help with bottleneck when editing please

My Macbook Pro has checkmarks across the board when I use the speedtest, reading/writing average of 1500 mb/s, but I get choppy playback sometimes even when using thunderbolt 2 card reader with my Cfast cards. Could someone knowledge me on the proper set up for editing? RAID, different SSD, just some info that could set me in the right direction would be really appreciated. Sorry for the beginner question. Thanks so much.

Best guess (assuming yourmedia resides on that fast r/w media and is not 6k stuff), stop using H264 encoded media to edit with but transcode to a edit/resolve friendly prores 422 before editing.
It a well know fact that even with a beefy machine h264 sucks on resolve. Better on 14 but why bother.
I always transcode all my material to a common denominator and when i was using a macbook pro in the past (with a thunderbold ssd raid zero for my media) had smooth as butter resolve experiences when i did that.

thanks for replying. I'm actually not transcoding and trying to edit RAW 3:1 footage right off the card. I am trying to skip the transcoding process. I am thinking of ordering an SSD with USB 3.0 to SATA cable in hopes that will speed it up.

Wont help speed wise as you are already clocking 1500mbps for your source media drive as you mentioned (dont edit from the card, thats generaly bad) Its your cpu (and gpu combo) on the macbook that is too weak for red debayering and a smooth experience (regardless of the drive speed in this case which is not anymore the bottleneck at 1500mbps) Better go transcode to prorez 444 (if you need quality or 422 just for editing) and put that on the 1500mbps drive or whatever ssd and you are good to go

Im not clocking 1500 on my source media thats just when I run the speedtest on my macbook. My macbook is capable of hitting 1500 r/w speed. My source media isnt transferring fast enough I believe. I think that's limited by the cfast card only having a read speed of 510 mb/s or something, is what I found out. Thinking a RAID 0 with 2 SSDs will allow me to run something with around 1000 mb/s read write speed

Ah, ok. I assumed when you run a speedtest you run it for the media you use. Running it for the internal mac ssd if you dont use it it of little use inthis case .
Yes so getting fast storage helps , but will not give you smooth red editing experience on a macbook. Sorry. Not happening. Your option is to transcode,or get bigger hardware. Or external gpu solutions etc, but red debayering is not benefitting that much from gpu and still needs cpu horsepower, so mileage will vary.
I worked for at least 2 years running resolve of a top specced macbook pro, plus a double raid zero of a few ssds each over thunderbolt on it for cache and for media (transcoded to prores 444 for red stuff and the rest 422hq) and worked great. You still need to do lots of caching if more then a couple of grading nodes (depending type) but its workable if all you storage is ssd based.
I moved to much biggermachine when i started working with multilayer exr files for vfx etc. The is a limit what you can push out of a macbook

agreed, your initial post is confusing when you tell us your speed test, and the drive setup you are using.

We all assume that is the drive that is giving those tests.

If the CF card you are reading off of is limited to 500, and you want to use it as a source card, i'm not sure anything is going to help you, except transcoding and using a different drive setup.

With the time you are losing in testing this and that, and spending more money in a solution that may or may not work, it is better to simply lose a few hours transcoding to prores, and then move on to the edit.

Link back up to the raw before you color if so desired.