FCPX & Thunderbolt
 

Guys,

I have a 2011 Macbook Pro 13" that I would like to use for my video editing, the read and write speeds to my internal hard drive are around 60 MB/s. I have just bought a 6TB Thunderbolt external hard drive, when configured to Raid 0 the read/write speeds are around 250MB/s which is pretty darn fast!

My Book Thunderbolt Duo

To increase the speed of FCPX would it make sense to move the FCPX program onto this external drive and run it from there?

Re: FCPX & Thunderbolt
 

Moving the application itself is tricky, but you can make the Thunderbolt drive your location for all the work files, which will make a big difference

Re: FCPX & Thunderbolt
 

Yeah, keep FCPX on he system drive but have all of your Events and Projects on the external drive. Thats the most efficient way.

Re: FCPX & Thunderbolt
 

I havent found that to be the case, it copied over very easily. To open the program I do it from the hard drive and everything seems to run fine. The thing I'm not entirely sure of is how fast it runs compared to having it on the internal hard drive.

Re: FCPX & Thunderbolt
 

Why is that Simon?

Re: FCPX & Thunderbolt
 

Traditionally, it was better to have the program on the system drive and the video on another drive so that the video file drive would only have to run the video file. If the program needed to access the application folder for some reason (special code, filters, etc.) then it wouldn't impact the playback of the video drive. These days it might not be such an issue since most people are not recording back to videotape anymore. But it's doubtful that you are getting much benefit from having the program on the Thunderbolt drive. An SSD drive, according to some people's experiences, might give you some extra speed. Actually if the Thuderbolt drive crashes, not only have you lost your video footage but the program as well.

Re: FCPX & Thunderbolt
 

Seems to me the best reason to have the application on the Computer system drive is it travels with the computer regardless of which Harddrive you might hook up to it. If you are trying to to use a different computer with the program then having a copy of the program on the external Harddrive might be useful