Looking for recomendations for external drives for video editing

Some background info. Current Macs support USB 3.2 at up to 10 gigabits per second (Gb/sec), which works out to around 1000 megabytes per second (MB/sec) in real world use. They also support Thunderbolt 3 and 4 at up to 40 Gb/sec, which tends to max out at 3000 MB/sec in real world use because of overhead and other limitations.

Your speed test results look typical; the 801/710 MB/sec result is “good” and the 943/949 result is “great” because it’s much closer to the roughly 1000MB/sec maximum you can expect over USB 3.2 10Gb/sec. I have several different SSDs that can reach that 900–950MB/sec range, so it’s a reasonable speed to aim for.

For Macs, the next step up is not the 2000MB/sec advertised data rate of some SSDs. That speed is achieved through USB only using USB 3.2 2x2. The catch is, no Macs, and very few PCs, support USB 3.2 2x2. So if you get a “2000MB/sec” external USB SSD, on your Mac it will not exceed around 1000MB/sec. So either ignore those, or be aware of that real limit and that on most PCs and Macs it will not perform any better than a USB 3.2 1000MB/sec external SSD.

If you want to go faster than 1000MB/sec on an external SSD for a current Mac, the real next step up is USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3/4. However, these are a lot more expensive so you have to have a demonstrated need for it (or you have no problem with the price).

But a lot of Mac/PC video editors have no need for Thunderbolt. A fast enough USB 3 drive does the job for them at much less cost.

The problem for video editing is that you can’t just rely on the marketing specs or even a brief speed test. One issue is caching; an SSD with a smaller cache slows down sooner, so large transfers take longer than a more expensive SSD with a bigger cache. Poor cooling can also slow a large transfer. Another issue is that some video pros have found that certain SSDs drop frames during video recording, even though they are faster on the spec sheet.

The video below explains some of these issues from a video production point of view, testing several external SSDs and explaining why one of the cheaper models turns out to be more reliable for video capture. Like him, I have also bought bare internal SSDs and put them into inexpensive USB 3.2 10Gb/sec enclosures that, together, can perform close to 1000MB/sec.

The main point is, for video, you want to choose an SSD that can sustain a large transfer at a higher speed for a longer amount of time, and not drop frames when recording video.