Penn-Ohio
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: External Thunderbolt HDD's

Working with AVCHD Multicam with FCPX on an iMac and MacPro I'm having some beachball slow downs using an external WD Dual Drive Thunderbolt RAID 0 and after several tests and discussions with tech's at Apple and B&H have determined that increasing the number of drives in the external drive and/or SSD will resolve the issue.

 

My current config gives me 248 MB/s Read/Write speed end and the internal SSD OS X drive delivers 750 to 937 MB/s as a single drive.  Obviously, I'd love to have a single Thunderbolt external delivering speeds like the internal SSD, but from what I am reading there isn't anything like that available.  Thus, I'm reaching out the community for help in telling me what they use and how to keep the cost down while increasing speed (not meant to be an oxymoron)  :-)

 

I'm ok with multiple drive enclosures, prefer mini (2.5") if possible at reasonable cost, otherwise 3.5" 7200rpm drives, and I'm totally OK with building my own via purchasing an external TB enclosure and seagate HDD's at around $50 a piece.

 

Desirable 500-6f00 MB/s in a mini drive or mini SSD configuration first or rotating 3.5"

Most Desirable would be 750 MB/s or more.

 

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR THE HELP  :-)

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), 3.7 GHz, 16 Gb, Duo FirePro D300, FCPX

Posted on Jan 3, 2016 6:08 PM

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Penn-Ohio

Q: External Thunderbolt HDD's

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  • by EcoGreg,

    EcoGreg EcoGreg Jan 5, 2016 4:10 PM in response to Penn-Ohio
    Level 3 (544 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jan 5, 2016 4:10 PM in response to Penn-Ohio

    Hey Penn

    Have you checked out the testing by BareFeats?

    Like this on the 4 bay mini TB… http://barefeats.com/hard196.html

    BF has lots of comparisons on its site so look around.

    Here's a different test… http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2015/20151217_2145-OWCMercuryExtremePro6G_1T B-RAID0.html

     

    Ya, you can definitely get some real speed up to the TB bus speed. Remember the nMP only really has 3 TB buses that share the 6 ports, and the HDMI port also shares the TB3 bus so check your cabling. Weird configuration if you ask me, Really Apple?

     

    Here's the thing, you really shouldn't be having the bandwidth issues for the number of feeds you are using, unless you are shooting 4K or greater. So I'm not convinced the Beachballs are due to your media drives. If you do create the Proxies and still have the issues, I would look elsewhere. Also make sure you have at least 15-25% free space on your drives, all of them. Drives really slow down when approaching full. Also check out System statistics via Activity Monitor while editing. RAM usage and page swaps especially. Quit all other apps and turn off background rendering if you can.

     

    Here is an article by Larry Jordan on Configuring your system which is pretty good on determining bandwidth needs. Getting a little old and technology moves on to faster and faster speeds, but worth a read.… https://larryjordan.com/blog/configure-your-system/

     

    BareFeats has comparisons between iMacs and MPs so give that a looksie as well.

     

    Hope this helps, Greg

  • by Penn-Ohio,

    Penn-Ohio Penn-Ohio Jan 5, 2016 6:18 PM in response to EcoGreg
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 5, 2016 6:18 PM in response to EcoGreg

    EcoGreg wrote:

    Hey Penn, Have you checked out the testing by BareFeats?

    Like this on the 4 bay mini TB… http://barefeats.com/hard196.html

    BF has lots of comparisons on its site so look around.

    Here's a different test… http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2015/20151217_2145-OWCMercuryExtremePro6G_1T B-RAID0.html

     

    Ya, you can definitely get some real speed up to the TB bus speed. Remember the nMP only really has 3 TB buses that share the 6 ports, and the HDMI port also shares the TB3 bus so check your cabling. Weird configuration if you ask me, Really Apple?

    TThanks for that info. Some great reading and interesting to see that thwre are solutions to achieve what I'm lookingnto do with raid even. Wow!

     

    EcoGreg wrote:

    Hey Penn,   . . . . Here's the thing, you really shouldn't be having the bandwidth issues for the number of feeds you are using, unless you are shooting 4K or greater. So I'm not convinced the Beachballs are due to your media drives. If you do create the Proxies and still have the issues, I would look elsewhere. Also make sure you have at least 15-25% free space on your drives, all of them. Drives really slow down when approaching full. Also check out System statistics via Activity Monitor while editing. RAM usage and page swaps especially. Quit all other apps and turn off background rendering if you can.

    UUnderstand the free space. Thisnoneni knew and generally try to operate with a minimum of 30-40% free space. I too am coming to the belief that there is something arwy. Accordingly I'm not gonna do a time machine restore I'm gonna do a fresh install :-( To avoid carryover problems if they are there. :-)

     

    EcoGreg wrote:

     

    Hey Penn . . . . Here is an article by Larry Jordan on Configuring your system which is pretty good on determining bandwidth needs. Getting a little old and technology moves on to faster and faster speeds, but worth a read.… https://larryjordan.com/blog/configure-your-system/

     

    BareFeats has comparisons between iMacs and MPs so give that a looksie as well.

     

    Hope this helps, Greg

    I Will do some reading And wanna see if I can also remember how to set up FCPX to show clip usage in orange. That is, when a portion of a clip has been used, it shows orange on the bottom of the clip.

     

    Want to have things clean and new. The iMac came today and dowoading fcpx now and will be teyingnit out tomorrow. I sure like the 5k display and can't wait to get the 32gb men installed and then see how that x395 vid card kicks with the 4.0 i7 processor. I am sooooo hoping I'm on course with this box. :-)

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