Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a year's worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive.Not only is it faster to read and write data stored in flash cells, but it's also safer. External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and sometimes much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps. Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells—similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM—to save data.Just how much faster is it to access data stored in flash cells? Typical read and write speeds for consumer drives with spinning platters are in the 100MBps to 200MBps range, depending on platter densities and whether they spin at 5,400rpm (more common) or 7,200rpm (less common). Video editing demands a lot from a storage product.Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. That’s because each frame of video contains so much information: audio, visuals, timestamps, metadata, and more. Compared to documents or images, video is somewhat unique as a file type when it comes to storage.In that case, your best option is a desktop-class hard drive. Physical Size Matters: Get a Desktop Drive, or a Portable One?If you have a large media-file collection—perhaps you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buff—you'll likely need several terabytes of space in which to store it. And let's not even talk about the cost of 4TB and 8TB external SSDs. A 2TB SSD, though? Expect to pay at least two to three times as much as you would for that 2TB hard drive. You can find a 2TB portable hard drive with ease (possibly even a 4TB one, depending on the day) for less than $100. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.And portable hard drives can be a great value if what you need is raw capacity above all else.In the case of these and single-platter-drive products, you're not meant to swap out the drive or drives inside.The largest desktop drives are often much, much bulkier than the first two categories, so big that you'll want to stick them under your desk or in a dedicated server closet. These larger models are more expensive but also much more capacious—think 16TB or more (in that case, populated by two 8TB drive mechanisms). In addition to storing large media collections, these drives can also serve as inexpensive repositories for backups of your computer's hard drive that you schedule, using either software that comes with the drive or a third-party backup utility.The next size up for consumer desktop drives is about the same height but twice as wide, to accommodate more than one platter-based hard drive mechanism in the chassis. Most are roughly 5 inches tall and 2 inches wide. (Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.)A desktop drive with a single platter mechanism inside will typically use a 3.5-inch drive inside and comes in capacities up to 12TB, though a few 16TB single drives in external chassis have started to emerge.
Best Setup For Video Editing Storage Install Any DriveThe storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. Their defining characteristic is the ability to swap drives in and out of their multi-bay chassis easily, so most provide quick access to the drive bays at the front of the device.Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers).Any portable platter-based hard drive should fit easily in a purse or even a coat pocket. These are called generically "2.5-inch drives," though they are actually a smidge wider than that. Hard drive-based portables make use inside of the same kinds of platter-drive mechanisms used in laptops. Which Interface Should You Look For?How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data. Some require you to sacrifice raw capacity for data redundancy, so you'll want to pay attention to the nuances of each level. Hit the link above for an explanation of the traits and strengths of each RAID level. Depending on which RAID level you choose, you can prioritize capacity, speed, or data redundancy, or some combination thereof.A collection of spinning drives configured with a RAID level designed for faster data access can approximate the speeds of a basic SSD, while you should consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, 5, or 10 if you're storing really important data that you can't afford to lose. Need Redundancy or Extreme Speed? Consider a RAID-Enabled DriveIf you buy a larger desktop drive with two or more spinning platters, you'll almost certainly have the option to configure the drive as a RAID array using included software. Example: A $60 1TB (1,000GB) hard drive would run you about 6 cents per gigabyte, while an $80 2TB (2,000GB) drive would work out to about 4 cents per gigabyte. If the drive includes only a single cable, you may need an adapter, depending on your computer's available USB ports. USB ports are ubiquitous, and many external drives now come with cables with both rectangular USB Type-A connectors and oval-shaped USB Type-C ones to enable adapter-free connections to PCs that have only one type. Almost every recent drive we have reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops. It tends to show up mainly in products geared toward the Mac market.A desktop hard drive with a single platter-based mechanism inside, or a portable hard drive, is far more likely to make use of plain old USB instead. Scheduling a skype for business meeting on a macDo You Need to Go Rugged?If you carry your drive around frequently, you'll want to pay attention to how rugged the drive is. (Also, that USB 2.0 port may not supply sufficient power to run the drive in the first place, so the speed shortfall may be moot.) Any remotely recent computer will have faster USB ports, though. The drive platters' own speed is the limiter, not the flavor of USB 3.The only case with hard drives where the USB standard matters much is if you connect a drive to an old-style, low-bandwidth USB 2.0 port, which is better reserved for items like keyboards and mice. All are inter-compatible, and you won't see a speed bump from one versus the other in the hard drive world. You don't have to worry about the differences among these three USB specs when looking at ordinary hard drives, though.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorCasey ArchivesCategories |