Best 2-4TB SSD with FCPX, Crucial X9 or X9 pro?

[Hector Vera]

I will admit that I am not a Mac guy, I stick to Windows so I apologize for that. But I will say that the SSD Drive you should get should depending what you plan to use it for. I heard Crucial is a very good brand, Samsung and Western Digital are great brands for external SSD drives as well. Be sure to check the read/write specs to see if it meets your needs. I imagine X9 Pro has better specs than X9 for the obvious name but also need to consider what’s your budget and the pricing between them both.

I see X9 Pros going for between $220-$240 and X9 regulars around $130-180, so if you can save up a bit more money to get something better over time, i suggest the X9 Pro if you really need something faster and reliable I imagine.

Hopefully a Mac guy can add to this as well so it can help you even more on this.

[Gabriel Raphael]

x9 here, im returning it to amazon asap

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[Neil Sadwelkar]

There are many SSDs on the market now. But only a few are suited for video post.

Almost all SSDs are faster than hard drives as far as reading data is concerned. But not many SSDs are fast for writing large amounts of data. Most SSDs write data very fast up to about 50-100 GB and then slow down to less then hard drive speeds. This is a on board RAM/Cache thing in the SSD. But there are also SSDs which write even 800GB to several TB, very fast.

Also, the new M1/M2/M3 series Macs are somehow slower for reading/writing to USB SSDs as compared to the same USB SSD with an older Intel Mac. Thunderbolt SSDs work fine on M1/M2/M3 Macs. Or, connecting USB SSDs via a Thunderbolt 4 hub seems to improve their speed on an M1 Mac.

From experience, Samsung Shield 4TB works very well on M1 Macs. Use the cable that came with the SSD. With Macs using a wrong cable will give you USB 2.0 speeds on SSDs. Maybe that’s what’s happening in the screenshot you uploaded (maybe, it could also be a bad SSD).

But what’s really worked for me is to get OWC Envoy express or Sabrent Thunderbolt SSD enclosures and placing an NVMe SSD inside it. That’s seriously fast and can actually speed up your renders.

WD Black, Samsung 980/990 Pro, Samsung 970 Evo Plus, Crucial P5 Plus, are NVMe SSD models that I’ve found are very fast (inside the above enclosures) even for sustained writes and reads. I’ve used mine extensively with DaVinci Resolve Studio, so I’m sure they’ll work fine for FCP.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Adding to Hector and Neil’s excellent observations above, I do run FCPX on a Mac Mini M1.

It is not my primary “work-station”, but it serves my FCPX customers very well.
On the Mac I have a mix of Samsung T7 drives hanging off a OWC Thunderbolt Hub.
For HD and 2K absolutely fine, for 4K you’ll start pushing it a bit.
Being old fashioned, I like to keep my project (Library) on the main drive (the one with the OS), and source footage on an external drive – depending on size of the project.

The T7 drives are “only” 1,050 Mbps.
However, I just recently got a Samsung T9 which will go up tp 2,000 Mbps.
So far the T9 (on a PC) is performing as well as the T7.

If it is not for editing, Samsung has just released an external 8TB SSD – T5 EVO Portable SSD USB 3.2 Gen 1
WARNING – small print for the T5 EVO:
“Up to 3.8x faster than an external HDD with read & write speeds of up to 460MB/s”

Which is interestingly bad on Samsung, as their EVO Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD cards (no enclosure) will run “up to 7,450 / 6,900 MB/s sequential read/write speed”…
Full disclosure, I have just purchased 2 x EVO Pro’s to expand my new PC Laptop from 1TB to 9TB of internal storage (with space for another 4TB).
Yes, although the drives can go faster, because of the USB connection, the Samsung T-models might not reach 7,000 Mbps.

What is nice about most of the SSD external drive brands are that they are reaching the cost point of what video tapes would have cost back in the day. At which point you might be better off keeping the Crucial X9 SSD for sitting on the shelve as a “near-online” back-up, and use something faster for editing.

Just a point of view.

Atb
Mads

[Gabriel Raphael]

I read around that Samsung 3TB and 4TB failed people..data losses.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The recent spate of failures were with Sandisk Extreme Pro 4TB version.

Samsung 3TB I haven’t heard of such a drive. There’s 2TB and there’s 4TB. But I haven’t come across reports of Samsung 2TB or 4TB drives failing.

In early 2023, there were reports of the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD having failures but there was a firmware fix that Samsung issued which seemed to fix the problem.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Gabriel,

The Samsung T5, T7 and T9 portable SSD drives do not come in 3TB versions.

And the addition of the Samsung 4TB versions are very new – I have purchased a bunch of them, and they appear to be happy.

SanDisk on the other hand, is a product that you’ll want to Google before purchasing.
One article from August this year:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sandisk-extreme-ssds-are-worthless-multiple-lawsuits-against-wd-say/

Having said that, I regret Googling Samsung just now – but then my old T5 SSD is still happy, so I’ll continue to work with it.

Atb
Mads

EDIT: Neil “beat” me to it, but is absolutely right in that Samsung brought out a firmware upgrade, whereas the SanDisk reportedly lost the data with no option for rescue.

arstechnica.com

SanDisk Extreme SSDs are “worthless,” multiple lawsuits against WD say

Ars cited in two SanDisk SSD failure lawsuits filed yesterday.

[Gabriel Raphael]

Im very happy with my new Crucial X9 Pro SSD, I also purchased a USBC 3.1 hub to connect every external SSD I have to it, speeds are great!