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best external drives: thunderbolt vs firewire

Explorer ,
Jul 31, 2017 Jul 31, 2017

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hi people,

I use a number of external drives, connected to my 2011 iMac,

for video production.  Most are USB2, a couple are Firewire 800,

and more recently, a Thunderbolt drive.

My write / read speeds for the drives are about like this:

USB:  23 / 30

FIREWIRE:  70 / 60

THUNDERBOLT:  150 / 140

these are megabytes per second i believe.

I can get by editing HD video, just using the USB2 drives,

but obviously, there's some playback issues if I'm using 2 or 3

camera shoots in a timeline.

I'm thinking of trying out the firewire drives, but someone tole me

that firewire can only communicate in one direction, therefore not

good for video work.  is this true?

The thunderbolt drive is brand new and I have not yet

tried it out for video work, but am thinking that it will be

the best, and I can simply use the older drives for archives.

thanks for any comments.

(I'm using mostly AVCHD & XAVC-S in HD resolution)

thanks!

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LEGEND ,
Jul 31, 2017 Jul 31, 2017

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Absolutely use your Thunderbolt drive.  I guess your 2011 Mac is really limited by the vintage of the ports like USB 2 ans possibly your Thunderbolt may not support much faster devices like SSD's  Maybe some Mac experts can comment on that.

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