Can FCPX Transcode Multiple Files at the Same Time?

I notice that FCPX transcodes files one at a time. Is this normal? I would think that it would start multiple jobs that are multithreaded in order to transcode multiple files.
I have all my libraries and media stored on my Fusion drive. I know,... I know,... I really need to split up the media to separate drives. But is that what is really causing FCPX to go so slow on the transcoding?

It's normal.

My understanding is that either way, when the system is transcoding, it is just as fast to give 100% to do one file at a time, rather than split the system between multiple files. Essentially, the same amount of data still has to be processed either way. in fact if your doing multiple files at once, a hard drive has to read multiple sectors, so it could actually slowdown the overall time it takes. I believe this is also why the macOS when copying multiple files across drives does them one at a time as opposed to all at once. I think they started doing that with Yosemite, but maybe it was el capitan. I'd love to hear a computer engineer explain it though!

Interesting. I understand.

Should I be splitting my libraries up to an external RAID? Will that speed up my transcoding activities? So if my original media is referenced off of a RAID 5 and my library with optimized and proxy media was on my Fusion drive, would that speed things up? What do other people do?

in short kinda...
it really depends on the type or port you are using... USB, Thunderbolt, or Ethernet...

How is your raid connected? what hard drive options do you have? what kind of media are you transcoding?

In the case of transcoding, it's basically all about getting the data to the CPU as fast as possible, then back to a drive as fast as possible. Raid 5's are pretty good at both the Read/write. so that's a good starting point.

Having your Media, Libraries and Cache, and FCPX itself, on separate drives should, in theory, be the fastest. if however, your media, Libraries and Cache were all going over the same USB bus, then you essentially are asking a lot of the USB bus, and it could result in you having the dreaded beach ball, as FCPX will have to wait for the next batch of info to make it through that poor USB bus.

In your case (assuming you are going over thunderbolt to the raid), I'd have media and cache on the raid 5, the library on either a separate drive, the raid, or the system drive. (seeing as you have a fusion drive, the library on the system drive might make the most sense.)

for our work stations, we go over thunderbolt 2, to pegasus Raids, and keep everything on the Raids (fcpx is on the system drive). We get the occasional Beachball, usually at start up, or when duplicating projects, sometimes when changing to a large event. but the simplicity of the media management makes it a small inconvienence. Also, it allows for an editor to just grab the library and move it to a separate drive if they want to take it home. (hopefully they remember to clear the cache first, to speed up the transfer)

hope that helps,

Fusion drives, IMHO, suck. But, I have prejudices. And I'm assuming that's your system drive, where your Libraries shouldn't be anyway. Would a RAID5 help? Absolutely YES. A great deal, especially over a Fusion drive.

Thanks for the info. I have a couple of disks laying around. So I'm going to configure them as RAID 0, and then a RAID 1 and measure performance. I hear that SoftRaid is the excellent software for this. But macOS now supports building a RAID again via DiskUtility. So I'll play with it.
Thanks.