FCPX Won't Start after Forced Quit

Oh boy, I'm having so many issues with FCPX (10.4.8). I can reliably make the app crash by scrubbing through a clip on my timeline using the Trim tool. After a bit of sliding left or right, I get the spinning beach ball which never ends. The only way to get FCP started again is to restart my iMac, if I try to restart FCP right after I force quit it, nothing happens. I have to force quit and reboot every single time this happens, which is a lot.

What is going on? I haven't had any of these problems until the last FCP update, and Catalina.

Hi Al,

Here are the clip settings, I'm basically using video recorded on my iPhone 8:

My external drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

I updated to Catalina from Mojave, I did not do a clean install. Everything else seems to run mostly okay, there are definitely some glitches in Catalina. I will also post an Etrecheck report below as Luis requested.

Thanks! I removed all those files and rebooted then emptied the trash and rebooted again. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of dropped frames and sluggishness in FCPX. I re-ran Etrecheck and this is the report it gave me:

I'm noticing, though, that even video files I play (exported from FCPX) using QuickTime are dropping frames and stuttering. So I'm wondering if something is up with the external hard disk the files are stored on, which is disk4s2 in the Etrecheck report. If I move this video file to my internal hard disk, it plays more smoothly. Not sure if I can check the disk speed of my external media drive, but I ran Disk Utility on the drive and it checked out okay. Although the very first time I ran Disk Utility "First Aid" on that external drive, I got an error message that said Unable to unmount volume for repair (-69673). But then the test ran fine when I tried it again right after getting that error message. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Not really sure what's going on, but I think it's related to the disk.

Here's the result of the BlackMagic speed test on my external media drive:

Unfortunately it won't let me test my internal drive, the app keeps saying it's "read only" and can't test that drive as a comparison.

Okay, thanks, this is the result of my internal hard drive, which seems a lot faster.

The reason I started using that external drive is because it was once very fast and I had none of the dropped frames I was experiencing when I stored my video files on my internal drive. In fact, I was given advice here that my internal Fusion Drive was problematic with FCPX and that I should put everything on a fast external drive. So that's what I did, and initially it solved the problem, everything was quicker. But since the Catalina update, it seems things have reversed somehow.

I will look into getting an external SSD drive to store my video media if that will solve this new problem, they are just so darn expensive, but it looks like I don't have much of a choice. Thanks!