Need help finding FCPX bottleneck

FCPX has become almost unusable. It takes 15-20 minutes sometimes to launch and 10 minutes to navigate between projects. I get a beach ball for a minute at a time sometimes between making edits. I need some help determining what the bottleneck is and figure out how to fix it.

My company has 78 videos, between 25-40 minutes each in length. We make edits to them fairly frequently. Most of the video is SD but we're replacing it with HD as we can. I've been rebuilding them in FCPX, and am about 80% done. As far as I can tell, the problem could be:

- The files are stored on a Drobo, about 85% full, connected via USB2. As soon as somebody releases an eSATA/Thunderbolt adapter I'm going to get it.

- The project files are in HD. This means that I'm winding up having to re-render the SD video as I drag it into the timeline and scale it to match the 16:9 ratio.

- I'm using original media, not proxy media. I was thinking that it'd be fruitless to have extra proxy media laying around, but as it stands I've got 2.4TB in render files.

Any advice would be very, very appreciated.

Edited to add: I'm working on a <6 month old 27" 3.1GHz i5 iMac with 16GB RAM.

 

Ah, dumb me, not sure why I didn't think to check to see if the Drobo had FW800. I ran and got a cable and hooked it up via FW. Unfortunately, it still seems to be crawling. I typed in a title and it's been spinning beach ball for the last 10 minutes. It's still active, but only using 2.6% processor. 125 threads and 7.92GB of RAM (11.78BG Virtual) right now, if any of those statistics would help clarify anything.

 

I'd need far more space to copy my projects to the internal drive, unfortunately. It makes sense that it's the number of projects that I have (78). I guess I'm going to have to try to group them as best possible and turn them on/off when I need them. I switch between them pretty frequently so I need them fairly handy, but not at the expense of staring at a blank screen and going through two cups of coffee before it finally loads anything.

I hope performance for large libraries is on Apple's agenda for a future release, this is driving me absolutely bonkers. Maybe some day there will be an 8TB Thunderbolt array in my budget.

 

I should also add that I have a Drobo S, not the older Drobo. Everything I've read says that it *should* be adequate for video editing.

 

Well, some of those can be fixed. I'd rather not have to use a utility to move things around, but I'll get Event Manager X to unload the groups of projects that I don't need. I'll just have to close and reopen FCPX more than I'd like.

I'll move to eSATA as soon as there's a Thunderbolt adapter available.

I could probably drop a couple of 3TB drives in here (I have 5 2TB drives currently), that'd give me an extra TB to work with. I'd have to be able to justify that that'd fix my performance problem to get the fundage for it though.

My last question is whether it would be worth the trade off to make proxy media for the ~57 hours of footage that I have. I know the proxy media would be about a third more storage space for the raw video, but would mean smaller render files in the projects themselves. It seems like a big tradeoff considering I'd have to switch back to original media and let it re-render before I export for web/DVD/etc. Not to mention I'd have to go through each of my projects and delete the render files, otherwise there's no way I'd have room for the proxy media.