UCanCallMeAl wrote:
Yes I'm using managed media if that means I'm importing the media into each Library when I start a new project.
Yes, that is managed media, which means that every library is self-contained, and as such you can copy it to another drive with much concern.
My external drive is a 2 year old Western Digital which only has firewire which does no good with this iMac and USB 2 or 3 (how do you tell?) and no Thunderbolt.
I assume it would help to get a Thunderbolt drive for external and put my libraries out there?
And then drag all of my libraries to it?
Man I hope this solves the dropped frames and speeds up real time rendering.
I assume your external drive is connected via USB3. If so and if the drive is fast enough you may get better performance by just dragging a library to the external.
You can hold down option key, go to the Apple menu, choose System Information... and then look and Storage to see information about your drives.
One other easy test you can do: download BlackMagic Disk Speed Test and try it on your drive. A USB2 drive cannot do more than around 40MB/s, with USB3 or TB you can get around 100MB/s or so, depending on the drive.
My suggestion is that you copy one library to the external, only have libraries open that you are working on, and try it. I expect you'll see much better performance by using the drive you already have.
FWIW, Thunderbolt when using a single drive will in general not make a difference, as the speed of the drive itself, not the connection, is the limiting factor. Both USB3 and Thunderbolt have more bandwidth than a single drive can typically use. If using a RAID, or an external SSD, you are likely to see a difference.