Fusion Drive vs. Flash Storage vs. Serial ATA Drive

What is the best internal system drive to have in a new i7 iMac for FCP X editing and why?

Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm
1TB Fusion Drive
3TB Fusion Drive
768GB Flash Storage

Flash, absolutely the fastest.

Fusion is reading directly from a Flash drive, and could be a more affordable alternative as long as you don't put any Events or Projects on it.

ATA is plenty fast enough for most editing, but I'm finding Flash to be nicer for faster boot ups, faster shut downs, faster app launches.

An equally important question is what type of external drive will you use for your Events and Projects? Thunderbolt is the way to go.

Hi Ben,

Why do you advise not putting any Events or Projects on a Fusion drive?

Can Events or Projects be kept on an internal system Flash HD?

What external Thunderbolt drives do you suggest?

Thanks!

Never put Events or Projects on the OS drive no matter what type it is. The multiple video and audio streams that FCP needs to read/write eat up the limited bandwidth of a drive very quickly.

As for the Fusion drive, I've not seen any confirmed data about how those files are handled. Since the drive will put often used files on the SSD portion, how does it determine that? These video files can be quite large and take some time to copy, theoretically slowing down overall performance. But like I've said, there's no hard data about how this works with Events and Projects to trust just yet, in my opinion as an engineer.

I've yet to find a bad T'bolt drive. I've used the Pegasus, LaCie, and Elgato bus powered single SSD, and they all kick butt as far as I'm concerned. But if you plan on doing this for a living, get the biggest T'bolt RAID you can beg, borrow, or steal money for. It will save you headaches in the long run.

Can music, iTunes, photos and word docs be stored on the system drive?

What about using the OS drive for web surfing?

What's your opinion of G-Raid?

Well yes, those don't tax a drive's bandwidth like video editing does. My comments are very specific to video editing, period. G-RAID has a good track record, I've never used one personally.

What's your opinion of the new i7 iMac?

It is a nice computer. I don't regularly work with iMacs at the moment.

Or you could just get the new Thunderbolt 20 TB Raid from Lacie ...


mmm... covet much?

:sick:

Besides increasing the start-up speed of apps and programs what other benefits does an internal Flash (SSD) drive have over the 1TB or 3TB Fusion Drive as the system drive in the iMac?

Faster read/write speeds. That's it. You still have bandwidth issues so your Events and Projects should be on a secondary drive.