-
1 TB for everything or multiple drives?
Hello
I have a 1 TB drive that I use with my macbook pro. It has files from Photoshop, Final Cut X, Pro Tools, Motion, etc. I currently have 700 GB left. I was reading how it’s more efficient to have multiple drives for video, and audio. Is that really important? I’m asking because my computer is slowing down significantly over the past month and I have tons of audio and video projects. When I was at college I was told that having separate drives was important and that after finishing project I should move them to the bigger 1 TB drive. Even my standard iTunes program takes over 2 minutes to launch and the 1TB drive is constantly running as I edit video and audio 24/7.
-
7 Replies
-
You need to look at what you’re trying to achieve to fully answer your question.
Having your apps and your media / clips on the same drive is always going to be the slowest implementation unless you’re running a high-end SSD. By placing your media files onto a secondary drive, the I/O operations for starting your app and accessing your media will get separate I/O.
Even then, a single spindle (single disk) secondary disk will be your bottleneck as a single drive (unless you buy new model, 15K RPM drives) will limit your I/O potential to around 100MB/sec (80MB/sec on FW-800 and 45MB/sec on USB-2).
The further answer depends on your connectivity options. Does you MBP have Thunderbolt? If so, you have a world of options available to you once you attach something like ATTO’s Thunderlink SH1068 or a Sonnet Echo Express with ATTO’s H680. You can now connect multi-drive arrays that will really speed things up. For example, I connect my Retina MBP to a Sonnet EE Pro with the ATTO H680. This is then connected to a 2TB, 4 drive SSD striped array (4, 512GB Samsung 840 EVO) that provides over 800MB/sec of sustainable I/O to the system. With FCP X, Motion, After Effects and PPro running from the internal SSD and my media on the external SSD array, I’m hardly every (if at all) seeing the busy cursor and things render very quickly.
Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
My macbook pro is actually a refurbished used model that was upgraded by an apple retailer. It has 4 gigs of ram and I don’t believe it has thunderbolt. I will try separate hard drives. All my apps are on the internal drive. I do have all my iTunes stuff on my internal drive on the macbook. would that slow anything down? I literally have over 25 Gigs of iTunes stuff. I will give a test of separate drives and see if it’s better.
-
Bryce,
What is the total capacity of your internal drive and how much space have you free on that drive? As soon as the free space gets less that 15% of the total capacity of the drive you are in danger zone. Especially if you do any editing or rendering on your computer.
If you have 25GB of iTunes material on your system drive you might consider moving your iTunes Library to a portable external drive instead. This will free up your system drive.
– Ronny
-
Aside from iTunes though it seems to run faster if I edit video on a separate drive.
-
Editing from an external drive is a must if you want to work comfortably. Keeping your system drive as lean and clean as possible is also very important.
– Ronny
-
I’m curious whether or not I could also store my video files into dropbox and work on final cut x projects from the Dropbox? I have two large Hard Drives and I sometimes don’t want to lug them around when i’m traveling.
thanks
-
No you couldn’t use Dropbox. Get another 4GB RAM as well, it doesn’t cost much and will improve performance.
Steve Connor
There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up