Am I using my drives in the best way in terms of performance?

Question

I want to make sure I'm using my iMac and drives in the way that will give me the best FCPX performance.
I have a mid-2010 iMac 2.93 GHz i7 core with 32 GB of RAM running OS 10.7.5.  It has an ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB graphics card.  My iMac has two internal drives:  a 256 GB flash drive (my "Macintosh HD"), and a 2 TB standard drive (my "Macintosh HD2").  I also have an external 2 TB drive from OWC/Macsales connected with Firewire 800.  I can't find the specifics on this OWC external drive, but I know I bought it as a video editing drive (it is not just for backing-up).  Though they introduced soon after my iMac, mine does not have a Thunderbolt port.
As things stand now, my OS and FCPX are on the main internal hard drive (it's my understanding that that is where they are automatically), which is the 256 GB flash drive labeled "Macintosh HD."  And I have my FCP event libraries and my projects on the second internal drive, which is the 2 TB internal drive labeled "Macintosh HD2."  Right now I'm only using the OWC 2 TB external firewire 800 drive for storing the video I upload from my cameras.
Does this sound like the best way to go in terms of performance?  I mean, is it better to use the internal 2TB drive for my events and projects?  Or would they be better on the OWC 2 TB external firewire 800 drive?  Or should the projects be on one and the events on the other?

Answer 1

T'bolt SSD or T'bolt RAID will be faster than your internal spinning disk drive.  For sure.
Larger drives are faster than smaller drives, mechanically.  But the data throughput is the same.  The differences are so small no one can notice in real world work.  But you get so many advantages with larger drives.
See, a hard drive encoluser has more than one platter in it.  A single 4 TB drive can have 4 platters in it.  so it access data, "mechanicaly" faster than a smaller drive with only 1 or 2 platters.  BUT when that data hits the controller card, the interface protocol (FW, USB, SATA, etc), it all shuts down to the same speed.  The platters and read/write heads are physicall MUCH faster than what the interface and controller card can handle.  So all that matters is how it gets connected.  USB 2 suck, FW is minimal for video, eSATA and SATA are pretty darned good, 6GB SSD is awesome, as is T'bolt.
Let me put it this way.  spinning disks are slower than SSDs in terms of internal "data access" (read/write) speed.  Both have to deal with the same "bandwidth" issues when they hit an interface such as USB or FW or T'bolt.  Two mechanically different things, but the work together to give you the total sum of a drives ultimate real world performance.
Now, a single SATA drive internally will be very slightly slower than a SATA drive in a T'bolt encoluser.  Because T'bolt has greater bandwidth than SATA.  But, the differences are so small, in daily real world operations no one would notice, and the price of the T'bot SATA enclosure would just be expensive.
That is why you see T'bolt enclosures with SATA drives always as RAIDs, 2 or more drives.  That's were SATA drives and T'bolt really shine.   T'bot really shines with SSD RAIDs, but their super expensive and super limited capacity.
But directly to your question, hard drives are the opposite of automobiles; bigger is always faster.