FCP X and external drive??

[Ifti]

My current setup is a MacBook 16" (2.3 i9 / 32GB / 1TB / 550m 8GB), and I have several external drives. The main ones are:

- A large NAS used for general data storage, backups, and for other users in the household to save data to.
- A ThunderBlade V4 drive, current used to house FCP projects I'm working on.
- A 2TB Glyph Atom Pro for when I'm not at my desk with the ThunderBlade.
- A Samsung T5 used for SuperDuper backups of the MacBook
- Various external USB3 drives for other backups and moving data between Mac and Windows.

When editing via FCPx all my video files, projects, render files, etc, are all accessed via ThunderBolt 3 to an external drive - be it the ThunderBlade or the Atom Pro.
Currently I'm only working with 1080p footage (native, not proxy etc), but plan to move to 4K very soon.....

I back these up to my NAS (MacBook > TB3 to 10GBe adapter > 10GBe Switch > 10GBe NAS).

Is this still the most 'efficient' way to work??
ie, with the speed of internal drives on MacBooks these days, do users just edit without any external drive whatsoever, without any noticeable loss in performance?
Should I eliminate the external drives from my workflow altogether (ie sell them!) or would it be beneficial to continue as I am?

 

[ruslan120]

Internal drive editing works just fine as well. You just run the risk of running out of space.

If the question is whether you want to cut out the external drives to edit on the NAS, you can get FCP working on a NAS and it will probably function just fine if the read and writes are at a few hundred MB/s. It would get slower due to the seek times on the spinning drives though. That’ll slow down editing in general by a decent amount.