[Geoff Birmingham]

Thanks for your words of encouragement, Alan! I have a feeling my solution is either: 1) simple but not really satisfactory; or 2) satisfactory but not simple at all.

My only saving grace is that I told the client in advance of the shot: “If the sun gets bright during the shoot, that profile with the wall of windows is likely to be badly overexposed.” So I did protect myself.

Good luck with your own post-production predicament.

[Geoff Birmingham]

@Joby and @Doug: again, thanks for your responses. @Joby, you moved a little into tech speak in the second half of your response, but I will try and interpret! @Doug, I think I need to get back in touch with LaCie and perhaps make some inquiries along the lines of what you’re mentioning (and perhaps Joby’s too, once I’ve figured out what he’s talking about!)

[Geoff Birmingham]

@Doug and @Joby – thanks for further thoughts on this. I think I’m going to have to go back in this thread and review. The problem persists!

It seems totally unpredictable. No real discernible difference in the nature of my projects (all basically doc-style stuff…no heavy effects etc). Sometimes I go the day with no problems, and then other days I get interrupted DURING PLAYBACK. It can be with 4K or HD. Just watching my sequence and then things come to a halt and I hear the drives spinning, as if they are just starting up. “We’re tired…let us take a little break for 20 seconds while we catch our breath.”

In a situation like that, doesn’t it seem that it HAS to be a drive issue?

As I mentioned before I have the drive formatted as RAID 1. (And yes, I have all media backed up elsewhere 😃)

[Geoff Birmingham]

Hilarious…I sure do apologize for causing any unwanted eye issues! 😃

And not to worry – I DEFINITELY have back-ups of all media and data. All over the place.

Very interesting what you say about the format of the drive. Your energy saver idea seems to be related to Intel Macs, but I’m using an M1 PowerBook.

I will absolutely hold onto your suggestions for other drives.

And here’s a little update for anyone reading this post in the future who might be having issues similar to mine: make sure you plug into the thunderbolt 3 port rather than the USB-C one! As soon as I did that, my problems (mostly) went away. Every now and then, I’ll still get a little hiccup, or my media will be slow to load after I open a sequence, but for the most part things are working much better.

(The obvious follow-up question to my error: what the heck is the point of including a USB-C port on the back of the drive when there are already two thunderbolts, except to trip up dummies like me?)

[Geoff Birmingham]

Ah, now all of this is beginning to make sense. BUT if the SATA drives only deliver 500 MB/sec at RAID 0, then it shouldn’t have really mattered if initially I was plugged into the USB 3.1 rather than the thunderbolt, right? (assuming I wasn’t using any of the other ports, which I wasn’t)

For the last couple of weeks, I was doing fine with my thunderbolt to thunderbolt. And then, out of the blue yesterday, the drive was super-laggy. I had to wait for it to get up to speed and play over, and over, and over… There was even a delay while I waited for it to copy a puny little photo file from my desktop to the LaCie.

The fact that you are a frequent LaCie user makes me think:

1) you’ve never had lag problems with your drives; and

2) maybe mine is flawed and should be sent back for a replacement!

Beyond being a 4K project, the thing I’m working on is super-basic. Quicktime H264 and MXF files. Stringing together soundbites. That’s it.

[Geoff Birmingham]

Helpful again! So speed should be the same if TB cables are aligned with TB ports and the same for USB. Did not know.

Of course, this STILL leaves me with questions. Don’t feel obliged to answer…mostly rhetorical questions…I might try to find answers on Google, though likely that will leave me more confused 😀

If the speed can be the same betweenTB and USB, why have two?

Difference between USB C and 3.1?

My MacBook tells me I have thunderbolt 4 ports. Does that make my TB connection faster than USB 3.1?

My MacBook ports doubles as thunderbolt and a USB if understand correctly. BUT for greatest speed, I should be using them exclusively thunderbolt? In other words if I went from my computer’s TB port WITH a USB cable to Lacie USB port (TB>USB>USB), that would be slower than going TB>TB>TB?

[Geoff Birmingham]

Thank you for the response, Neil. As a courtesy to those who might come across this post and wonder what happened, I share an update. And I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it.

Long and short, the LaCie <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>does work just fine with my footage. I’m not going to call it crazy fast, but good enough for my fairly straightforward needs. Where I went wrong? I plugged my thunderbolt cable into the wrong port of the darn drive. I saw three ports, didn’t look carefully, they all appeared to be the same, and so I used the one that was most convenient.

<b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>Turns out that was the USB 3.1 port. The other two are TB. (Separate question: what’s the point of having the USB 3.1 if it’s slower??) Anyway, once I switched to using one of the two TB ports, my performance went up ten-fold. BTW, I’m using regular old MXF files, so nothing to demanding.

<b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>Thanks all for sharing your thoughts. And I still like the idea, someday, of getting something like the Blackmagic dock.

[Geoff Birmingham]

Not a bad idea, Alan. Right now I’m using SanDisk Extreme Portable, but that’s actually the reason why I started to investigate other options. It seems both this drive and the G Drive max out at 2TB. I need something that has greater capacity. So that’s why the dock seemed appealing – buy the “bare” SDD drives at lower cost (and larger than 2TB), then swap them in and out as needed.

[Geoff Birmingham]

Helpful again.

Following up on your note from your first response, in which you suggested that the drive might need a settings adjustment to avoid going to sleep, I did a little sleuthing. Sure enough, others were having the same issue, and one recommendation was to send a command through Apple’s Terminal app to instruct the drive to remain spinning.

Having done that, first indications are that this may have solved the problem…definitely not an obvious solution, but seems that you might have pointed me in the right direction, which I greatly appreciate!

[Geoff Birmingham]

Glenn: curious which QNAP model in the ecosystem you’re using. I don’t really need a NAS drive (though I imagine I could find ways to take advantage of that option), but the <b data-selenium=”productTitle” style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>QNAP TVS-872XT 8-Bay NAS Enclosure one gets plenty of positive reviews on B&H. AND it looks like it takes both SSD and HDD drives.