Samsung T7 with Mini M1

[iAdamator]

That sounds a little on the low side for a T7 with the M1 Mini (I have both of these), and IIRC I get in the high 600MB/s range - I'd need to check again to be sure. Unfortunately I don't think there is anything you can do to improve it assuming you have good quality cables, although I did find that I got somewhat better speeds by going through my CalDigit TS3+ dock, which is connected to the Mac via Thunderbolt. I think it was about 60-80MB/s faster.

600MB/s should be fine for editing 4K video from the drives - I do this often and have never seen dropped frames due to disk speed. If you look at the Activity Monitor disk activity, or if you have an SSD monitoring tool like the one in iStatMenus, you can see the read/write speeds, and you'll probably find that they are well within this limit. Bear in mind that a lot of 4K video codecs are only using about 100-200 mega *bits* per second, or 25MB/s. Even with multiple streams of video most SSDs are capable of reading this for at least a short period.

One caveat is that most SSD manufacturers quote an ideal maximum throughput using a limited high-speed cache to get those high numbers. I think this is about 40GB on a 1TB Samsung T7. This means that for sustained transfers the speed will drop-off dramatically once the cached is used. This is why Black Magic Design doesn't approve the T7 for use with their cameras (but does approve the T5, which although slower, has a more consistent long-term write speed). That said, while this is critical for video capture (at least for long takes), it may not be such an issue for video editing if you are working on clips in a normal workflow.

Thanks for the reply and useful information. I’m very new to FCP pro so I don’t know what’s optimal yet. If I do need to edit from an external drive like the T7, is there a combination of things that is optimal? For example could I keep my footage on the T7 (my footage is all iPhone videos) and have the library/project on the internal drive? Or have everything on the external?

Going by what you said I’d think I could have everything run off the T7 and likely not run into issues. At least not with what I do.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Thanks for the reply and useful information. I’m very new to FCP pro so I don’t know what’s optimal yet. If I do need to edit from an external drive like the T7, is there a combination of things that is optimal? For example could I keep my footage on the T7 (my footage is all iPhone videos) and have the library/project on the internal drive? Or have everything on the external?

Going by what you said I’d think I could have everything run off the T7 and likely not run into issues. At least not with what I do.

Good questions! FCP library organization can be a bit personal, but I would propose the following:

1) If you have a single Mac and might use a combination of internal and external SSDs for your projects, then it is probably easier to have your libraries/projects on the internal drive, with media "external" to the project, and then back up the FCP project to external drive or cloud storage.

This allows you to potentially move media between internal and external drives. The reason for doing this isn't necessarily for reasons of speed (unless you have a hugely taxing multi-stream 6K or 8K timeline). It can be helpful if you are mobile and don't want the hassle of working from the external disk (e.g. on a plane). You might also want to have the media on both internal and external as a backup, but be able to work from both if required (by relinking the file locations to internal or external drives as required)

2) If you have multiple Macs, then it is probably easier to have the library on the external drive, either including it in the fcpbundle or with "external" media but on the same drive. This means you can just take the external drive with you and work directly from it on multiple machines, without working about having multiple copies of your library.

I would keep separate libraries for each distinct "project" / deliverable. I find the Apple usage of the term "project" to be a bit confusing, and tend to think of it as a "timeline".

As a further point, I think you may need to be careful having the FCP library (fcpbundle) location inside folders that are constantly synced to cloud storage. Davinci Resolve strongly advises against this because the cloud sync can cause file locking contention that could corrupt the project or database - but I don't know whether Apple has a state policy on this. Best avoided and use a non-continuous backup solution. I would be interested if anyone has any thoughts on this!