Flash & solid state drives

Hi Ken & Friends,

I'm running FCP 5.1.4 on a 17" MacBookPro with OS 10.6.8. It has a FW 800 and a Thunderbolt port and "High Speed" USB. (I think it's USB 2, not sure.)

Anyhow my biggest client, a band leader for whom I do lots of demos, has a lot of files and the FW 800 - 500 Gb drive he owns is both old and filling up.

Given my setup, what would be the best drive he can get for me to edit from given my system?

Thanx,

Ben Bryant NYC

Ben,

A Thunderbolt drive would be your best bet for data transfer speed. If the older FW800 drive has anther port you could also use a second drive (daisy-chaining). Stay away from USB 2.0 drives for video editing - the older USB 2.0 protocol transfers data in packets with pauses in-between which FCP will usually interpret as dropped frames.

-DH

Thanx, DH.

Ben Bryant NYC

Hi Ben
Just to back up David's point.

USB2 has a thru put of around 480Mbits/s, but with overhead actually a little less than 400Mb/s. This = less than 60MB/s
Firewire 800 provides around 85MB/s of thru put.
Firewire is a bottleneck for even a single 7200rpm hdd.

A modern spinning hdd has around 160MB/s RW capability. Almost 2X faster than a FW800 I/O speeds.
A modern ssd drive thru put is around 450MB/s

TB 1 on your Mac provides around 10Gbits/s or 1250MB/s.
You can RAID 0 a lot of drives before maxing out a TB1 port.
TB2 doubles the speed to 20Gb/s and TB3 doubles that 40Gb/s.

I started using a couple of ssd drives for media drives thru the USB3.0 ports(5Gb/s//625MB/s) for editing. I back up to spinning hdds and archive there. I erase the project at completion and load next project onto ssd. Off to the races.

Keeping Mega bits(Mb/s) vs Mega Bytes(MB/s) vs Giga bits(Gb/s) Giga Bytes(GB/s) sorted can be confusing. PetaBytes anyone? Holodeck time ;p

Hope this helps, Greg

Thanks Greg.

Ben Bryant NYC