File Management

For video production today, hard drives are mostly relegated to backups and archiving old projects, not capture or working production. Speed (data transfer rate) is the issue, driven by high data rates resulting from high resolutions (4K+) and bit depths. Just compare the speeds:

A. Most “high performance” hard drives top out around 200-250MB/sec.

B. SATA SSDs (now considered old and slow) transfer at double that rate, around 450-550MB/sec.

C. NVMe SSDs can transfer up to 7000+MB/sec if installed internally…

D. …limited to around 3000MB/sec if connected externally via Thunderbolt 3 or 4…

E. …and limited to around 1000MB/sec if connected externally using USB 3 at 10 gigabits per second.

On a budget, that last option E is reasonable, up to 1000MB/sec might be OK for video editing depending. If your projects are more demanding and option C is not possible (no more internal slots), then try option D but Thunderbolt is a significant jump in price over option E (USB 3 at 10Gb/sec) which is now widely available and relatively affordable.

As to how to set everything up, for sheer performance the speed and capacity of the volume that contains your Media Cache is critical (short answer: as fast and as large capacity as possible, and a hard drive is not recommended), and the speed and capacity of the volume containing original media is almost as critical. Adobe has some good articles like this one:

Hardware recommendations for Premiere Pro and After Effects

Rendering and previews are much more dependent on GPU acceleration and CPU cores versus the codecs you choose. For example, if you edit or export using a codec for which your computer has hardware support, or at least GPU acceleration, and Premiere Pro takes advantage of it, then it should render much faster than a codec that must be done on the CPU. If you choose to pre-render previews then the speed and capacity of the volume where the previews are stored does make a difference, and again hard drives are not considered good enough.

If I was starting from your position I would buy some affordable 1TB to 4TB NVMe (fast) SSDs and set them up for video editing. I would put them in fast enclosures no slower than option E, similar to this:

A generic USB 3.2 10Gb/sec enclosure

You might find it easier to buy a pre-assembled NVMe SSD in an external USB 3 10Gb/sec enclosure. These are very popular with video pros, and are more affordable now. For example, the 1TB size of the widely used Samsung T and Crucial X series of fast external SSDs is around or under $100 now. People routinely mount these tiny drives on cameras for high capacity capture.

With more money, you could get one fast Thunderbolt enclosure with bays/slots to install multiple NVME SSDs like the ones below, the second one is a more high-end solution for serious video productions that need fast external storage at very high capacities:

OWC Express 4M2

OWC ThunderBlade

I use option E because my video editing is not at the same professional level as many of the experts here, so that works for me. 1000MB/sec works fine for my projects.