-
Mac Pro FCP harddrive configuration question.
Hey guys, I’ve been a lurker for awhile and now I’m ready to make my first post :). I have an older mac pro tower, 2x Dual 2.66 procs. Until yesterday i was running FC Studio 2 with everything on one 250 gig hard drive, the raw footage, the scratch, the apps, everything! I just bought a 30 gig solid state drive and a 1tb normal harddrive. Today I upgraded to 10 gigs of ram and installed snow leopard fresh on to the solid state drive, and soon I will be installing Studio 3. I’m interested in hearing your opinions on how I plan to organize everything. Here’s what I’m thinking:
Drive One, 30 GB SSD: I will have the OS and all the Final Cut Studio files installed on this drive, but not the extra media files (“Optional Content”) . Roughly 11 GB.
Drive Two, 1 TB Western Digital: I’d like to use this drive strictly for raw video files.
Drive Three, 250 GB Stock Seagate Drive: I’m planning on having about 30 gigs of music pictures and other stuff that I will rarely access on this drive, just stuff from before I installed snow leopard. I will also install the 30 or so gigs of extra media ( the “Optional Content”) for Final Cut Studio on this drive as well as using it for my Final Cut Render Scratch drive. I’m thinking any time I’m using Motion or Soundtrack I wont be rendering anything with FCP.
My only real questions are can I install the “optional content” on a different drive than the Studio Program files? I’d life to keep as many applications on the SSD as I can but not clutter it up with files I will barely use. Second, would 175 or so gigs (on the 250 GB drive) be enough for my project files and as a scratch disk for just the render files in final cut? Most of my videos will be less than five minutes, and one project will be about 45- an hour. I’m guessing it should be enough considering I used to have the scratch and the raw files all on one harddrive but I’d just like to make sure. I do have around 19 gigs to play with on the SSD, but I’m in no rush to fill it unless theres a solid speed benifit. Thank you guys very much, I’ll do my best to honor karma and be useful on the boards in the future :).
-
8 Replies
-
Forget everything you have mentioned. Putting media on your system drive is the last thing you want to do.
Your Mac Pro has room for a total of 4 Hard Drives. A 500GB or 1 TB for your system drive Mac OS and Apps.
2TB or 1TB HD’s for the 3 other slots for your media.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
Thanks for the quick reply… I think you may have me confused. I don’t have any media on my system drive. That was my original setup, the list i posted is the current three drives I have installed right now. A one terabyte drive just for media, a 30 gig system drive, and the old stock 250 just for holding my personal stuff and scractch files.
-
Steve, did you actually read his post? He’s not putting media on his system drive, and he’s using three drives. In review:
1. Solid State Drive = System drive for OS and applications
2. Dedicated video storage drive
3. Assorted offline media, potentially FCS optional content
His main question is whether or not it’s possible to install the FCS optional content on a different drive than the main application. This is the stuff that usually ends up in the root level Library folder under Application Support in a subfolder, i.e. /Library/Application Support/*
It appears to be possible, according to this document on the Apple support pages:
https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2909
-
[Jerry Johnson] “Until yesterday i was running FC Studio 2 with everything on one 250 gig hard drive, the raw footage, the scratch, the apps, everything!”
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
I did a custom install of the content on my media array. Works fine.
-
Oops, sorry about that. I guess I should follow my own advice…
-
Well, you we’re both right. Steve was correct that up until 2 days ago I had everything on one drive but the rest of the post is about how I knew it was the wrong way to go and how I was fixing it. I haven’t installed Final Cut yet so I was curious about how the best set up would be. So Alan you’re link was exactly what I was looking for. You too John, thanks. My other question was how big do your scratch files usually get for bigger projects? Thanks guys.
-
your OS on a 30gig HD will leave only 19G of free space which FC or compressor will need to use temporarily and it might want even more.. at least I had problems awhile ago when my powerbook ran low on empty space. I might be wrong but I think the FC app and your OS should be on a larger drive?
Moto Guzzi rider
dog lover w/wife, Ex & 3 kids
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up