- #Solid state external hard drive for macbook pro portable#
- #Solid state external hard drive for macbook pro pro#
If you're buying a drive for data-protection or backup purposes, this could be worth thinking about for the sake of peace of mind.Solid state drives (SSDs) have made our Macs faster and more responsive than ever, but often at the cost of less internal storage. Again, solid state drives have the edge here, as they can be built smaller.Īlso, some drives are equipped with layers of physical protection against impacts, heat, water and other nasty things that can damage them. As such, you may want to think about how easy a drive is to carry around. Portability and toughness: There are all sorts of reasons you may want to transfer your data from place to place on a drive – to edit on the go, to bring to a client, or to create an offline, off-site copy, for example. Different drives will offer different connections – USB-C and USB 3 are good, but Thunderbolt is better, and having a drive/computer combination with Thunderbolt 3 or 4 compatibility will see a marked improvement in transfer speeds. Interface: As well as the drive's own read speed, the interface it uses to connect to the computer will affect how fast you can access the data. Another solution is a RAID array, which is essentially a rig that spreads data across multiple hard drives, improving capacity and performance and adding a layer of redundancy in case of drive failure. Ideally, you want to get speeds as snappy as possible – not just so you don't have to spend half your life in front of the computer waiting for files to copy across (though that is a factor), but also so that you can play and edit your files directly off the drive without any stuttering.Īn SSD is the faster drive type, though these come at a cost premium compared to HDDs. Speed: Hard drive write and read speeds refer to how quickly data can be transferred on and off the drive. Anything less than that will simply fill up too fast to be useful. In general, though, we'd recommend video editors getting a minimum of 1TB. Of course, bigger hard drives are pricier, so it's a matter of getting as much storage as you can for your buck. Video files are big, so a video editor will want a hard drive with as much storage as possible. Most average consumer hard drives these days sit somewhere between 500GB and 4TB, though you can get ones with a lot less or a lot more storage, if you prefer. If you're relatively new to hard drive shopping, this is a good primer of the key features you should be looking out for.Ĭapacity: The headline feature of any hard drive is its capacity – the amount of data it's capable of storing. The speed and storage needs of those working in video are much greater than most other creative disciplines, simply because video is so data-intensive.īelow, we've listed the main criteria we looked at when selected our favorite hard drives for video editing. Picking out the best hard drives for video editors is a different matter to picking out the best hard drives for anyone else, or even the best hard drives for photographers. What we look for in the best hard drives for video editing It comes set to RAID 5 as default but it’s also reconfigurable to RAID 0, 1, and 10 for maximum flexibility. Though its 7200RPM hard disk drives aren’t technically the fastest you can get, all four are removable for a quick workflow switch-up. Sustained maximum read/write speeds of up to 1000MB/s/1100MB/s respectively mean it’ll handle almost anything users can throw at it.
#Solid state external hard drive for macbook pro pro#
Dual Thunderbolt 3 ports allow daisy chaining of up to 5 additional devices, while up to 85W of charging power is delivered via the USB-C connection for compatible MacBook or MacBook Pro devices. However, it does boast some very impressive specs and performance stats. So, read on to discover the best hard drives for video editing available today.ĭestined for heavy workloads and professionals, this storage device doesn’t come cheap. We've included both types in this guide, and covered options for a range of budgets as we know everyone has different needs. Also, the moving parts can generate heat, which can require noisy fans. HDDs tend to be cheaper than SSDs, but you need to make sure that you get one with fast enough transfer speeds to handle video, lest you be stuck in front of your computer all day. They can be combined to form a multi-drive RAID (redundant array of independent disks) array, to increase speeds. These are an older technology, still using spinning disks to write and read data, but they're reliable and reasonable fast. It's also worth considering Hard Disk Drives, or HDDs.
#Solid state external hard drive for macbook pro portable#
These are probably the best choice for most video editors, as they're faster and can be made more portable – the downside being that they tend to be the more expensive option. There are two main types of drive for video editing we'll be considering here.