What are you Guys, Gals, using for large external drives, anything purchased in the last few years. Storage has increased a lot over the years as well as transfer speed, ect.
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External Drives in 2024
- Thread starter Rchawks
- Start date
Others may be able to chime in about external hard drives (like a 16TB drives that spins) which you can hook up to your one computer and store your data. I've had those for years and kept running out of space and ended up with a dozen useless hard drives; this was back in the day when 500GB, 1TB, and 2 TB drivers were popular.
I've moved on to the NAS which is a series of drives in a box that you connect to the home network so all your devices (computers, phones, tablets, etc) have access from anywhere, not just the one computer. It's a bit of a commitment but it's probably the last time I do this in my lifetime since I now have over 100TB available to make us of one day. Since I keep each and every video I record on all my drones, cameras, and other devices, I needed the store and I can expand it over the years. Available space and cloud storage I no longer worry about.
This is the one I have, it's an older unit but you can upgrade and move at your own pace, you can start with just a couple of bays. I recommended whatever you choose it's Synology, there's lots of help on YT, and external hard drives that spin and crash are a thing of the past you'll never look back. Hopefully this helps others as well.
[Not me, not my video]
I've moved on to the NAS which is a series of drives in a box that you connect to the home network so all your devices (computers, phones, tablets, etc) have access from anywhere, not just the one computer. It's a bit of a commitment but it's probably the last time I do this in my lifetime since I now have over 100TB available to make us of one day. Since I keep each and every video I record on all my drones, cameras, and other devices, I needed the store and I can expand it over the years. Available space and cloud storage I no longer worry about.
This is the one I have, it's an older unit but you can upgrade and move at your own pace, you can start with just a couple of bays. I recommended whatever you choose it's Synology, there's lots of help on YT, and external hard drives that spin and crash are a thing of the past you'll never look back. Hopefully this helps others as well.
[Not me, not my video]
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It depends on what you want. Do you want ... blinding speed? Or large capacity.
NAS (as pictured above) is great for tons and tons of storage. They're not super fast. Each hard drive only delivers about 150MB/s. Even if you fill them with faster drives, you're limited to the speed of your network. I run my NAS over a 10gb network, and I get reasonable speeds out of it. But for storing LOTS of data, it's great. I can't remember how many terabytes I have at the moment, but it's in the high 20's I think. But if you throw in high capacity drives, you can expand it to mind blowing amounts of storage.
If you want something blindingly fast. Then you have to think about ports. If you have (or can install) a Thunderbolt 4 port, then you can get speeds in the 3000MB/s range. The Thunderbolt-5 ports are coming out now, and there are some Thunderbolt-5 external drives. Those are more like 6000MB/s.
So .. how fast do you need. Personally, the 3000MB/s seem fine for Photoshop and Lightroom work. And the things that slow you down are other bottlenecks.
I'm using this combo:
* https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B7CQ2CHH/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
* https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BYPVNBTQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
And getting this result, which is quite satisfactory. Capacity is 4TB.
NAS (as pictured above) is great for tons and tons of storage. They're not super fast. Each hard drive only delivers about 150MB/s. Even if you fill them with faster drives, you're limited to the speed of your network. I run my NAS over a 10gb network, and I get reasonable speeds out of it. But for storing LOTS of data, it's great. I can't remember how many terabytes I have at the moment, but it's in the high 20's I think. But if you throw in high capacity drives, you can expand it to mind blowing amounts of storage.
If you want something blindingly fast. Then you have to think about ports. If you have (or can install) a Thunderbolt 4 port, then you can get speeds in the 3000MB/s range. The Thunderbolt-5 ports are coming out now, and there are some Thunderbolt-5 external drives. Those are more like 6000MB/s.
So .. how fast do you need. Personally, the 3000MB/s seem fine for Photoshop and Lightroom work. And the things that slow you down are other bottlenecks.
I'm using this combo:
* https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B7CQ2CHH/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
* https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BYPVNBTQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
And getting this result, which is quite satisfactory. Capacity is 4TB.
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The (way overpriced) Mac internal drives are even a bit quicker.
Agreed, my NAS is not very fast. If you are working on a project and you need file access, you need to get those files out of NAS storage and onto a good SSD. Synology has a Drive Client that will sync your data from the NAS back and forth to your favorite location on your computer whether it's the internal SSD or an attached. You choose what you want to work with; the software handles the rest.
For the Mac, the internal drives are usually pretty small (even though they are super fast) at 256gb or 512gb so like @Erk1024 I put together this enclosure with 4TB SSD and while I don't get quite the speeds he is getting, it's still fast since it is Thunderbolt 4 (on Mac Studio M1 Max). I only recently learned about this and I agree, this is the way to go instead of any of the external hard drives that spin. It's BF and for CM coming up, now is the ideal time to buy this stuff because it's cheap and there are so many selections:
Awesome, thank you for your responses. It gives me even more options to consider now, which is what I was hoping for.
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One important thing (for me at least) is that the drive enclosures that me and @mavic3usa linked are passively cooled. Some of the drive enclosures have little fans that make noise. That's not fun if you have a computer which is completely silent otherwise.
There is also this older Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. It's only around 2000MB/s, but the good thing is that it can take TWO little NVMe drives, so you can build yourself an 8TB or larger SSD if desired. It's passively cooled like the other enclosures. I hope Sabrent or someone else creates a TB4 or 5 version.
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