Beach Ball / usage - funny discovery!

OK - I ended up buying a G-Technologies (Hitatchi) 2TB external FW800 drive.

This piece of hardware looks nice, and performs really well. Only complaint is that it's noisy! (As noisy as my Iomega Ultramax 1TB (2x500GB) drive.

Anyway, when I shot down my USB drive and run a project from this FW800, performance in FCPX is dramatically improved.

BUT…the comparison is not quite fair, as the USB drive has many projects and events. The new FW800 drive is almost empty.

I will update once the rest of my stuff has been moved over…

Over and out!

I don't think as you fill the drive you will notice much degradation, provided you are not using several open projects and events at the same time. Once you reach the 10% to 15% available capacity, then it's probably time to retire that drive from any editing projects.

Bear in mind that a firewire 800 drive is still a minimum requirement for use with editing HD footage, and especially 1080. It won't continually be able to keep up with delivering the streams of video to your editor. I edit 720p footage referenced from a FW800 drive often with good results but I prefer editing from SSD or ESATA drives and just using FW800 for archives and storage.

But it is nearly twice as fast as your USB2 device and streams differently than the clunky delivery of USB, hence the performance boost.

SSD is fast and fun, but still very small and very expensive. eSATA is way more preferred if possible over FW800, but like DGW said, it's the minimum requirement.

But I wanted to make the point even if you buy an eSATA or FW800 drive, make gosh darn sure the drives inside of it are 7200rpm!

Yes, SSD's can be pricey, but they are coming in larger capacities as time goes on. I use (2) 512 GB SSD's, one for my OS and FCPX and one for my active projects media. The performance is outstanding. I usually edit direct off the scratch SSD and then upon completion move my project and events to the FW800 drives for storage.

The 512GB size almost always handles a few open projects and I never typically have more than that active at any one time. I think for many people a 256 GB drive for a project scratch disk would suffice (perhaps even 128GB)...and those SSD's are a lot cheaper nowadays.

dgwvideo wrote: ... I use (2) 512 GB SSD's, one for my OS and FCPX and one for my active projects media. The performance is outstanding. I usually edit direct off the scratch SSD and then upon completion move my project and events to the FW800 drives for storage.

So, are you saying you put your projects folder on a different drive than your events folder (can you do that?) Or, are you saying that you initially save your event and project on an SSD and once you're finished working on it, you move the completed event and projects to FW800 drives?

Also, I was under the impression that it wasn't good to use an SSD for your source and render files as too many rewrites on an SSD would limit it's life expectancy.

One of my SSD drives is strictly for my OSX Lion and its' applications (which includes the FCPX program, Motion, Compressor, Logic, etc.)

The second SSD drive is a scratch drive that contains my FCPX Projects and Events. When I import footage, it is imported to the SSD scratch drive. I do my editing from there. When my project is completed, I MOVE the project and related events to one of my FW800 drives.

I have also heard the concerns about writing and re-writing to SSD's, and since these are my first experience with them, I have no real knowledge of how long they will hold up. I expect, however, it is still quite a long time, just perhaps not as long as a standard high quality hard drive.

BTW- These are Crucial M4 6GBps SSD's and come with a three year warranty. (My Mac Pro only offers the 3GBPS data speeds but they are backwards compatible). The sheer efficiency and speed is amazing.

And yes you can put Projects and Events on any drive you want. They don't have to be on the same drive, or only on one drive, they can be on various drives. I have them spread across three.