This is an honest, unpaid review people. As a 20 year vet of editing I have had my battles with drives and finding one that can stand up to a few key challenges:

  1. Beefy 4k (and up) footage. I shoot minimum of 4k, and sometimes 8k. So I need it to play back without lost frames and without having to transcode into a proxy
  2. Large projects. Even if it’s just a 30s TV commercial it is sometimes 10TB of data, so I need large drives.
  3. Portability. I go lots of places, the drives have to follow. That’s a must.

So here are my findings with speed tests to prove it.

THE ABSOLUTE BEST is iodyne Pro Data. The Pro Data is without question the king of the drives. It comes in three varieties, 12, 24 and a whopping 48 Tb. It’s full SSD with 4-dual USB C ports, meaning 4 extra USB C ports for other drives. Best of all and what makes this drive so insanely fast, is that you can run two USB C cables to your computer and it uses each one doubling the bandwith. There is no competition to any other drive on the market, unless you start talking RAID towers, which are a whole other category and are not portable. The only downside is the size; she’s about the size of the laptop and just as heavy. That said a small price to pay for being able to edit 12k footage like it was SD.

SECOND BEST is Samsung T7 drives. The 4TB variety is just big enough to hold a project, and they can be used almost like SD cards especially if you have a BMCC. They are super fast, small, and durable, also cost effective when you start getting into the larger capacity.

THIRD BEST are the Seagate Expansion 16Tb drives. For the price (about the same as the Samsung T7’s) you get 4x the storage, but it comes at half the speed. The drives are mechanical, not SSD, and the transfer rates are slow. You could edit off it, but with a larger project I wouldn’t trust it. These are good for backup and archive if anything. Spend the money and get SSD.

READING SPEED COMPARISON / DATA TRANSFER

iodyne Pro Data = 9548 MB/s
Samsung T7 = 1577 MB/s
Seagate = 654 MB/s

The iodyne Pro Data is 6 x faster then the Samsung and an insane 15 x faster then the Seagate.