HI, is anyone using FCPX with an SSD?

Yes, it most certainly will boost editing and render time in FCPX. I have been using an SSD over a year and love it. I edited a 2-hour 4-camera multiclip without the need of encoding proxy on an external SSD. I also went from editing on my Mac Pro with USB 3.0 to my mom's iMac 2010 while visiting over Thanksgiving using her USB 2.0 ports and only a few drops frames from what I recall.

External USB 3.0 hard drives are only as good as the speed of the drive. Any spinning disc is not good for editing, but are cost effective for archiving projects and video.

I plan on getting a OWC PCIe Mercury Accelsior_E2 in my Mac Pro soon to increase the editing and render time even more.

With an external HD connected via USB3, the limiting factor is the HD itself.

Did you try running Black Magic Disk Test on your HD? This can give you a reasonable idea of how much throughput your HD can handle, and compare to the throughput you need.

I think that if your HD is fast enough for your needs (which it likely is), you may not see a great performance increase by replacing it with an SSD. And you will likely need to be careful managing the available space. If your work is segmented into pieces that easily fit into the SSD, that is fine. But if you start filling it up, performance can degrade substantially.

However, replacing the *internal* HD with an SSD will make your OS load faster, applications start faster and make your machine "snappier". You may not need it, but once you try it you'll find that going back to a machine with an HD as a boot drive becomes painful. Of course, this assumes the material in your boot drive can fit, with enough breathing space, in the SSD.

2009 Mac Pro 2.66GHz Quad, 16GB RAM

Hard Drive Bay 1: Crucial M4 512GB SSD (Boot)

Hard Drive Bay 2, 3, 4: Western Digital 1 or 2TB HDDs (Documents, iTunes Music, and Photo and Video Archives)

Optical Drive Bay 1: Pioneer Blu-ray Burner

Optical Drive Bay 2: Crucial M4 512GB SSD (Current FCPX Projects)

Importing and Exporting is much faster.

I have a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter, and when I travel, I remove the SSD in the Optical Drive Bay 2 and use it with the adapter as an external. So when I was I was visiting my family over Thanksgiving, I used my mom's iMac to complete a project.

I will no longer use a HDD to edit in FCPX, because the HDD constantly had to work hard loading thumbnails and waveforms. The SSD is much snappier.

On a side note, Apple still has a lot wrong with FCPX. Thumbnails and waveforms take too long to load compared to FCP7, and especially with a HDD. I used Logic Pro X yesterday, and the waveforms loaded so fast on a HDD. I just don't get why the FCPX software engineers can't get it right. Load time is wasted time editing.

So agree with you Tjwaido.

And simply put if you have the $ to use SSD of course it speeds everything when data transfer is going on (feeding in content for cutting etc). Eventually we'll look back at spinners as laughably slow. Right now its just a matter of $. If they are "worth it" is very relative but nothing beats the performance for video editing. (dont think however this will solve problems inherent in a buggy program such as 10.1 however ;-)

I have a 512Gbtye Thunderbolt SSD drive running on a 2011 iMac. You can tell FCP to use it as a scratch disk and I also copy the library over for each project. The according to black magic is 5 or 6 times faster than the internal drive, and hundreds of times faster than USB2.0 External drive. FCP runs fine with several project open at a time. I also added another 8mbytes of RAM. I strongly recommend it, although they are not cheap.