What are the best hard drives for video editing?
As a videographer working in London, I spend a lot of time creating and capturing the perfect shots. Safe storage is not only vital for videographers when a project goes into the video editing stage but also to protect the invaluable video clips that have been captured long term. So which hard drives are the best for videographers for their video editing needs? In this article i’ll give you my top recommendations for hard drives for using for video editing and for storage.
Cost vs quality
Once upon a time there storage for videographers was predominantly done on hard drive with spinning glass disks inside. These are still used today but we also have SSD drives at our disposal. SSD’s (solid state drives) don’t have a fragile spinning glass disks in them and operate by storing data on integrated circuits. SSD drives are faster and have greater durability. So why don’t videographers se SSD drives for all their projects? This is down to other difference between these two drives which is cost. Cost can often be the defining factor too. So can we have a system where we use both traditional hard drives and SSD drives? Absolutely and this is exactly how I work to balance out cost and quality.
My personal hard drive setup for my videography work
I have a storage and work system in place for all my videographer work and i’ll run through this in detail. Even before I complete a filming job for a client, I have already had a discussion about long term storage. I always ask the client to take a copy of the rushes on the day. Sometimes clients can be resistant to this but when I explain that we cant guarantee storage and that we usually delete video files after the project is complete, they soon change their mind. We’ve never had issues with storage but it’s not outside the realm of possibility so by insisting clients take a copy of footage, it mitigates this potential issue. So the client has taken a copy of the video footage, now onto making my own copies. We have a raided system using the old style spinning disk hard drives. What is a raided system? This is essentially a system that makes multiple copies. It automatically makes a copy of each of the two drives it has inside of it. Our raid is 40TB which is split into 2 x 20TB drives. This is enough storage for all of our current and ongoing projects. This kind of drive in SSD style would be unaffordable for most of our projects which is why we opt for a regular hard drive in this case. We also make a third copy to a SSD drive which we work off of. Working off of an SSD drive means quicker speeds and a seamless editing experience. Once a video project is signed off, we let the client know we might be deleting their material and that their copy footage that they took on the day is the one for long term storage. We will usually make a copy of footage onto an older spinning drive and store in a lock up for long term storage and delete the copies from our raid and from the SSD drive. In essence we use a mix of SSD drives and regular hard drives.
Which SSD and raided hard drives do we recommend?
When it comes to SSD drives we opt for Samsung T7’s. We have trialed other brands but have had some issues with speed and reliability. We’ve never had this issue with Samsung drives so these are our go to drives for videographer work.
For our raid we use the Lacie raid with built in CfExpress reader. These have always been reliable for us and are reasonably priced.
What bout online storage for videographers?
Online storage is also a great option, especially with prices dropping. We actually have a 2TB online storage option which we use for certain bigger projects where we need an extra layer of storage security in the cloud. There are plenty of great online storage options form companies like Dropbox and Pcloud.