Advice for portable hard drive

Hi there

I am more and more editing on the road and I am looking for a good solution to edit there.

is there a portable hard drive that you would recommend? I need at least 1 TB and I am wondering if an 7200 usb3 will be enough or if I should go for an expensive SSD drive ? If you have any other alternative I am really curious .


Will it be much worse than a raid desktop system ?

thanks a lot for your advice

Depends what you want Speed, Storage or Both?
If you want both I would suggest a RAID.
If you want Speed and still be mobile then a SSD might be your better choice.
For storage then a standard mobile drive is the way. They are also cheap.

I use a RAID on the desk, and standard 7200 USB 3 or Thunderbolt to be mobile and transfer files from one desk to another.

The new CalDigit Tuff drives (they come in SSD and HDD) are pretty good and price not that in there position.
And they already have the 3.1 USB Type-C interface.

A while back I decided to do the rough cuts and reports on my way back on the train and by air.
Since I didn't have access to electricity during my travel, I made sure I also offloaded the cards to the RAID and on the mobile drives (CalDigit Tuff). Used two HDD for storage and one SSD as my scratch. When I got back I spit out the XML and uploaded the timeline to frame.io

I want speed and portability.

The caldigit tuff looks great. I can't find it on sale in ssd though

Hi Manucho
I switched to using ssd drives in USB3 enclosures. I backup on spinning hdds. When I'm done with the project, I archive and then remove the project and replace with new one.

In regards to USB3, I recommend that you make sure the device supports UAS(P) USB Attached SCSI Protocol. It is much faster than legacy Bulk Only Transport (BOT). If the device doesn't advertise UAS or UASP, then it will be BOT only. All Macs with USB3 support UASP.

Here is some info on testing a brand new Samsung EVO 850 / 500GB drive in different enclosures…
I placed the drive into a Inatech enclosure with UASP and ran Black Magic Speed tests. Averaged 463Mb/s write 476 Mb/s for NTSC.
I then ran the test in a StarTech USB3 UASP 2 bay dock. Write speeds average 433MB/s Read 501MB/s
Next I used a USB3 with no UASP capabilities. This was a Seagate SATA to USB 3 chip set from a 2.5 “ Seagate Plus Portable connector from 2012. I and got an average of 279MB/s Write and 298 MB/s Read.
While this is not a definitive test for UAS enhancement, it is an indicator of why you should get UASP enabled devices. Before anyone jumps on this as an unfair test due to different chip sets, I agree. It does however, represent what one might expect when getting a plain vanilla Bulk Only Transport (BOT) enclosure/drive and at least some of the improved speeds is due to the UAS Protocol. There are of course more definitive test where manufactures have tested the same units while using UASP and BOT. All such tests report large improvements for ssd drives that can push the bus.

A modern 7200rpm hdd will have speeds ~160MB/s. as a single drive.

Last few things… Watch out where you put a USB3 device as it can interfere with wifi. If using a laptop, don't place behind computer or near hinge. Also, make sure you plug in USB3 devices first if using both USB3 and USB2 devices. First device in sets USB speeds. Make sure to use USB3 cables, not USB2 cables.

Hope this helps, Greg

Thank you this is all very helpful. Thanks as well scrubelicipus!!

If mac starts with an usb hub and both usb2 and usb3 devices on it, which one sets the speed??

In regards to the USB hub…
In all honesty, I don't know, but here is my thoughts.
The hub itself has to be USB3, so my guess is that it sets the speed. There is a hierarchical order and the hub would be listed first and anything plugged into it would be "daughters" to it. (I think??)
Having said this, I use a couple of USB3 devices and one of them supports both an ssd and has 3 USB3 ports for daisy chaining, and expansion. I do have a USB2 trackball and a Contour ShuttlePro that is also USB2. Just as a safety check, I always plug in my USB3 external drive before the hub/drive.

I'll try plugging in the Hub/drive first later today and make sure it stills sees the enclosed ssd as USB3 even with the USB2 devices attached. If I have the time, maybe I'll pull the drive and just mount the Hub and see what happens. Sort of busy, so maybe someone else can test, or you can if you have USB3 hub and USB2 devices.
You can check in About This Mac>System Report>USB>follow the device and see if Hub is reporting 5GB speed or 480Gb.

Hope this helps, Greg