Understanding hard drive choices for FCP video editing?

Hey, this might not be an FCP specific question, but I'm new to video editing and setting up my system. Presently I'm editing .264 right off a USB2 external 2TB drive on my late 2011 mac book pro. (2 usb2 ports, a firewire, and thunderbolt) I've added ram and a new SSD drive but everything else is factory. Not optimal I know, but it works fine for what I'm doing. Exporting master files back to the same drive takes about 1.5X real time.

I'm not a video professional and never plan to be a video professional. I plan to edit 1080 movies of me teaching (talking head, minimal effects) masterfile them as .264s and a lower res version for upload to the web.

My question is this, I do want a little more speed and a backup, but before I start spending a bunch of money on external drives, it would be helpful to know where the actual bottlenecks in my system are. For instance, I don't want to drop 700 bucks on a raid thunderbolt setup only to find out that my processor or graphics card are or just the nature of transcoding in general is going to be the limiting factor. On the other hand, if a big fancy setup is going to double my speed I might go for it, but if it's only going to add a little bit, maybe I'll pass. I've thought about everything from buying a second USB2 2tb drive to use as a backup to going for a big fast mirror drive. I'm really not sure what the right solution for my needs is because I don't understand the whole system. I'm willing to spend money I just want to make sure it's well spent.

Last question, is editing and then transcoding back to the same drive creating a bottleneck that would be solved by editing to one drive then masterfiling on another.

Thanks for your time and consideration and helping out a newbie.

My office has a few iMac workstations dating back to maybe 2012/13 and a 2015 MBP. I have a Pegasus 4TB RAID for our main active libraries and several G-Tech drives for less active libraries and backups. We also have a couple of Lacie drives for the same purpose.

The Pegasus is Thunderbolt. The G-Techs and Lacies are a mix of Thunderbolt, USB3 and Firewire 800.

We edit h264 DSLR content and XAVC footage. In my experience the performance gets a little better as you move up the I/O ramp. The impact of a faster connection like Thunderbolt hasn't dramatically increased my personal editing experience. Yes, our Pegasus is a bit faster than the other formats when it comes to editing, but not dramatically so. Where the Pegasus really shines is copying files. It's really, really fast. Moving files from the Pegasus to the iMac SSDs is way faster than the other options.

The other thing I have noticed, though I don't have any data to support it, is that on our systems the USB3 drives cause FCPX to crash a bit more than FW800 drives. The Thunderbolt drives crash the least. It's almost like the slower the connection is, the more likely FCPX will crash. Again, I can't support that claim with data.

Based on your fairly modest needs, I wouldn't think that a big, fast RAID is going to get you a lot. In fact, if I had to it again, I probably wouldn't get the Pegasus (even though it's great). I could probably have gotten by with a plain old non-RAID hard drive with Thunderbolt connection. I could have afforded more of them. When I got the Pegasus I was hoping for some dramatic speed increases on the editing side, which is where I really want my speed to be since that's where most of time is spent. Instead it was only a minor increase in editing efficiency.

I'll be curious to hear other people's feedback.

Brian S wrote: …would be helpful to know where the actual bottlenecks in my system are. …

usb2, no doubt.

plus, when you use the same 'Chanel' to push data in both directions (read Events, write export) it gets molasses

Question is how to invest smart?
FW is already obsolete, TB is on actual Macs avail, could be replaced on future Macs by usb3.1 ..
A raid (soft- or hardware) makes no sense on a slow usb2 connector.

So, … I guess, a TB-connected fast drive is your best option. Be it a 2 tray Raid box, or, rare=$$$, a TB-connected SSD
A usb3 connected drive/Raid is future proof, but doesn't add any value to your actual set-up.

… or, for shoestring budget, some used fw-connected harddrive… (??)

Brian S wrote: ...I'm editing .264 right off a USB2 external 2TB drive on my late 2011 mac book pro. (2 usb2 ports, a firewire, and thunderbolt)...Exporting master files back to the same drive takes about 1.5X real time...I do want a little more speed and a backup...is editing and then transcoding back to the same drive creating a bottleneck...

IMO USB 2.0 is just too slow. It is often 3x slower than a slow USB 3 5400 rpm bus-powered drive. Unfortunately your 2011 iMac was the last generation before USB 3.0 was added. Your options are FireWire (essentially obsolete) or Thunderbolt.

Ideally you don't want to edit and export to the same drive, however your main problem is the slowness of USB 2.0. This exacerbates everything else. You could probably get away with exporting to the same drive for a single stream of 1080p if the drive was faster.

This 3TB G-Tech G-Drive has both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 and is only $245: amzn.com/B00HQXUG2Q

Re export speed, my 2015 iMac exports 1080p content to H264 5x *faster* than real time, or 1 min. to export 5 min of material. This is not due to the hard drive since the I/O rate isn't that high, but the CPU is fast and it has Quick Sync.

Your 2011 MBP has a Sandy Bridge CPU which was Intel's 1st generation with Quick Sync. If this is used, I'd expect it to export faster than 1.5x real time (do you mean 7.5 minutes to export 5 min of material?). OTOH depending on the model of MBP it might only have a dual core CPU.

A good way to export for web usage is straight from FCPX using the following parameters:

Export>Master File>Settings
Format: Computer
Video codec H.264 Faster Encode
Resolution: 1280x720

If you do this and if your machine is not I/O-limited, I'd expect it to be faster than 1.5x the real time playback duration.