16” MBP M1 MAX SLOW PERFORMANCE

What drive is this? How is it connected? How is it formatted? How full is it?

There may be software conflicts - that is particularly more likely if you migrated everything from your previous mac.

We need information about that in order to help, so: Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

Did you try creating a library in the internal drive? That ought to be extremely fast.

Also: if you run BlackMagic Disk Speed Test on your external, what do you get? By comparison, the internal should be some 500 times faster...

Your external drive (or perhaps the way it is connnected) is a big problem.

It looks like it is only using a USB2 connection. That is completely inadequate.

Your internal drive is over 150 times faster.

(EDIT: in my previous post, when I estimated 500, I meant to have written 50; thus it is three times as bad as I thought it would be)

I suggest you quit FCP, eject the external drive, and completely disconnect it from your mac.

Start FCP again. Still slow? I don't think it will be.

It’s in the EtreCheck report. The Seagate is

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB

That’s megabits, which is ridiculously slow.

That fine for archiving and storage, but not for production.

Any SSD will be better. Of course that much storage in SSD isn’t cheap. Perhaps you need that much for the project you’re working on.

Tom Wolsky wrote:

It’s in the EtreCheck report. The Seagate is

External USB 480 Mbit/s USB

That’s megabits, which is ridiculously slow.

Yes, but that was due to the drive being connected via the USB2 adapter.

As the OP showed in the last Blackmagic test, the drive is capable of about 100MBps.

hat fine for archiving and storage, but not for production.

Any SSD will be better. Of course that much storage in SSD isn’t cheap. Perhaps you need that much for the project you’re working on.

Agreed, of course.

But maybe the OP does not need all that at once. That would make a smaller SSD, perhaps just 1TB, enough, or perhaps even the internal could be used, leaving the HD for archiving.

Spinning SATA drives will top out at roughly 150 MB/s.

SATA SSDs will top out at about 480 MB/s.

NVMe/PCIe SSDs can hit 3500 MB/s.

That would be for single drives in enclosures that aren't a bottleneck themselves. RAID storage will multiply those figures, how much depends on the box, the number of drives, and the interface.

The enclosure matters, and the cable/adapters matter. A lot. Spend some money on a quality TB4 cable. It'll handle all flavors of Thunderbolt and USB, plus video and charging should you need it in the future. Get a quality adapter or hub as well. The cheap ones on Amazon have the right connectors, but will only bring frustration. Not worth the few saved dollars, imo.

EDIT: meant to add formatting...

The drive format also matters. In all cases, you'll want GUID partition map.

For spinning drives, use Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - aka 'HFS+'

For SSDs, use APFS

For drives you absolutely need to share with a Windows machine, ExFAT - avoid this altogether if possible.

Formatting a spinner with APFS will cause problems and should be avoided.

FAT32 should also be avoided, and many drives come pre-formatted this way. Wipe and reformat.

Besides the keystone things that we know cause trouble, the report is pretty clean.

Does FCP have "Full Disk Access" in System Preferences->Security & Privacy->Privacy? I assume it does already, but if not it needs to be added.

Also, there is a chance there is some problem with the library itself.

You could try a simple test. Close this library, make a new one on your external drive, add some clips, and make a short project.

How does that proceed? Are then slowdowns? If there are slowdowns, quit FCP and copy this test library to your internal drive. Test. This ought to be extremely fast.

If you haven't already done it, try some new footage as there may be a corrupt file ruining the performance.

A couple of years ago I suddenly had problems similar to yours and found by a process of elimination one 4K video file that was causing it.

I trashed the file, reimported it and everything worked perfectly.

I'd look at that adapter. Can you tell us what it is, exactly?

It seems that your drive may be USB3 capable, but your adapter may be limiting it to USB2 speeds.

That would explain why the drive used to work fine on a USB3 port on your iMac.

EDIT: and if you were using the same adapter with an SSD, that would tell us why even that would not work correctly.

If you’re working multiple projects you might think of using multiple smaller SSDs.

Ideally TB4 drives. OWC has excellent products. The speed is expensive though. TB3 might be the best price to performance ratio at the moment. I use SanDisk 2 TB. Truly pocket sized. Samsung T7 2 TB for most projects. Really like the Samsung X5 1 TB as well.

Compared to a hard drive, any SSD will be a lot faster. I don’t think it is worth going to Thunderbolt 4 SSD. They may give you a speed close to that of the internal drive but cost a lot of money. A USB-C SSD will be less costly and still be more than ten times as fast as your HD.

Note how it says: 1 * USB3.0 + 3 * USB2.0

You will need to make sure that the drive is connected to the USB3 port on the adapter.

They don't seem to be identified but an educated guess is easy to make.

I suggest you test with BlackMagic Disk Speed Test. On USB3 it should give you 100MBps or more for the HD, and perhaps 400MBps for an SSD.

Also: this appears to be a low cost adapter; it is possible that it may not offer the best performance, but still USB3 will make a huge difference.

WAIT!!!!!

You have that sworn enemy of video applications right there: Chrome. And, particularly, its nasty hidden minions, the "keystone" daemons that hog the system videotoolbox.

See https://chromeisbad.com for how to completely uninstall those pesky things.

After that you will need to drag FCP to the trash and download a fresh copy.

Could you post another EtreCheck report?

I have the 14” version of your computer and have no problem with 4K footage or RED or anything else off the system drive.

You said that FCP X struggled to create a library on the internal drive. . . . did you have multiple libraries open at once?

If you haven't already done it, close every library, disconnect all external drives and then try creating a new library on the internal drive . . . it should fly.