Help in recomendations for external drives for video editing

8TB SSDs are no longer scarce, but still expensive. However the prices have been coming down. You can now buy a fast 8TB NVMe SSD like the WD Black SN850X for around $600 (or less, if you’re watching during a sale), and put it in a USB 4/Thunderbolt 4 enclosure costing under $100, for up to possibly 3200MB/sec throughput. I‘ve been satisfied with the Acasis and OWC enclosures I’ve tried, for other brands check online for website or YouTube reviews.

If 950-1100MB/sec is acceptable for your work, then you can put the SSD into a 10Gb/sec USB 3 enclosure that costs only $20-35. I mentioned assembling it yourself because the pre-built 8TB external SSDs are a few hundred dollars more. However, several stores have been running a sale on the new Crucial X10 8TB external SSD for an unusually low price. 950-1100MB/sec is the same USB speed category as the Samsung T7, which is widely used in video capture and editing, so if you are very budget constrained the 8TB X10 might be a possibility.

If your performance requirements and budget are much higher, and you have a computer that supports Thunderbolt 5, you can put the same 8TB NVMe SSD into a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure (around $200 right now) for up to more than 6000MB/sec throughput, approaching the speed of the SSD when used as an internal drive (7000+MB/sec).

When you see external 8TB SSDs sold for under $500, watch the enclosure speeds to see if they’re 10Gb/sec or just 5Gb/sec. Also, I didn’t mention 8TB SATA SSDs because SATA tops out at only around 5Gb/sec and no longer costs less than much faster NVMe.