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Is FCP X running a bit slow cause I’m using a OWC ThunderBay 4?
I have a project with lots of footage. I bought a OWC ThunderBay 4 so I could have the flexibility of four 4GB drives. I converted my footage to Pro Res (regular pro res, not proxy). I find the program can be a bit buggy and I get the beach ball spinning wheel more than a little. It usually goes away, although sometime I need to quit the program and restart. I’m tempted to say the problem is the ThunderBay, since it can take time to switch between its hard drives in the Finder window. But I was wondering if perhaps there is another answer.
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17 Replies
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That is a VERY good point. It’s a late 2013, 15′ retina. Thoughts? Below are the specs. As always, thanks Noah (and anyone else who might answer)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB
Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Processor: 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
Hard drive: it’s 500GB and I have about 40 free GBs -
There’s a percentage of any HD that you should leave available, I think it’s 20%. I have found performance to slow down when I fill up either my system or media drive above 80% or so. Exactly what you are describing (beach balls etc). Early on I killed a drive by running it at near capacity.
Also, you will see the best performance from thunderbolt drives if they are formatted raid 0 or 5. -
it could well be the drive but it could be anything, I once had a FCPX playback issue with beachballs and dropped frames that turned out to be caused an external audio interface but only if it was plugged into a port of a particular USB hub.
I spent two days rebuilding my entire system from scratch and making notes at every step to find that one. Sometimes it can be fixed with something as simple as deleting your FCPX preferences.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
I’ll try that Jeff. That said….I suspect strongly it’s the OWC ThunderBay itself. When I’m in the finder and switch between different hard drives, it seems to take way too long each time. That’s the reason I think that. Now I need to do some online research as to how to test my suspicions….
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I think you’re probably right about the OWC drive. i think you said you were using the drive in it as individual drives rather than a RAID? It could even be on of the drives being faulty rather than the box itself.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
Bingo Jeff. I didn’t have it set up as a RAID. Rather as 4 separate drives. I’m doing some internet research and it seems setting up a RAID 0 would require erasing all the data from my disks. Which stinks. Oof.
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RAID 5 is a lot safer. I have three of the Thunderbays connected to a 2013 Mac Pro. Two with 4×5 TB equals 15 TB available storage each and one with 4×3 TB with 9 TB. One extra drive space needed for parity information to allow restoring.
Fast reads and writes, Mid 400’s to 500 plus MB/sec. when on the outer 30% of the drives. Not that full yet. As you know, with RAID 5 one drive can die and you can rebuild. I’m using the latest SoftRaid 5 software. Highly recommended. Will work with equal sized drives without the necessity of matching firmware often required with hardware controllers, like the QX, also by OWC.
Have gotten so used to SSD’s it can seem as if it takes a while for the HDs to spin up, but when spun up access is very quick.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500, Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD -
Turns out part of the speed problem was letting the non-used drives fall asleep.
More importantly….I’ve never heard of a RAID 5. So, from reading about it, it seems like that’s my best bet: if I don’t plan on backing up the 4 drives worth of exported files….but I don’t want a RAID 0 cause I worry about one drive getting hurt….I can do a RAID 5 so that even if one drives dies, I can easily replace it and have my information restored? It seems almost miraculous as I’m reading about it.
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Yes, that is how it works. It will maintain your information through one drive failure. You can even get info off of the remaining drives until you replace the dead one, although it is highly recommended to replace it as soon as possible. Always good to have a backup of the same size on hand.
Had a feeling you were waiting for those drives to spin up causing your delays.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500, Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD
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