Final Cut Pro X and MacBook Pro retina (late 2013)

[nicolasonline]

Hello,

Knowing that it is always good practice that your "OS drive" and "Media to Edit drive" is the right way to do things for multiple reasons.

1. We used to operate on spinning drives. Said drives would average out at say 100MBps read and 100MBps write. Having to read/write the application and cache it in RAM and use the same drive to access media would obviously bottleneck the system somewhere.

2. SSDs used to be really expensive and we use to have 64 or 128GB SSDs just running our OS and have the cheaper storage and/or RAID drives manage our media.

The question is now in relation to the latest iteration of Apple's MacBook Pro Retina 15'' (specifically the 1TB and 2.6GHz) version which geekbench'd the highest single-core score any mac has ever geekbenched. But most importantly scores an astonishing 675MBps write and 725Mps read due to its PCIe connector.

With those ridiculous speeds nearing what many extremely striped RAIDs couldn't achieve only a few years ago, and the whole system architecture handling application management. Is it safe to say that editing can be done on the internal drive as a regular practice (keeping in mind that SSDs do have limited read/writes) and that it's not ideal, but the trade-off being not lugging around hard drives everywhere you go.

Any thoughts/opinions/constatations/technicalsavvy/banter on this subject is openly welcome.

Thanks,

Nick

 

[FSMBP]

It's all personal preference but I do live by separating OS from Media, even with SSDs. Reason being that, like you said, write/reads on drives are limited and given the fact Retina machines do not have easily accessible HDs, I would rather have more wear/tare on an external.

However, for small easy projects, I have edited on my MacBook Pro's SSD. Also, I've been proxy work bigger projects.

 

[nateo200]

It's all personal preference but I do live by separating OS from Media, even with SSDs. Reason being that, like you said, write/reads on drives are limited and given the fact Retina machines do not have easily accessible HDs, I would rather have more wear/tare on an external.

However, for small easy projects, I have edited on my MacBook Pro's SSD. Also, I've been proxy work bigger projects.

My reasoning exactly. I only edit off the SSD for small things, pretty much the same practice as when I had a spinning HDD as my boot drive but for different reasons obviously. Although with the non-PCIe SSD rMBP's OWC offers replacements...hopefully OWC will continue both SATA and PCIe SSD options for the rMBP and MBA. SSD's are great but the limited read and writes is kind of a buzz kill....I'll most likely be looking into a small RAID array to get >250MB/s read and write in the future, unfortunetely they just aren't cheap and external SSD scratch drives via say a Lacie 256, 512 or even 1TB SSD via USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt will give you VERY fast read and write from one drive.

 

[FSMBP]

My reasoning exactly. I only edit off the SSD for small things, pretty much the same practice as when I had a spinning HDD as my boot drive but for different reasons obviously. Although with the non-PCIe SSD rMBP's OWC offers replacements...hopefully OWC will continue both SATA and PCIe SSD options for the rMBP and MBA. SSD's are great but the limited read and writes is kind of a buzz kill....I'll most likely be looking into a small RAID array to get >250MB/s read and write in the future, unfortunetely they just aren't cheap and external SSD scratch drives via say a Lacie 256, 512 or even 1TB SSD via USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt will give you VERY fast read and write from one drive.

That's my plan in the next couple years, a single 512GB SSD for editing my main project (connected via USB 3 or Thunderbolt). Then, once the project is done, I would move it to traditional hard-drive for storage.

 

[nateo200]

That's my plan in the next couple years, a single 512GB SSD for editing my main project (connected via USB 3 or Thunderbolt). Then, once the project is done, I would move it to traditional hard-drive for storage.

Yup the LaCie ones are a bit pricey right now considering I just bought two new LaCie mini Rugged's among other stuff so I'm waiting but I might use the SSD in my old cMBP and connect it via USB 3.0 (I have a Seagate that has a removable SATAIII to USB 3.0 connector that works with any 2.5" drive), not as pretty but probably still really fast...only 180GB's but it would be soley used as a scratch drive with nothing but my current projects on it. One thing to keep in mind is SSD's have limited read and writes vs a traditional HDD (I have to 7 year old 2.5" 160GB's that still run fine, used to run them in RAID until one of the RAID adapters broke) BUT external SSD looks much cheaper than a RAID right now and it will really saturate the link speed far more than a single or even double spinning disk set up...kind of silly to have 4.8Gbps (USB 3.0) and 10Gbps (Thunderbolt) I/O's when hard drives barely touch 100Mbps!

 

[josh.b]

I have the Fusion drive but I always use my external USB 3 hard drive for cache/media storage because I don't want to kill my SSD drive in 6 months through 60GB per day writes while editing. I dunno how people can afford to use SSD for their workflow. Must burn through so many drives a year

 

[nateo200]

Eh I don't think you'll kill it. I have an SSD now for editing, its from my old MacBook Pro that I took it out of and replaced with a spinning drive since its been relegated to a family computer. Anyways over USB 3.0 I'm getting anywhere from 180 to 300MB/s...pretty fricken awesome. I can capture 10-bit uncompressed HD from a capture card to something other than my internal SSD realistically now.