External harddive vs External SSD speeds?

Hey guys, I'm editing on my 2015 base model $1999 15" retina MacbookPro and I should have gotten a 500+ GB SSD but didn't I have the small 128 SSD inside.


I've been using an external 1TB hardrive that connects via USB. I put my 4k videos on there and edit them in Final Cut Pro X. It seems pretty slow while editing. Takes awhile for things to load.


If I buy an external SSD that hooks up with USB and store my clips there while editing... will it be a lot faster editing?

And if the answer is yes, will these speeds be identical to if I was using the clips from the SSD built inside the macbook?


Thanks

Hi BabyMale
Welcome to the forums.
So first you leave out some very important info for anyone to answer your questions.
Is your external USB drive USB2 or 3? If USB2 that becomes a bottleneck as modern disks both spinning and ssd are faster than USB2.
A 7200rpm hdd will transfer sequencial files around 160-180MB/s. A modern ssd will hit around 450MB/s.
A USB2 port can only handle around 35MB/s
A USB3 device without USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) can do roughly 270-280MB/s
While a USAP USB3 device can handle the entire thru-put of a single ssd (SATA3(6)) ~450-500GB/s
The theoretical speed of USB3.1 gen2 is ~10Gb/s or 1.21GB/s same as TB1. That's Giga not Mega!

Is an external faster than the internal "Flash" drive in your MBP(this is not the same as a SATA based ssd) No it is not even close, but more than likely an external USB3.1 gen 2 drive with an ssd SATA3 disk will be more than fast enough for most editing tasks at least till you start doing 4K multi-cam edits, then you need to look at RAID set-ups.
Most editors prefer to keep media on an external device and free up some internal bus data room and to make it easier to handle large files. Remember internal drives/bus have to also handle all other data for all programs and OS not just video data files.

Bottom line, you need to figure out how much thru-put you need to keep the data flowing and any set-up that meets those needs will work out fine.

Don't forget back-up drives and a clone.

Hope this helps, Greg

Hey! Thank you so much for all your help. I didn't even think about USB2 vs USB3.

Here is the External Hard Drive I'm Using

So it looks like it's USB 3.0
It's definitely not horrible but it seems a little slower than it should be.

So you're saying I'll probably notice a difference if I switch to a USB 3.1 SSD like this one?

But still, at the end of the day, nothing will be faster than using the clips that are stored directly inside the "flash storage" of my Macbook Pro's?

BabyMale wrote: ...I've been using an external 1TB hardrive that connects via USB. I put my 4k videos on there and edit them in Final Cut Pro X. It seems pretty slow while editing. Takes awhile for things to load.

There can be a huge difference in performance between various external hard drives. A USB 2.0 bus-powered drive might to 20 megabytes/sec. A USB 3.0 bus-powered drive can vary from about 50 MB/sec for a slower 5400 model to 120 MB/sec for a faster 7200 rpm model like the HGST Touro S: amzn.com/B00IVFDQFM , or up to 220 MB/sec for the Seagate Backup Plus Fast, which internally is RAID-0: amzn.com/B00HXAV0X6

In general AC-powered drives (usually 3.5") are faster than USB bus-powered drives. However the above bus-powered Seagate is faster than many AC-powered non-RAID drives.

BabyMale wrote: ...If I buy an external SSD that hooks up with USB and store my clips there while editing... will it be a lot faster editing?

It will probably be faster, assuming your bottleneck is not already CPU. However video editing consumes a lot of space and SSD is fairly expensive per megabyte. You might be better off with a RAID array, even a two-drive RAID-0 provided you have another drive to back it up with. The 6TB G-Tech G-RAID Studio is one example: amzn.com/B00JXM9KMU

BabyMale wrote: ...And if the answer is yes, will these speeds be identical to if I was using the clips from the SSD built inside the macbook?...

The internal SSD in the 2015 MBP is probably faster than most external SSDs, even RAID. The internal one can do 1,700 MB/sec. However you don't need that much speed to make a significant improvement. If you can afford it, Thunderbolt RAID systems like the OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini are nice: eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/Exte...WC/ThunderBay-4-mini