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Is there anything wrong with video editing off of an external SSD?
I have a 2013 15″ MacBook Pro w/ Retina & 2.4ghz intel core i7 running on OSX 10.8.2. I do my video editing in either Final Cut Pro 7 or Adobe Premiere CS6, but will start using creative cloud when I start my next project which will be working with 4K+ footage. I usually edit directly off of external hard drives and keep all the transcoded footage, project files, and scratch disks on the hard drive. I am getting tired of dealing with hard drives failing on me left and right and am thinking about working off of an external solid state drive instead of a hard drive for my next big editing project. I’m considering buying the Samsung T1 Portable 1 TB USB 3.0 External SSD. I would still use an external hard drive to back up all of my work throughout the duration of the project, but I would never edit off of the backup hard drive. Is there anything wrong with this plan I have to edit off of an external SSD? I noticed that video editors never edit off external SSD’s and I would like to know why.
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4 Replies
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why?
because they are expensive, and relatively small.
If SSD drives were 6TB and cost $260 each, everyone would only use SSD drives.Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
Hi Bob,
Thanks for the reply. I understand that SSD’s are more expensive, but if money is not an issue, is there any reason why editing on an external SSD shouldn’t be done?
Since external hard drives are so unreliable, I need to buy a new one every time I start a new project. I feel that it would be a worthy investment to pay more for an external SSD instead of an external HD if I could re-use the SSD again and again as a working drive for numerous projects. I wouldn’t use it for long term storage. I would just constantly back up my work from the external SSD onto a backup external HD and, when a project is done, I would just clear the space on the external SSD and use it for my next project. If I did this, would an SSD have an advantage over a HD in terms of fail rate?
Also, are there any external SSD’s that would have enough throughput to use for editing footage with resolutions of 4K and up?
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SSDs are used all the time for editing. You can mount SSD’s in any RAID array. AT this coming NAB you will see multiple vendors – Small Tree, Facilis, Open Drive, all showing SSD only RAID arrays. But you can mount SSD’s into any array, with the right adaptor.
Like with SATA drives, if you have enough drives raided together, you can do 4K and above.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
Hi Tony,
You have 2013 MBP and would like to work on 4K. Its nothing wrong, actually its great to work of the SSD setup either with single unit (as yours) or in Raid as Bob mentioned, as there is no seek time involved with those drives. I guess you are working with lower bit rate something like Sony XAVC422 or Red 4K which is 30MB/s for 40BM/s, but regarding the reliability, we have systems over 6 years old with SSDs still working with no issues and with no maintenance required. I would say that those drives are more reliable (at least models we use in our servers) then enterprise HDDs.
Enjoy the smooth ride..Elvin
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