Reading book “Final Cut Pro Workflows” by Osder & Carman, 2008. On page 284 it relays advice that it is best to put Project Files [.fcp] on a separate drive to the Media Drive (e.g. Media Drive= XSAN), due to:
- Safety – not all on one drive
- Avoid fragmenting the media drive (project files, cache and to a lesser extent render files) are written often (transient files?)
I’m not immediately convinced by these arguments:
- Media drive should be backed-up in any case. I use (slower) USB drives and file-synch.
- Fragmentation may be an old-school issue, less of an issue on Mac’s HFS +.
- Example: article at [http://www.macmousecalls.com/files/1f6efbb25f58d77390499af1f984d2c7-33.html] linking-on to [http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation]
- Example: Larry Jordan, “Final Cut Pro Power Skills” 2010, page 34, Chapter 2, “Defragmenting Your Hard Drive”: Once popular, this technique is no longer recommended.
How to view degree of fragmentation on an HFS volume:
- [http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter12/hfsdebug/fragmentation.html]
- Command-line app to report a variety of storage-volume statistics, including fragmentation.
- After download, can check the sha1 checksum, but this is of the executable, not the download itself ([.dmg] file). The ‘sha1’ command is inbuilt to Mac OS, as: [/usr/bin/openssl sha1]. Note the last character of ‘openssl’ is a small ‘L’ niot a ‘1’.