Hard drive recommendation?

FCPX hive mind:

Looking for recommendation for a Thunderbolt 3 12-16tb external hard drive populated with 7200RPM drives. Looking for speedy read/write but want to as always be careful with my spend $.

Currently have TB2 Promise Pegasus drives, Cal Digit, and OWC drives but running out of space. Will be getting a new TB3 computer and want to know the best price/performance options you can recommend.

Primarily used for editing HD and 4K footage on FCPX.

Thanks!

Promise does Build To Order now at a pretty reasonable price. Worth checking out. I just purchased a TB3 R8 32TB. It's blazing fast!

estore.promise.com/us/product/bto/pegasus3

Yes, they make good products--have two of their RB2 drives. Was wondering if their might be something out there as good but a little less pricey.

Aslo, and this is weird, the find print on the product page says:" 1Typical HDD performance will be approximately 200MB/s reads and 200MB/s writes, per drive."

Which is very slow. My TB2 drives are like 600-700mb. Odd.

screendor wrote: … best price/performance options you can recommend.
Primarily used for editing HD and 4K footage on FCPX.
…

read this morning on another board:

"Switch to Proxy, and use any usb3 drive … but 'using Proxy' seems to be unmanly…"

just quoting! SCNR

back to seriously:
… in a pro environment, stability and reliability are of most concerns, imho. And fact is, HD/4k in proxy-mode don't make use of a fraction the data-speed a TB-connected Raid offers…
So, what is your back-up strategy? …And how many hours of source-material you're using (consider to avoid mechanics/spinners, switch to SSD)?

My strategy generally is to transcode everything to pro-res, ingest. For back up, I do a 1-1 clone of the entire drive at the end of every session. Both drives Raid 0.

Because I often do all color correction, effects in FCPX, I don't use proxies. And I transcode to Pro Res because it is the least taxing on the system, especially when applying Neat Video, Color Finale Pro, vignette, audio FX, etc.

screendor wrote: ...Because I often do all color correction, effects in FCPX, I don't use proxies....

What does using proxies have to do with color correction? I usually do color correction and effects on proxy files. The only think you can't do with proxies is alpha-channel transparency.

Using proxies takes about 1/10th the disk space of full-resolution H264 material.

All 11 films nominated for the 2018 Oscar for best picture or best editing essentially used proxies for editing. IOW they edited a transcoded 1080p version, regardless of what the original resolution was: blog.frame.io/2018/03/05/oscar-2018-workflows/

screendor wrote: Aslo, and this is weird, the find print on the product page says:" 1Typical HDD performance will be approximately 200MB/s reads and 200MB/s writes, per drive."
Which is very slow. My TB2 drives are like 600-700mb. Odd.

As far as I know, that is about the top speeds of a 7200rpm HDD no matter how it's connected... Which is why you need to RAID them to increase the speed... Which is why Thunderbolt is quite useless (well, at least unneccessarily expensive) for an enlosure holding only one HDD.

Interesting. If I were shooting on very large format codecs like Red or in Raw, would definitely use proxies. But I don't for our general HD and 4K projects because I believe I would need more hard drive space. Sure, the proxies take a lot less but when I go to export, I'm going to need to generate Optimized media (Pro Res) and have that on my drive. So I would end up with proxies and Pro Res, no?

Yes.

I should have mentioned that I'm looking at at 16TB Raid O enclosure, and looking to populate it with fast 7200 HDDs. So it's trying to find out the peformance difference between say a 4TB Seagate Barracuda and a 4TB WD Black drive...

screendor wrote: Interesting. If I were shooting on very large format codecs like Red or in Raw, would definitely use proxies. But I don't for our general HD and 4K projects because I believe I would need more hard drive space. Sure, the proxies take a lot less but when I go to export, I'm going to need to generate Optimized media (Pro Res) and have that on my drive. So I would end up with proxies and Pro Res, no?

If you're shooting 1080p or 4k H264, proxies (which themselves are 1080p ProRes) take about 60% additional space. IOW if you have 1GB of media, proxies would add another 600MB for a total of 1.6GB.

If you transcode that to optimized media, that takes about 6x the space. So 1GB of media becomes about 7GB total.

So the overall disk space difference is 7GB vs 1.6GB, or roughly a 4x difference.

You don't need to generate optimized media for all your content before you export. When you switch out of proxy mode and export the timeline it only creates full-res ProRes render files for the timeline itself -- not for all the media you imported.

The only two reasons to not use proxy are (1) Proxy doesn't support alpha channel transparency, (2) If you have 1080p and 4k mixed resolution, proxy is fixed at 1/2 the linear or 1/4 the total resolution. So proxy of 4k is 1080p which is fine for editing and color correction. However proxy of 1080p is 960 x 540, maybe a little low in some cases.

I edit about 90% 4k and 10% 1080p and I generally have no problem using proxy for all of that. However if you have 80% 1080p and 20% 4k, maybe that would be a problem.

Generally FCPX is fast enough on most machines to not need proxy for 1080p H264. It would be nice if it allowed creating proxies only for 4k and then using original media for the 1080p clips and proxies for the 4k clips. But it doesn't support that.

Why optimize everything to start with? I edit 1080 and 4K, 2-4 angle interview Multicams, all with a Pegasus R8 T3 RAID 5, 28TB. I get footage from GoPros, DJI drones, RX0, iPhones, and some GH4s. And all of this goes out to TV broadcast. Never optimized, never had issues. Saves space using original H.264 media.

In the filed on my rMBP I have to use proxies, but still use original media, not optimized.

Wow. I have similar Raids--Pegasus TB2 R6 and R4 connected to a 2013 nMP.

Two things: I've heard it said many places that best performance results from using Pro Res files (less demand on the CPU/GPU). Secondly, once I start apply grades, denoise, etc, system performance really grinds down--which is why I transcode to Pro Res.

My assumption would be that it would be even worse with native files.

FCPX.guru wrote: Why optimize everything to start with? I edit 1080 and 4K, 2-4 angle interview Multicams... GoPros, DJI drones, RX0, iPhones, and some GH4s....Saves space using original H.264 media...

I guess everyone has their own tolerance for editing performance. On my top-spec 2017 iMac and 10-core iMac Pro I can edit one stream of 4k H264, provided it's not too long. It's a little laggy but if it's scripted material and doesn't require a lot of documentary-style exploration, it's OK. On all other machines, inc'l 2015 iMac, 12-core nMP, etc. it's too laggy -- for me personally.

Even on my 2017 iMac and 10-core iMP, 4k H264 multi-cam is just too slow without proxies. Also, when browsing through large amounts of 4k H264 content rapidly, I still prefer proxies. If the total amount of media was 5 or 10 hrs, it might be OK. For 100 hrs of media, so much skimming and tagging is required that even a little lag slows me down.

However your basic point is good -- don't immediately assume that you've got to have either optimized or proxy media. Depending on the machine and codec, it might do OK without that, even on 4k in some cases.

"My assumption would be that it would be even worse with native files."

If you have an older Mac, maybe.

I'm running an iMac Pro (10 Core, Vega 64) and I do 4K multicams with no real performance issues. Have never missed a deadline, have never worked overtime to make a deadline.