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External Hard drive with enough speed to edit 6k Raw ?

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JORIS REYNAUD

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Hi guys,

I'm finding myself in need of external drive with read/write speed fast enough to edit 6k raw 6:1 red footage.
Would you have any recommendation ? Experiences to share ? (Is it even possible ?)

I use portable WD HD that can barely support 4K footage from a7s2 -
I also own a sand disk external SSD (usb3) 660mb/s (it's great but only 512GB, cant load a project on that)

Looking into 3 to 6TB solution.

EDIT : As a travel/portable solution. Not a desk HD

Thank you :)
 
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Keep in mind most external USB 3.0 spinning drives are slower than what you can typically get out of a fully saturated pipe. In practice most fall in the 180-225MB/s range.

With USB 3.0 (or now as it's called USB 3.1 Gen 1 - 625 MB/s) you're top end bandwidth will be the limiting factor. If I recall correctly your Sandisk can only hit around 440MB/s on average. Also the latency and communication with USB 3.0 is a factor. It's actually workable, even with 8K footage, but you won't have the performance of an internal RAID setup for instance.

With USB 3.1 Gen 2 (1250 MB/s) you'll have a much speedier experience.

With Thunderbolt 3 (2500 MB/s) even more so.

In all of these cases if you are on a single drive, even an SSD drive, if it connects internally via SATA III you will top out at 600 MB/s.

So in all situations likely what you really want is an external RAID enclosure. Which there are a bunch of in any of these connectors. For instance you can get 4 bay enclosure with 2TB SSDs and have 8TB of RAID 0 as a working space and be pretty much at top speed up to TB3.
 
Hi Phil,
Thank you for your message.

I use a Mac Book Pro mid 2017 (usb C only) to edit, When on the computer, as you mentioned it, it's flawless.
External, indeed the older usb3 gen stuck.

By any chance, would you be able to recommend me a portable HD 3.1 or even thunderbolt of a few TB that you had a positive experience with ?
In the mean time I will start my researches :)
 
JORIS REYNAUD said:
Hi Phil,
Thank you for your message.

I use a Mac Book Pro mid 2017 (usb C only) to edit, When on the computer, as you mentioned it, it's flawless.
External, indeed the older usb3 gen stuck.

By any chance, would you be able to recommend me a portable HD 3.1 or even thunderbolt of a few TB that you had a positive experience with ?
In the mean time I will start my researches :)
Click to expand...

http://barefeats.com/hard226.html
 
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