a very small amount of nand, and thus are only going to give increased boot speed. They will not help at all with large contiguous files.

As far as the original question, I had recently been asking about media-drive speed on many forums, without any satisfactory answers, until last week. Some "experts" say that any drive is fast enough, and others says to get the fastest drive you possibly can.

Both of these answers are completely wrong.

Lord Bless Ronny Coutens, who gave me the correct answer here:

www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...-is-a-waste?start=20

I have since veririfed this information with both DigiLloyd, and also with the head of a FCP users group.

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The next part of the puzzle, after you calculate your maximum i=o speed needs, is to determine what drives will actually give you that speed. You have to take into account how full the drive might get (surprisingly, this even affects SSD's although to a much lesser extent than with spinning hard drives) and the fact that we deal with large, contiguous, non-compressible data. The manufacturer's speed claims don't apply to such data.

The AJA test seems like a pretty accurate way to determine the real-world numbers. However, you still need to make sure you test with real-world conditions:

A fairly full drive.

Test using the last-written data. (esp with a hard drive)

Test with multiple streams running at once. - This, I believe, is one thing AJA can't do, though I could be mistaken.

- And finally, test again after six months of hard use.

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For my needs, it looks like I won't ever need more than 100 MB/s. I can't get that with a 7200 rpm Sata drive (not video files) and I don't want to use raid, for a number of reasons, but I SHOULD be able to get that with even a 3G SSD.

I'm doing that research today. IIRC, DigiLloyd recently did some testing of this exact thing, using video files. If anyone already has such numbers, listed for various drives, please post them here.

I gave my 2 cents as an IT engineer, and personally, I think you're blowing a simple issue way out of proportion. I mean, we could get in to how no Mac made to date has a 3G data buss. How Mac Pros currently will never do more than 2G SATA. Then there's latencies between the drive, its controller card, the Macs data bus, and the CPU, then from the CPU to and from the GPU. We could get into how not all HDD units have the same number of platters inside that little metal case, how read/write heads move at different speeds for different drives, etc, etc, etc. Are you on shared or local storage? But none of that will help you realistically select the "best" drive on the market. There is no single best drive on the market.

Get the fastest you can afford, because under all the bull the truth is that the more video work you do, the more complex the projects, the more streams you'll need, the more CPU cores you'll need, the more RAM you'll need, the better CPU you'll need, etc. It's an evolutionary thing, and there are thousands of variables. But what would I know..

And why not a RAID? If I could afford a T'bolt RAID, I'd have one ASAP! Give me one good reason not to?

5200 vs 7200 was the original question? For video, you need 7200 or SSD. You need SATA or FW800 or T'bolt. Minumum 7200 FW800, Maximum SSD RAID T'bolt. No such thing as a drive system too fast for video editing, period.

Western Digital 4TB Thunderbolt can be RAID 0 and drives are user serviceable. $479 once you add it to the cart
I wish they sold the enclosure only.
This is assuming you rethink the use of a RAID as per BenB.
www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/841455-RE...Thunderbolt_Duo.html

BenB wrote:
And why not a RAID? If I could afford a T'bolt RAID, I'd have one ASAP! Give me one good reason not to? .

I'll just give you my reasons. (good ones.)

1: I run four raid-1 Sata enclosures external to my Mac Pro, for various backups and on-demand data. Because of my audio card and the fact that I want add a 6G internal bus, I have no more room for a raid card, an eSata card, or a T-bolt card.

2: Unless you use an expensive, chip-less raid solution, you can be in deep trouble if your raid card fails, and you need your data right away, as often the encoding is proprietary. (But you knew this, right?)

3: For video, Even a 3G SSD is faster than two WD Black sata's in raid-0. (they are pretty even for things like text documents.)

4: I don't want raided Sata drives inside my Mac, for all the above reasons, plus they throw a lot more heat than SSD's, which causes the Mac's fans to run more loudly.

5: While SSD's are not failure-proof, they are far more dependable than Stat drive.

6: I can do my work perfectly fine with only a 256 GB main media / scratch / whatever you want to call it drive. So, an internal 3G SSD is fine, and 6G simply speed up file transfers.

7: When you look at the cost difference, factoring in the cost of the raid card and also the fact that you can't fill Sata drives more than about 50% without significant slowdown (something you seem to want to deny, Ben, but it's a simply law of physics) the cost per GB of SSD vs a Sata array is not that great.

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^ All good reasons.

Now, if someone has a MBP, which I realize a lot of video pros are using, then you might consider a Tbolt system. - but they are awfully expensive, and you don't gain any speed.
I don't know what options exist for Macbooks, but if it has eSata ports, I'd go that way, and use external SSD. You can always put them in one of those overpriced Tbolt enclosures 2 years from now, when Apple completely abandons eSata.

And no, there is no point in buying the fastest drive you can. You would simply be wasting money that could be spent on some nice plugins. Ronnie's figures seem to be correct. very few people (except folks editing Red, etc) are ever going to need more than (a true) 100 MB/s throughput. - But again, determining which drives actually give that much throughput, when using large non-compressible data like ProRes, is somewhat tricky.

1- How are you going to add a "6G internal bus" to your Mac Pro, exactly?

2- RAID cards fail less often than HDD controller cards. RAID is not a back-up solution, it's a speed solution. Don't confuse the two.

3- Yes, SDD is faster than HDDs, that is understood, duh.

4- Not much heat, no excess fan noise, I have Mac Pros in many installations across the country set up with internal RAIDs and the heat and noise are non-issues. They do not ramp up fans any more than a single internal drive.

5- Yes, SSDs "should" be more reliable "theoretically" at this point in time, because they have no floating read/write heads to physically crash into the drive's platters. But, most drives are pronounced "crashed" and dead due to severely corrupted directories, not physical crashes. When that happens you often can not determine if it was bad data or a physical malfunction. SSDs are prone to this same issue. They're not bullet proof by any means, but theoretically should be more reliable.

6- Problem is, no Mac does 6G, only 3G, so you will never have 6G performance on any current Mac.

7- HDDs do not slow down significantly when filled up, it does not defy physics, that's not how drives work. That is a scientific fact I can back up with 30 years of professional enterprise level IT engineering experience. It's an outdated myth from HDDs made a decade ago. Today's drives are simply too fast for that to matter.

Dude, you've been fed some incorrect information somewhere, and are really blowing a simple drive decision way out of proportion. But, hey, do what you want. Tell the doctor he knows nothing about medicine. I'm out, best of luck.