Thunderbolt vs. USB external drive

Hi everyone!

2 years ago I bought an iMac with a Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt, which is very fast: I back up my clips there and use it while editing, so the internal hard drive of the mac is not saturated.

I shoot videos using a Nex 5R and a JVC HM100. I guess my clips are not so heavy to process compared to other editors. My editing is simple: I do some color correction, I work with 50p clips to slow them down, I stabilize some videos, but nothing more. I don't usually need to render the clips during the editing, everything is smooth.

I tried a USB external hard drive connected to my USB 2.0 port and it worked just as well as the Promise Pegasus. Maybe I noticed a little slow down, about a second (when you are working with no lags, a second might seems a long time) but it worked really well.

I haven't done any proper tests, so I don't know if it takes more time to export a movie using an external USB drive, so I wanted to know your experience. How much is the thunderbolt external drive important to you?

My examples are not significant, but I think in very low budget works, the USB drive seems a good solution. I hope you can help me with your experience

Thank you for your time.
Take care!

Hi Andrea,

We have seen SO many issues with people using USB2 for editing that I really would not advise anyone to do this. Although in some cases such as you mention USB2 will "work" it's not really something you can rely on for any serious editing.

You say you experience a 1 second lag. If I would see this on any of my systems I would get a heart attack

IMO it makes little sense buying a fast computer and a professional NLE and then bog everything down by using a slow external drive.

So yes I will take Thunderbolt over USB2 anytime. I even would not touch USB3 for editing, but that's just my personal revenge for all the time I have spent the past years helping people solve problems caused by using USB2 drives for editing

- Ronny

Oh, I see Ronny, i didn't know about these issues. I had to back up some files on an external USB drive and since they are compatible with FCPX I just edited them quickly. But I didn't try anything serious.

Yes, a second lag seems a lot, especially when you use the thunderbolt ports.

Thank you for your reply I'll stick with my Promise Pegasus, we are best pals now

In the past I've worked between two offices several hours' train journey apart. On many occasions I've taken a clone of a project onto a USB2 external drive and continued to work on it while on the train. It works fine with DV, HDV and even AVCHD source material, as long as you're content to work with simple cuts and have no multicam. ProResLT works OK too, though full ProRes is pushing your luck.

Yes, you get occasional playback issues. Yes, it can be slow to respond. But for logging or assembling selects or even putting together a quick cut it's workable. It's not pleasant, but it's workable. Firewire800 is clearly superior, and even that's a fading (obsolete?) connection, but USB2 can be useful in some circumstances.

Recently, I bought a FirmTek USB3 caddy, which bus-powers a laptop drive and performs very well. It's a little large compared to the miniature plastic-cased USB2 drives out there, but it's more robust and the trayless caddy system is very nice indeed. With a Samsung 840 SSD inserted I see close to 300Mb/sec in either direction, and have had no problems at all.

It's extremely handy for a portable system.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

The good thing seems that the Thunderbolt port has a 2 directions connection, which improves the communication between the computer and the external hard drive.

I am trying the Inateck base station now (USB 3.0 compatible) which is very useful because you can change hard drive in no time. It seems very good.

I don't know about anyone else, but I find Thunderbolt drives to be really touchy. I edit with my MacBooK Pro and Lacie drives and any time I bump into the drive or cable, it unmounts and barks at me. I use USB3 drives fairly often and never have had this issue. I still prefer Thunderbolt for speed, but I have to be extra careful.

I had the same issue when my smartphone was near the thunderbolt device.
I solved the problem putting the phone away (2 meters) and the Promise Pegasus is not disconnecting from the Mac anymore.

The connection is stable, but sometimes I have to unplug and plug again the cable that connects my external monitor to the NAS, because my Mac can't see it (even if the Thunderbolt icon on the Promise Pegasus is on).
I admit that I use an old VGA monitor as second screen, but it works just fine when I connect it directly to the Mac (my iMac has just one thunderbolt connection, so I have to go through the NAS).