Anyone editing with FCS on iMac and SSD drive and Thunderbolt enclosure?

[dpavid]

Anyone editing on an iMac with SSD internal drive and external Thunderbolt drives? Accordingly to many youtube post, people are getting Blackmagic Design Disk Speed Test results upwards of 250MB/sec on single internal drive and over 600 mb/sec using SATA drives in thunderbolt enclosure.

Obviously disk speed is more than enough for AVC-Intra but what about CPU processor and GPU? My MacPro died and I don't plan to buy another one until a new model comes out with hopefully with Thunderbolt, if it ever will. For the meantime I was thinking about getting a 27" iMac with 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD for the internal HD, and Promise Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt System.

Does anyone have a similar system? Do you know if I will be able to edit 4 streams of multi-cam AVC-Intra 100? What other issues will I encounter?

This is just a half-way carry over system so (when/if) the new MacPro comes out, I can pull the SSD drive from the iMac and use the Thunderbolt array on the MacPro and keep the iMac for the kids.

Thanks in advance for your comments and thoughts.

 

[David Saraceno]

I'm running a 240 GB Mercury Extreme SSD in a 15" i7 2.5 GHz late 2011 MacBook Pro 15-inch.

I pulled the 750 GB 7200 rpm internal boot drive, and used a OWC Data Doubler to install it in the optical bay drive.

SSD boot drive (SATA III): write - 457 MB/s | read 483 MB/s

750 GB 7200 rpm in the optical bay: write - 88 MB/s | read 89 MB/s

Note that I have 600 gigabytes of data on that drive.

AVCINTRA 100 plays uneventfully off the media drive

 

[dpavid]

Does it play from the SSD drive? Besides, I'm thinking about playing media from a thunderbolt enclosure. I read you need a minimum of 3 SATA drives in RAID 0 just for AVC-Intra Playback for it to be smooth.