Q: Do FCP 6 project files absolutely need to be stored on boot drive
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Jul 12, 2016 7:19 PMby stopmotion,I was asking specifically about FCP 6 project files (the ones w/ the fcp extension), not the media files that you import into them. I read in an excerpt from a book on FCP 7 that you can locate your FCP project files anywhere you like and that the author no longer suggested keeping them on the boot drive which used to be Apple's recommendation also. I was wondering if there were any FCP 6 mac users who had their project files located on a drive other than their boot drive.
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Jul 12, 2016 8:51 PMby Drew Reece,HelpfulI'm quite sure we used to have them scattered across many disks
The .FCP project files are pretty small & not written to that often I don't think it make much difference to your SSD to move them elsewhere. You will want to relocate the autosave vault in the FCP settings too if you are that concerned about what is written to your boot disk.
I think you get a lot more performance benefit from having a scratch disk & another disk for the large media files.
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Jul 13, 2016 1:59 PMby Shane Ross,Helpful" My boot drive is an SSD drive and I'd like to be writing to it as little as possible."
Why? Writing to SSDs is very fast, that's the point of them. Putting it on an external might slow you down again. And they take up VERY little space.
Store them on the boot drive. Best suggestion
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Jul 13, 2016 12:22 PMby Drew Reece,Ideally the scratch disk should be a separate disk, not the same as your main media disk. That way the IO is not all reading & writing to one bus. Spinning disks also have seek time which would slow performance when FCP had to read/ write media & save to scratch (I'm assuming the disks are large spinning models).
I think you are focusing on the wrong thing by moving the project files, SSD's will eventually fail - they have limited writes. Preventing a few kb of writes per day seems like it would be a negligible benefit. I suspect your browser or other apps (with log files) write more data than that to the SSD every day.
You should max out the RAM before you consider tiny changes like this, memory can also be written to disk, which will be the boot disk by default & may be many MB's per day depending on your setup.
Sorry if you have considered all this & already setup your system to max out performance, it just seems like you may be missing a bigger picture - maybe it is us that are not seeing what you have already setup.
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Jul 13, 2016 1:56 PMby stopmotion,Initially I was concerned about unnecessarily shortening the life span of my SSD boot drive because of the limited writes, but also, I had read in a book on FCP 7 where the author (Larry Jordan) said he no longer suggested keeping your project files on the boot drive and that you could locate them anywhere. But after considering your input and that of Drew Reese, I'll just leave them where they are.
Thanks for your feedback.
