Best Data Structure for FCP-X?

[Terry VerHaar]

Has anyone figured out the optimal data structure for FCP-X on a Mac Pro? I have 4 internal drives and am now booting from PCI-e based flash memory. SO I have all four drives to mess with. Thinking of doing a RAID-0 on two of them for speed. I know, I'll need to back up OFTEN.

Is if best to put Projects and Events on different or the same drives? How about media? I don't copy my actual media into the Events folder so is it better to put it on the same drive as Projects and/or Events, or separate.

I have done it different ways previously but since I am completely re-structuring with new drives, I thought I'd get some expert input.

Thanks!!!

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Wow - no one? :smiley: Sam Mestman, where are you?

 

[Sam Mestman - WMM]

Hey Terry,

My .02 is that it your best bet is to keep your media on the fastest raid you have, and keep your events and projects on flash storage if you can (you'll get faster load times, although if you're dealing with lots of proxies and render files, you probably won't be able to do this). The other option would be to keep events and projects raided on your internal drives, and then have your media live elsewhere as sym links that you can reconnect if you ever move them. The real key is to keep your media outside of your original media folder, which gives you the flexibility to put your events and projects wherever is convenient. If it were my setup and I had a bunch of internal drives in a mac pro, I'd keep all my events and projects there (which would give me plenty of space for my proxies), as well as commonly used media like SFX libraries, music cues, and archived masters (for your reel) so that it's always loaded regardless of what event it lives in. All other event based external media can live on separate drives that you have mounted as needed... and then use Backups For Final Cut Pro to archive your events to your startup disk (and not include the proxy and render media in the settings tab).

So, bottom line... keep all events, projects, proxies, and commonly used media on the internal RAID which is always going to load up, and everything else on external drives that you'll only need for a particular project.

 

[jimhare]

Terry,

You also need to think about what is the easiest way to back up at the end. I always prefer to keep everything on the same drive so I don't need to figure out where all the bits and pieces are later. I tend to use drives like I used to use tapes. Keep everything together then put the drive on the shelf.

 

[Craig Parkes]

If you have all 4 drives free, and enough space on two drives for you media bay, I'd seriously consider a software RAID10 (0+1) - That way you get two drives worth of raid 0 speed, plus Raid 1 like redundancy.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Craig - not sure I understand what you mean. For RAID10, I'd need 3 drives, correct? That leaves one for other stuff. That could work but what do you mean by "media bay" in this context? Thanks for the input.

 

[Scott Crawley]

Jim,

You do multicam heavy, high res work. What editor are you using and what res do you cut at? Are you typically cutting 5 angles, or more? Have you ever run into a data throughput bottleneck? I am wondering how far folks have pushed the limits before suffering performance issues, and I believe Terry is interested in the same.

Maybe someone with an intimate knowledge of Mac bus capacities could assist. Kilgroe, you here?

Which Mac are you on Terry?

Thanks

Terry,

You also need to think about what is the easiest way to back up at the end. I always prefer to keep everything on the same drive so I don't need to figure out where all the bits and pieces are later. I tend to use drives like I used to use tapes. Keep everything together then put the drive on the shelf.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Scott - yes, definitely interested in performance issue, as you are aware from my recent "issues." LOL I am on a 2010 MacPro 5,1 - 6-core, 3.33 Ghz.

As something of an update to my other thread about FCP-X performance (and I should go update it there), I pulled out my hair about the spinning ball which, I think, turned out to be a bit of an accumulation of issues. As the smoke clears, I have replaced all 4 of my internal drives - to 3 TB drives, I have bumped RAM from 16 to 48G, and I have gone the extra step of adding a PCIe flash memory disk as a boot drive. In the process of doing all this, I obviously cleaned up my data structure and everything seems to be quite zippy right now.

That is what brought me to inquire about how to arrange Projects, Events and actual media to optimize performance.

 

[Scott Crawley]

Scott - yes, definitely interested in performance issue, as you are aware from my recent "issues." LOL I am on a 2010 MacPro 5,1 - 6-core, 3.33 Ghz. ... and everything seems to be quite zippy right now.

That's good to hear.

According to Mactracker, each of the optical hard drive bays has a 3.0 Gbps controller. Does that mean that each drive can read data simultaneously up to 3.0 Gbps, or is there some other limiting factor?

Anybody?

 

[paul schefz]

not sure if this helps...i actually have both events and projects in the fcpx folders on a dedicated pegasus TB (raid5)...it was strange at first to just let fcpx "handle" all media and files....but really, it makes it really easy to move things around from within fcpx and i still know exactly where things are.....
the pegasus gives me 600+mb/sec R/W so altough it is HD based, it is twice as fast as my internal SSDs (for large files, sustained R/W) so i now have everything in one place, no speed issues (at least not on regard to storage)...works great....