Re: FCP 7 and SSD on a Mac Pro / beach-balling

I can only share my experiences with the MacBook Pro (2009 Core2 Duo) and an SSD (OWC 3G) as the boot / applications volume.

I have never had the issue that you describe. My typical set up is to use my traditional hard drive for media storage (such as imported media and other assets) while setting my SSD as a scratch disk for quick renders and also faster exporting of files.

I highly doubt that 3G SSD speeds would cause a beachball problem, when even the slower SSDs are much faster than a typical internal drive.

Have you tried the Blackmagic diskspeed utility? I believe it is free on the Mac App Store. You should be able to confirm your read and write speeds are more than sufficient.

The intermittent nature of the problem (every 5 minutes), suggests to me that it is not an overall performance issue with the drive, but perhaps a configuration issue somewhere. I am perplexed though. It is fully possible that your SSD has a hardware issue as well, but I don't know how to test that other than swapping it.

Good luck!