If I put the iMovie library on an external drive over a USB 2.0 connection, will it slow down work within a project?

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Level 1

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If I put the iMovie library on an external drive over a USB 2.0 connection, will it slow down work within a project?

I'm running out of internal disk space on my iMac. I want to move the iMovie (10.0.8) library over to an external disk that has only a USB 3.0 connection. But my iMac has only USB 2.0 ports. When iMovie operates, does it load a project into memory, and do all the work there, or does it bang on the library often while I'm working on the project, so that it would slow down project work? I have a hunch that it does frequent saves during work automatically to disk, which would slow things down a lot.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2), Mail

Posted on May 3, 2015 6:29 PM

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GeeD

Level 6

9,173 points

May 4, 2015 7:23 AM in response to rha90272

External disk speed is quite important especially if you have limited RAM since less can be transferred to memory and more has to be read and written back to disk. Your disk will run at USB 2 speed which is not fast but should work. (A Firewire 800 disk would have been better assuming your Mac has this). If you haven't already, update your RAM to the maximum.

Geoff.

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