WHAT MAKE FCPX TICK?

General Question what make FCPX tick. So what i mean is where can i put in a pacemaker to run fcpx faster and smoothly. Ok New SSD drive will speed up the opening and closing of fcpx will that drive have any other effect on the running of fcpx. Graphic card Is perhaps the heart but which one and what is the best thing to look for in a graphic card, for smooth running editing HD/ 4k editing. and the third piece of hardware is the media drive. thoughts on this would be great fast sata drive of SSD. Mac memory of course we are full loaded.

Bottom line what can we do when upgrading the system for best results.
Kind regards

Trevor

What Mac model to you have, and what model year is it? That would help us a great deal. But in general;

GPU should be the fastest possible, with the most VRAM possible, and the most compatible with your system:
support.apple.com/en-us/HT202239

If you have an older, pre-late-2013 Mac Pro (again, we've no clue at this point, you've not said), there is a thread here about that you may want to read through.

As many of the fastest CPU cores as possible.

16 GB RAM or better.

SSD helps for OS drive, RAID for secondary drive, necessary for storage of libraries and media.

USB 3.0 or (preferred) Thunderbolt RAIDs, 7200rpm for spinning platter drives.

Be sure all drives have at least 10-15% of their capacity left as free space (the more the better), PLUS enough room for the files end users work with directly.

System maintenance: run a Repair weekly on all drives with Disk Utility, run a Repair on all drives' directories with Disk Warrior.

Depending on your Mac model, year, and specs, you may want to use either Optimized or Proxy media rather than native.

Working with a mac pro trusted friend 2009.
Ok SSD helps Os stater fast but dose nothing for fcpx am I right there?

two internal drives raided like wd Black performance 160 mb would give 320 mb speed or close vs a ssd drive for projects am I right or wrong?

I am not sure that a 2009 will take usb.

You have said nothing about graphic cards I am sure they also play a roll .

Many thanks warp speed

trevor

I have a 2009 Mac Pro and a 2013 Mac Pro and they're pretty different. The 2009 Mac Pro was my main machine before the 2013 purchase, now the 2009 is a standby machine.

The 2009 has 48gb of RAM, 8 cores, a Radeon 6850 GPU, a CalDigit Raid card driving the four internal bays and a CalDigit Element 4 bay connected via mini SAS. It also has a CalDigit USB 3.0 card and a BlackMagic Decklink for external monitoring. All of those upgrades cost a lot of $. But I did them gradually from when the machine was new and there were no alternatives. But my 2013 machine still smokes the 2009.

Not knowing how much RAM you have or what your graphics card is makes it hard to know how far you are from having a solid edit system.

I guess my point is upgrading depends on what your plans are and how long you think you're going use that machine. Putting a bunch of $ into a 7 year old machine seems like a poor spend, so I get things that can be ported to other machines. Obviously lack of Thunderbolt makes a big difference because you can't buy TB peripherals until you have a TB machine. But USB 3.0 cards are available, so you could go that route and be close with some disks arrays.

You can do the following, which makes a big difference:
1) Get an SSD (500 gb is fine) for a boot drive and place it in the Optical bay, freeing up your 4 drive bays.
2) Get four drives for your drive bays and stripe them as RAID 0. They don't have to be massive.
3) Get a USB 3.0 card and a USB 3.0 4 disk external RAID (striped RAID 5) to use as a TimeMachine backup.
4) If you have 16gb of RAM or less, try to find cheap RAM to get you to 32gb
5) If you can find an inexpensive PC graphics card to upgrade your GPU, then do it.

Otherwise, I'd abandon the 2009 and buy a really fast current iMac or wait for the new Mac Pro if you've got the time and $.

Trevor Hughes wrote: Working with a mac pro trusted friend 2009.
Ok SSD helps Os stater fast but dose nothing for fcpx am I right there?

two internal drives raided like wd Black performance 160 mb would give 320 mb speed or close vs a ssd drive for projects am I right or wrong? YES, IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE

I am not sure that a 2009 will take usb. IT WILL TAKE A USB 3.0 CARD

You have said nothing about graphic cards I am sure they also play a roll . YES, THEY DO ESPECIALLY WITH THE 2009

Many thanks warp speed

trevor

Yes time flys.2009 - 2016.
Portable to the next machine is wise, Will be starting with testing a new graphic card next week Gtx760or 780 which should boast the usage of GPU running now with a old 4000 for mac and in test it show 50% better speeds.

Then raiding the drives of for project files is about as much as I can do.

But hey it all works fine. and may be ssd for start up disk but that will not have any effect on the runing of FCPx apart from opening and closing right?

Cheers