Internal PCIe SSD vs External thunderbolt speeds

Hello, probably a newbie question but am I likely to see any noticeable difference in processing and rendering speed on FCPX if I store all my files on an external thunderbolt drive compared to storing it on the internal PCEi of my MCP or my MacPro? Would be useful to take partially completed media with me when I travel, to work on when I'm away.

Cheers

You'll only see external drives increase performance if they are A- RAID, B- compared to the system drive.

An internal SATA drive will be plenty fast enough for most work. If you do really heavy work, very large projects, large format video, an external RAID (or internal on a MP) will help. But for most work, an internal secondary drive, would be fine.

An external T'bolt unit will allow a single solid state drive or spinning disk drive work at its maximum throughput (depending on the enclosure it is in). Not any significant increase over a secondary internal SATA drive. But a T'bolt RAID will show (again, depending on the enclosure) a great performance increase.

Simply NEVER put your Libraries and/or media on the "system drive". Then you get bandwidth bottleneck problems.

Hello Ben,

Thanks for your prompt and comprehensive reply.

I'm still a bit confused, I was actually wondering if using the thunderbolt would slow down my processing speed compared to the internal SSD, if so would it be significant enough to make a noticeable difference. I do the odd multicam project but no huge bodies of work. The final length of my longest projects would around 10 mins.

So in a nutshell my processing won't be slowed down if I store all my media including render files on my external thunderbolt drive?

Oh heck no! T'bolt will not slow you down at all. Even a single spinning disk drive in a T'bold enclosure will not be slower than an internal SATA drive. Probably be close to the same, maybe a smidgeon better.

But I have one the new PCie solid state drives in my mac book pro, which I think are supposed to be a lot faster than the old internal sata drives.

NEVER put Libraries and/or media on your "system drive", no matter what type of drive it is. Even SSD drives have limited bandwidth that craps out at some point. "Bandwidth limitations", that's the point you need to understand. Even SSD has bandwidth limitations. Not to mention the encode/decode of data they do, that spinning drives don't.

Yes. DO NOT use system drives to store media and Libraries. While they are fast, the internal SSD is running the OS, the Application, and now you're asking it to drive the media as well.

Wirral3 wrote: ...So in a nutshell my processing won't be slowed down if I store all my media including render files on my external thunderbolt drive?

In general no. However a Thunderbolt interface itself doesn't make the drive fast. A single 5400 rpm bus-powered 1TB drive like the Buffalo Ministation is a lot slower than the 1TB SSD in a nMP, despite contention for OS resources.

Also, most common editing activities in FCP X are CPU or GPU-bound not disk bound. You can see this by watching the I/O rate in Activity Monitor or iStat Menus. Of course if you're editing many concurrent streams, or editing uncompressed 4k, you'll hit an I/O limit sooner.

As everyone said in general you want to use a separate drive for media. Besides the performance issue, libraries become so big so quickly that a 500GB or even 1TB SSD system drive just runs out of space.

Cheers Guys, this is all really useful information. I guess the summary would be store all media and render files OFF my macs. I didn't realize that thunderbolt raid was quicker than regular thunderbolt. I was waiting for thunderbolt 2 to come down in price, but I guess standard thunderbolt raid drives may be a better deal. Any recommendations? I'm currently using a Lacie 4TB thunderbolt for my nMP its powered but don't think its raid, and a 1TB buffalo ministation thunderbolt for my MBP (late 2013).

Wirral3 wrote: ...I guess standard thunderbolt raid drives may be a better deal. Any recommendations? I'm currently using a Lacie 4TB thunderbolt for my nMP its powered but don't think its raid, and a 1TB buffalo ministation thunderbolt for my MBP (late 2013).

The benchmarks I've seen for the Lacie 4TB TB look very good for a single drive -- over 200 MB/sec. Yes a RAID array would be better but for many things you won't notice the difference. This is especially when editing compressed video like H.264, since that lowers the I/O rate.

The 1TB Buffalo ministation I think is 5400 rpm, which isn't that fast. The fastest bus-powered USB 3 drive I've tested is a HGST Touro S, which does about 130 MB/sec.

On USB flash drives, the fastest one I've tested is the 128GB Sandisk Extreme Pro, which did about 250 MB/sec read/write on QuickBench large.

The Pegasus R4 is a good RAID array with a built-in hardware controller. However I've seen many good reviews of the OWC Thunderbay 4 (which is TB2), which comes bundled with SoftRAID. If purchased with installed drives, it has a 3-year warranty, vs the Pegasus 2-year warranty.

Re Thunderbolt 1 vs 2, I seriously doubt you'll see any performance difference in a pure disk drive application. Thunderbolt 2 can display 4k video and handle disk traffic on the same bus.

Make sure you think in terms of backup. Even if using RAID5 or SSD, everything should be backed up, preferably using two separate methods such as Time Machine and Carbon Copy, to two different backup drives.

When thinking about Thunderbolt vs Thunderbolt 2, you should realize that for a single drive, the TB bus speed is much greater than the speed of the drive itself; the same is true even if you have a 2-drive RAID (unless the drives in there are SSD). So in this case, moving from TB to TB2 would not help, since the drives would stiil be the bottleneck, not the bus.

That brings me to another oft repeated advice: "NEVER use the system drive for your media". I agree in broad terms with the rationale, but SSD does change the equation a bit - the internal SSD on a MP is faster than a typical 4-drive TB2 RAID with spinning platters...

For working on the road on a small-ish project, it is perfectly FINE to use your internal SSD drive in your Retina MBP. I do this all the time. Still, I would prefer a TB RAID (which I don't have), or a fast-ish USB3 large drive (which I do have) for heavier duty work.

Edit. Don't worry too much. Oh, and by the way, BACKUP!!!!

Thank you so much everybody, loads of really useful information here. I think I'll keep all my larger projects on the 4TB thunderbolt connected to the nMP and upload media for smaller projects ie less than 20G direct to the MBPr for when I'm away from the office. I'll keep my eye out for a RAID in due course, of course!

I use the OWC Thunderbay 4 with my own drives (WD Cavier Black) and the speed is way more than good enough for all my projects

pollux wrote: I use the OWC Thunderbay 4 with my own drives (WD Cavier Black) and the speed is way more than good enough for all my projects...

I assume that is RAID-0? Will you be using that for production or RAID-5?