FCP 7 / Multitrack on Yosemite?

[David Roth weiss]

Yes, constantly downloading and deleting movies on your SSD will cause it to deteriorate prematurely, very much like using it as a media drive, simply because your moving big files on an off the drive. In a boot drive, apps are updated only occasionally, but for the most part they are left in place and simply started up when you need them. Document filed are also pretty much left in place with some minor changes, but that’s what SSDs are designed for.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Michael Brown]

David, thanks and that’s what I’m heading for now. My main goal is to get unhampered multiclip playback with 7 angles, preferably without having to stick to 1/2-frames (just a nuisance for fine editing).

Now here’s the dummy part: I have never worked with a raid, I know very little about it, I’ve been reading but the more I read, the more I get confused. So questions:

Q1: If I build a raid 0 from 2 conventional USB3 4TB HDs using the iMac’s internal Disk Utility, am I building a software raid or a hardware raid, and will this substantially increase my throughput speed?

Q2: Does the aforementioned set-up have anything to do with re-booting my iMac differently than usual, and will my Raid 0 config look like a unique mounted disk, just like any external HD that I can mount and unmount from my sidebar according to my needs? (I will only be using that for fcp 7).

Q3: If all this is ok and the way to go, do I need to copy / back-up any one of the disks I intend to raid, because they would be re-formatted when creating the Raid? My ProRes converted footage is on there, but the original footage is stored safely elsewhere. And of course: when building the Raid, does the OS software (disk utility) do the job of dividing up the media on the raided disks or do I do that manually?

Q4: last but not least, is it worth the extra money to purchase an external Raid drive (pre-configured, if I understand correctly, meaning 2 drives in one unit?)

Many many thanks in advance 😉

Michael Brown

[Roger Poole]

Hi Michael, if you need so many angles, as already suggested, you need raid. There a two things to consider, the speed of the hard disk itself and the amount of data the interface can carry. I would suggest a 4 way striped thunderbolt raid. You would never saturate the thunderbolt interface and get some astonishing speeds which would be up to streaming multiple angles. Try downloading the Black magic speed test utility and test your media drives, then watch this….

Edit: I just tested my G SpeedQ Raid 5 and get just over 200 MB/s read and write via esata. Thunderbolt would be off the scale.

https://youtu.be/bYqNZVpT2RQ

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[Michael Brown]

Hi Roger, thanks for your advice 😉

I have about 3 TB of ProRes footage to deal with (LT). Since I’m producing this thing myself, I also have economic aspects to watch out for 🙁

Thanks for the BM speed checker, works like a charm. Out of curiosity, I just compared my standard 4TB LaCie USB3 drive with the newly and unsatisfactorily purchased Lacie 4TB Thunderbolt drive (that gave me an impression of bogging faster) : the Thunderbolt is by about 30 to 40 Mb/s slower than the USB3!

Now since I’m in a kind of a hurry and my resources are limited here, I went for an ICY BOX 2-Bay Raid enclosure (not too expensive and years ago I was very satisfied with their FW400 cases), and I ordered 2 WD 2TB Raid internal disks rather cheap (80 € a piece new) that should be here in a couple of days.

I know that’s not Thunderbolt, but I prefer USB3 in this case since I want to save my 2 DV ports for my monitors (especially since I don’t know yet – haven’t experimented – if my iMac and fcp7 will read a 2nd external monitor via USB3.

Knowing I’ve invested about $300, do think I’m going to be sorry?

Best from Hamburg

Michael Brown

[Roger Poole]

Slow thunderbolt. Did you format the drive to Mac extended, not journaled?

[Michael Brown]

Yes, Extended, but all formatting options are journaled. In this case Extended (Journaled) w/o other options such as encrypted and/or case-sensitive.

Michael Brown

[Roger Poole]

Though journaling is for boot volumes it doesn’t have a huge impact, well not 30-40% slower. What are the actual speeds shown by speed test.

[Michael Brown]

Well now they read about the same: +/- 165 to 170 read & write. Earlier the USB3 drive read around 190-220 if I remember correctly. Strange. But slow, right?

Michael Brown

[Roger Poole]

I checked out the Lacie 4tb thunderbolt and the specs suggest speeds around those you are experiencing. However, if I’m correct, the Lacie has only one disk inside and although the thunderbolt interface runs at a massive 20GB/s you are still stuck with the maximum that a single disk can read and write. Thunderbolt has ample capacity to to handle multiple disk RAID read and writes simultaniously so this is where the increased speed comes from. A single disk enclosure wont show a dramatic speed increase because the disk is working at it’s max, where a 2 disk Raid would pump out much more and that would be very easily handled by the Thunderbolt interface. The “off the scale” speeds shown in the YouTube clip are achieved by striping multiple disks, each only as fast as your single disk but multiplied by the number of disks in the RAID configuration. For the amount of angles you want I would suggest a 4 disk RAID 0.

[Walter Soyka]

[David Roth Weiss] “FYI, while an SSD drive would have enough throughout, SSDs are not really great as media drives, as moving huge amounts if data in and off an SSD drive will fairly quickly ruin the drive’s performance. SSDs are better suited for use as boot drives, because starting apps and storing document files does not move that data on and off the drive as is the case with media drives.”

Check out the SSD Endurance Test [link]. While it’s true that flash memory has a limited number of re-write cycles, that limit is much higher on good, modern SSDs than one might expect.

The Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD in that test wrote 2.4 PB of data before failing. That’s the equivalent of re-writing the entire drive nearly 10,000 times. If you re-write your entire drive once daily, it would take almost 27 years to fail like that. Even if that’s a high one-off, manufacturers are commonly offering 10-year warranties on SSDs. Your computer may well be obsolete before your flash storage hits its write limit.

As long as you consider any drive, mechanical or solid-state, to be a consumable, and build a backup strategy accordingly, you’ll be fine.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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