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after effects via thunderbolt drive
hi guys, just wondering whether anyone has tried working in after effects with your full project living on a external thunderbolt drive, ssd or regular hard drive.
im a freelance motion designer constantly on the move so i work from my laptop a lot, transferring files back and forth to my desktop machine is proving time consuming and frustrating.
any tips / info is much appreciated.
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4 Replies
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thanks dave, much appreciated.
motion designer / design director
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You have to be careful when purchasing a drive with Thunderbolt. Some of them are not what they seem at first glance.
Several companies are selling drives with a Thunderbolt connector but a USB controller, not a true Thunderbolt controller. Price is a good indicator which is which, the drives USB 3 controller are considerably less.
A true Thunderbolt drive like those from Promise or LaCie (the big ones) provide excellent performance. They are really TB to SATA and SATA throughput becomes saturated long before TB does.
Now with TB2 and the potential for 20GB speed its very unlikely that you’ll find drives to keep up. Of course you’ll need TB2 on both ends, drive controller and computer.
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I do not do a lot of AE work, but the work I do is kept on a WD MyBook TB 6G (2x3G striped) volume. Everything runs fine and speedy until my system falls back to my SATA drives for something – loading a system file, background swapping, etc.
As Dan says, though: if you move it, pack it well! 🙂
Good luck!
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I’ve been using a Drobo Mini with 4x HGST Travelstar 7K100 1 TB 7200 rpm drives plus a 128K SSD accelerator via Thunderbolt to a new iMac. All the AE projects and footage are on the Drobo which moves back and forth weekly between two locations. So far seems to work great.
Best
Bruce
Photographer / Motion Graphics Artist
Vision Risingvimeo.com/BodhiBruce
visionrising.comDance Without Reason
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