Help! Final Cut Pro Thinks My RAID Array Is A Camera Card

 Huh? What?

So today I went Import to try and re-import some media that behaved funky. Doing this I got a surprise: my RAID Array appeared under CAMERAS instead of DEVICES. And FCP started listing all the media files importable (there are 140k+ files on this drive array!), and not showing any of the folders/subfolders.

What? RAID_ZERO Array under Cameras???

A quick search found an article by Larry Jordan from 2015 about this very problem.

Heck, I checked my RAID, and lo and behold... I didn't have the three folders Larry is talking about (DCIM, MISC, PRIVATE) at the root of my drive, I only had a DCIM one. And that was enough to trip FCP into thinking my drive was a Camera/Camera card.

DICM folder at the root of the drive, not good!

I quickly dropped this DCIM folder into another folder at the Root, and now back to normal. 😊

That's how it should be.

Single External Rotating Drives Speed Wall

I often have to explain to friends and clients that no matter the connections on your SRHD (Single Rotating Hard Drive), USB 3, Thunderbolt, whatever, the read/write speed is limited by the drive itself.

See this BMD Disk Speed Test on a Thunderbolt connected 2TB LaCie Rugged portable drive. The port is capable of up to 10Gbps, 1250MB/s data transfer speed.

Lame speed due to the limitations of the hard drive itself. It has a USB-C connector as well, and the speed is exactly the same. As of today, single rotating drive won't give you anything above 130MB/s at best.

If you want more speed, you can only get it with a SSD or a Raid drive array.

As a reminder, the max speed of the various connecting protocols are tabulated below:
USB 2.0 480Mbps (60MB/s)
USB 3.0 / USB 3.1 gen1, 5Gbps (625MB/s)
eSATA 1.5Gbps (187.5MB/s), 3Gbps (375MB/s), up to 6Gbps (750MB/s)
USB 3.2 / 3.1 gen 2 / Thunderbolt v1 two channels 10Gbps (1250MB/s)
Thunderbolt v2 20Gbps (2500MB/s)
Thunderbolt v3 40Gbps (5000MB/s)

A single rotating modern drive is the limiting speed factor using all but USB 2.0 protocols. As a reminder USB 2.0 was implemented in 1996!! eSATA in 2004. Hard drives have some serious catch up to do.

Drive performances are not made equal - a few speed test comparisons

Some are abysmal! Like this Patriot USB 2.0 32GB flash drive:

Seriously flawed!

Compared to this no name USB 2.0 16GB flash drive:

Useless for most tasks.

Obviously pale in comparison to this (meh!) WD My Passport for Mac USB 3.0 1TB portable hard drive:

That's acceptable for HD work, certainly not fast.

What's a bit better is this WD Red 2TB 3.5 bare hard drive in a USB 3.0 (or eSata dock, or on the internal Sata bus):

Acceptable, OK fast for most HD work.

This G-Drive 4TB USB 3.0 beats it by another a small margin:

Acceptable, OK fast for most HD work.

The old CalDigit 5 hard drives Raid0 4.7TB via eSata is still faster though:

OK fast for most things HD (but NOISY! as in LOUD FAN NOISE)