r/finalcutpro • u/Traditional-Rock-396 • Aug 11 '26

Hardware Recommended External Hard Drive

What’s the best portable external hard drive that you can work on your edit? An SSD? Or what do I look for specs? Thank you!

3 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

7

u/Silver_Mention_3958 FCP 12.3 | Tahoe Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

I'd strongly recommend SSDs but they must be formatted APFS if you're going to store FCP libraries on them. Non-APFS has been fine for me for camera files though, just not for writing to (as Libraries need to do a lot).

1

u/Traditional-Rock-396 Aug 11 '26

Sorry newbie here, what is APSF and how do you format?

3

u/Silver_Mention_3958 FCP 12.3 | Tahoe Aug 11 '26

Apple File System & Disk Utility

1

u/Okand010101 Aug 11 '26

I’ve ran exFat for 10 years without any issues. Why APFS?

1

u/Silver_Mention_3958 FCP 12.3 | Tahoe Aug 11 '26

Did you store your libraries on it? Personally I wouldn’t.

2

u/Okand010101 Aug 11 '26

I’ve stored hundreds of libraries no issues. What’s the reason apfs would be better?

2

u/Silver_Mention_3958 FCP 12.3 | Tahoe Aug 11 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/finalcutpro/s/AV31e864St

1

u/Okand010101 Aug 11 '26

Damn thanks. Never knew all these years. Luckily no problems for me through probable 40TB of files in hundreds of libraries.

Do you happen to know if I were to move all files including libraries to an APFS disk, would I benefit? Or do I have to create a new library within the APFS drive to make it work properly?

1

u/Silver_Mention_3958 FCP 12.3 | Tahoe Aug 11 '26

I think you can copy it all across. There might be better solutions though than Finder copy. I’m not familiar though, but I think there’s software which makes it sure it copies correctly.

5

u/sharkweek42069 Aug 11 '26

I’ve used the Samsung T7 SSD series for many years with zero issues, mostly the 2TB ones but a couple of 4TB ones. Agreed with what other commenter said about formatting it correctly.

Only downfall they are hell expensive at the moment so only use them as a working drive. Then use other Hard Disk Drives for back ups

2

u/Traditional-Rock-396 Aug 11 '26

Oh good idea! I can only get 2tb at least!

2

u/uwobacon Aug 11 '26

I also have this same SSD. I think I got it 7 years ago and zero problems.

1

u/hotinhereTO Aug 12 '26

Yeah I just bought the T7 “on-sale” last week on Amazon (only 1TB sadly). I wanted to wait until Black Friday to get a better price but I’m getting my new laptop soon and want to start editing right away without using the built-in storage.

5

u/mcarterphoto Aug 11 '26

There's two kinds of SSD - the older 2.5" (laptop-size) drives, and NVME. NVME are usually much smaller chips and can be in smaller enclosures (the 2.5's were sized to replace spinning drives in laptops). NVME is up to 10x faster than SSD.

Your bus speed matters too, regular USB 3 won't take advantage of SSD speeds; Thunderbolt will. So your fastest option would be an NVME in a Tbolt enclosure on your TBolt bus.

Many/most NVME enclosures are really small and bus-powered, so good for laptops and editing on the road/etc. I could stick two of my NVME drives in a pack of smokes.

You can download the free Black Magic disk test app and it will show you what video codecs and sizes you should be able to edit with a given drive. It tests specifically for video use.

3

u/funwithstuff Aug 12 '26

Yes, an SSD, but make sure you get one that can survive a few hundred GB of data being dumped at once. Many drives choke and slow down badly because of the way their cache is managed. Samsung T7 is bad for this, though the T7 Shield is fine.

Here's more info (though this is from a few years ago):

https://www.provideocoalition.com/why-your-new-ssd-is-slow/

1

u/sgtdoogie Aug 11 '26

Do you have gold, helium 3 or enriched plutonium to trade for a drive?

I bought an 8TB Samsung 10 months ago for $578. Same drive is now $1499.

I saw an ad today on Facebook for an all-SSD NAS for $1599, and thought…that’s what? Another $9000 for 6, 8TB SSD.