Is it viable to edit on a super fast MicroSD card?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
April 27, 2018
3 replies
3792 views

So I've bought such an incredibly modern laptop for field work that it doesn't have any normal USBs nor a SD card reader (it's a Dell XPS 9575)

It does however have a MICRO sd card slot.. It's only got 1 drive (the SSD the OS is obviously on) it got me thinking - is there any way I could potentially edit on Premiere on a MicroSD card??

This one is 150 megabytes p/s write (275mBps read)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07141QN7L/?coliid=IO7WGFILAZQKT&colid=3IVSC4RG3API&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Which certainly seems viable? but I wonder about latency/ lag...and write cycles/ life span... and general reliability. Could this be a viable work drive?

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R

RjL190365

Legend

Actually, that microSD slot cannot take full advantage of any of those "super-fast" cards at all. You see, the card that you described requires a UHS-II bus to even come close to that card's advertised read speed. Unfortunately, most built-in microSD card readers (including, unfortunately, yours) only operate at up to UHS-I speed, which means that your card might not even achieve 90 MB/s in read speed (after accounting for overhead) in that laptop.

And even if your slot can operate that fast, microSD cards as a rule use the cheapest and least reliable of NAND flash chips that are NOT designed to withstand repeated rewrites. Unfortunately, video editing with the card as the media drive REQUIRES that the card get subjected to such repeated rewrites (which can be up to several thousand rewrites to the same cells per minute) - and your new card MAY get corrupted or killed off after only a couple of uses in such a manner.

And your unit should have come with (or you can purchase) a USB-C to USB-A adapter for external USB devices. That laptop has two USB-C ports. So you need an external SSD that already has a USB-C cable included. Newer Samsung external SSDs should already have come with such a cable. Furthermore, SSDs are engineered to withstand multiple random rewrites. SD cards aren't.

Now for something different:

That laptop does not come with a CUDA GPU at all, nor is available at all with one. And OpenCL support in all of the 2018 versions of Premiere Pro CC is currently broken, so you'll have to suffer with software-only rendering regardless of whether you're using the Intel graphics or the onboard AMD Radeon graphics..