However I got tired of "living dangerously", plus the downtime of recovering from backups. I always had good backups so didn't lose anything. I'd estimate over the years I probably averaged about a drive failure every two years, which of course required recovering from backups. It's the cheapest way to get good performance. It's a little risky IMO but if you have good backups I guess it's OK. In the past I ran my main media on two-drive RAID 0. You can run the G-Raid in RAID 1 but that cuts capacity to 50% and hurts some types of performance. Also the R4 can tolerate a drive failure due to RAID 5 whereas a single drive failure on the G-Raid in RAID 0 will compromise all data on both drives. It's not as fast as the R4 but it costs 1/2 as much. I like it because it sits flat on top of my R4 and the color mostly matches. I also back the R4 up separately to another detached Thunderbolt drive using Carbon Copy, and periodically to a 4TB USB 3.0 drive. I use it in RAID 0 to back up via Time Machine my iMac and 8TB Promise Pegasus in RAID 5. I have the 2nd one - the G-Raid 8TB Thunderbolt 1.
E.g, "sudo iopending", and "sudo bitesize.d".
The I/O histogram can be examined using the command bitesize.d. If so inclined you can measure whether there's an I/O bottleneck using the Terminal command iopending. Whatever external drive you get should itself be backed up, even if it's RAID 5. G-Raid is less expensive and pretty good, but not as fast. The Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID products are very good, but somewhat expensive. If your boot drive is not SSD nor Fusion Drive, a single 7200 rpm drive doesn't have that much extra I/O performance anyway. It's only common sense to distribute the I/O load. That said, 4k takes a lot more and if you ever edit multicam or multiple streams it takes even more.
Editing single-stream H.264 1080p video doesn't take much I/O performance. In fact many activities on FCP X are CPU or GPU bound. People often make expensive purchases speculatively assuming that faster I/O yields faster performance. That said, if the system drive is fast (say SSD or Fusion Drive) moving 1080p media to an external drive may not yield a dramatic overall performance improvement.įaster I/O only improves overall performance if I/O was the bottleneck. It's generally good advice to have your media files on a separate hard drive than your system drive. Is it true that I should have all the video files in the external hard disk when you work with video?.Now I am looking for a good thunderbolt hard disk. But I have been told that I should have an external hard disk when I work with video editing. So far my editing workflow has been with my internal hard disk.