Performance issues while tagging clips

Hi together,

at the moment I'm editing my first documentary. I imported all clips and already transcoded them into optimized media.
Everything runs smoothly but when I start tagging my clips I discover performance issues. Especially when I mark 3 or more clips and tag them with a keyword it took sometimes several seconds to perform this task. When I mark more clips (greater 10) the spinning wheel appears and I have to wait until I can go on with my work.

I wonder how to tag my 4000 clips now without loosing so much time when it comes to key wording.

I know my system setup is not "top of the edge" but everything else is fine.

My setup:

MacBook Air (2 GHz I7, 8 GB RAM)
Extenal Seagate HDD (3 TB, 7200rpm) connected via USB 3

I wonder if it would be better to use a Thunderbolt HDD. Faster is always better.

Anybody has the same experiences?

Thunderbolt is the way to go!! It helps iff you use proxies

I dont use proxies...everything is on one external HDD connected through USB3...

that is exactly what i am saying… it seems are close to your macbook air limits for handling hi res footage. I suggest u use proxies or update to a much faster thunderbolt raid

hi, mindgap, I also have large project, about 400 hours.
yes, we get slower and slower when we import these clips.
but, we can bear it until now.
we distribute these documentary clips into 3 mac pros ,each with 8gb fiber RAID,
each mac pro may has 2000-4000+clips, and we run FCPX 10.0.9, not 10.1.1,
cause we don't think the 10.1.1 is stable.

I think your system setup is not enough for 4000 clips.
you need a disk with very strong IO, so that you can handle indexing these clips

The Air is barely enough to run FCPX for heavy editing work. It can be nice for light work. The CPU, etc, are simply not up to what a Mac Pro is. A Thunderbolt drive would only help if it is a RAID. USB 3 should be fine for most work, but you seem to have a pretty large production. If you update anything, I'd update to a Mac with more GPU power, but a T'bolt RAID wouldn't hurt. Yeah, I think that Air is being pushed to it's limits. 16GB RAM wouldn't hurt, either.

Thanks for all your feedback. What I don't get is that handling the clips isn't a problem. It's smooth to handle the them. But when it comes to set Keywords the hole system shuts down for seconds?

I mean, how many power does a system need to tag 10 clips with a keyword? It's basically a data base operation. No rendering is needed here...this is what makes me think about it.

I see this performance issue on my 2008 MacPro 3,1 28GB / eSata RAID 5 & RAID0.
I, too, am astonished that a simple database alteration can take so much time. It slows down operations especially when i could key in 2-4 keywords in the time it takes to actually save 1. I started seeing this on larger projects (~1000+ clips).
I've considered moving smaller projects to an SSD to test performance gain. Is anyone doing this?
I think it would be ideal if we could break out the database portion of the Library to an SSD and keep media, renders, transcodes on larger drives.