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lethalillness

macrumors member
Original poster
Glad to have gotten my first and new (refurbished but practically new) 27'' iMac last week. I sold my custom built computer and finally fully switched fully mac. I love it and it's definitely really nice as I also have a 2011 Macbook Pro.

I do graphics and audio and with this being a transition to a new computer I have a lot of my data on external hard drives. Over the weekend I've had to finish a video project for school. Before I had my iMac, I used to stream my Mercury Elite external via Firewire 800 to my Macbook Pro in Adobe Premiere with no problems editing from the external. Though, using my iMac I notice that it lags a lot when playing back.

I took this a step further to see if this was just a limitation of RAM and using Adobe Premiere (since I only have 4GB in the iMac compared to the 8GB Macbook Pro). In order to do that just tried to play a exported movie from the Mercury Elite, that too was extremely laggy. I then transfered the video to my iMac (which was slow over Firewire 800) and it played fine.

I figure maybe its just the Mercury Elite and iMac so I tried transferring some stuff from my old HDD via a USB HDD caddy that too is slow (obviously slower than FW800, but still slower than it would on my Macbook. The only thing I could think is the ram. I do have a SSD in my Macbook Pro but that would have nothing to do with streaming from the external only transferring.

Any ideas? The reason for my concern is because like I said I do audio and in audio I would need to record to a separate disc. Adding a second HDD in my iMac is not an option so I have to rely on externals and lagging that much playing a simple video would be nothing compared to 40 track sessions which are flawless on my Macbook Pro. Thanks.

Edit: The only other difference I can see is I have Lion on the iMac which I don't on my Macbook Pro.
 
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