Final Cut and Mac Mini

Please ensure that any anti-virus, speed-up or clean-up apps are disabled or uninstalled. The Mac doesn't really need these, and they often cause performance problems.

Hey brain,

I hope this article will help you find your solution: If your Mac runs slowly - Apple Support

There are multiple things that could be going wrong for this issue (annoying I know)! But if the things that could be causing your Mac to run slow is the max overheating, unwell vented area, multiple applications open, but my strongest hypothesis is that because of your low 8 gb of memory the max could start to feel slow, also if you have low storage the max could want to run slow for that reason.

I hope this helped!

8 GBs of RAM and using an externally mounted USB connected drive is not exactly optimization for high performance. Can we assume that the 1 TB drive is at least a SSD?

16 GBs of RAM with an internal 1 TB SSD would have been the best way to go. An internal drive connection will always be faster than an external one.

This may not help but I had a M1 Mac Mini with 8gb Ram and made movies but using iMovie which included HD video with audio inserts and and other special effects and ran very smooth and fast. Most testesr on Youtube report good performance with Final Cut Pro and 4k footage so you may have some other issues.

External drives will always be slower than internal drives, using a hub shouldn't make a difference.