If you’re using a MacBook Pro for editing video you already know you need external hard drives for video work. Actually, you’ll need external drives even if you’re working on a fully loaded Mac Pro. The top-of-the-line solution is an external RAID drive. But if you’re looking for a more affordable solution keep reading.
First, here’s a link to an article testing various hard drives for read and write speed – http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-Drive-SATA-vs-Firewire.html
The bottom line is that on a Mac Pro an eSATA drive is about 200% faster than a FireWire 800 drive. On a MacBook Pro eSATA is only about 150% faster. Both are way faster than a FireWire 400 drive.
What does this mean to you?
Every time you do anything with a video file you’re dealing with the speed of disk access more than any other part of your system – more than RAM, processor speed, or graphics card.
When you’re ingesting video from a tape-based system faster disk speed means fewer dropped frames, corrupted files and other nasties.
When you’re editing it means you can play your timeline in something closer to real time with effects in place without having to render as often. (Okay, that depends on many other factors but a faster disk will always improve this.)
And when you’re rendering you’ll see a significant increase, especially when you store the original video files on one eSATA drive and render to another eSATA drive. One drive is reading files and the other is writing – you’ll see up to 200% increase in render speed as a result.
I use the drive in my MacBook Pro as the target drive and keep the source files on an external eSATA drive. You’ll need an eSATA card to connect to the external drive but that’s also inexpensive and easy to work with.
Here’s how I do it.
For around $120 you can purchase a 1 TB eSATA drive. Here’s an affiliate link to the great, small, fast, and affordable drive I use - 1TB Fantom G-force Greendrive
Another $33 will get you a decent eSATA Express Card adapter. Here’s an affiliate link to the one I use - Syba e-SATA ExpressCard
Add in $10 for an eSATA
To my way of thinking, this is a great way to improve everything in your video workflow at a very reasonable price.
While I’m at it… remember to pick up two of those drives and hook the second one up using USB.
Backup the primary drive completely so you have two duplicate drives – run it every night to be safe. Yes, you do want two copies of all your digital video files.
If something happens to your primary drive just unmount the backup drive, plug it into the eSATA cable and you’re back in business at full speed.
