FCPX External Drive Speed Comparison - Samsung T5 vs LaCie Rugged vs MBP SSD

in this video I want to talk about external hard drives and how much having your Final Cut Pro library on an external drive affects the speed of your editing hey guys this is Serge and welcome back to my channel as may you know Final Cut Pro libraries can take up a lot of disk space especially if you're editing 4k video so naturally it makes sense to have them on an external drive but does happen these libraries on external drives effect to speed of Final Cut Pro and if it does by how much what I did is I compared to speed of my internal solid-state drive on my 2015 MacBook Pro to two of the most popular external drives out there the LaCie rugged Thunderbolt Drive and the Samsung t5 solid-state drive first let's take a look at the cost if you upgrade your storage directly from Apple you're paying about 800 US dollars for one terabyte of storage that's about 80 cents per gigabyte the Samsung t5 solid-state drive retails for about 250 US dollars for one terabyte drive and if you get it on sale you can get it for about 200 bucks that's about 20 cents per gigabyte the LaCie rugged Thunderbolt Drive which in my case is a mechanical drive sells for about 130 US dollars for a one terabyte drive that's about 13 cents per gigabyte so is Apple's internal storage worth four times more than an external SSD and over six times more than the mechanical drive let's find out first let's start by simply co-op a media off an SD card onto the drive we'll start with the cheapest option the LaCie rugged on my SD card I have ten short 4k clips which add up to about eight gigabytes I'll select them and drag them over to my external drive one minute and 36 seconds to copy about eight gigabytes to a mechanical drive now let's copy the same ten video clips to an external solid-state drive once again I'll select the ten files and drag and drop them into my external drive window one minute and 26 seconds that's about 12 percent faster now let's do the same test copying the media to my internal solid-state drive that's about a half a second faster than the external solid-state drive not really a noticeable difference for the next test will import the same 10 video clips off the SD card into Final Cut Pro you might be surprised by the results once again we'll start with our cheapest drive I'll hit the import button make sure the copy to library is selected and click import all one minute and 50 seconds next let's import these same clips onto a samsung t5 library once again I'll make sure to copy to library is selected and click import all surprisingly this took two minutes and five seconds twelve percent slower than the LaCie drive I repeated in this test a few times just to make sure and got the same results every time and last let's try importing onto the internal drive one minute and 48 seconds slightly faster than the LaCie drive and about 12 percent faster than the Samsung t5 so for imported media as expected the internal drive was the fastest the surprise here was the mechanical LaCie disk drive was about twelve percent faster than the samsung solid-state drive the next test will be transcoding a five minute video clip into Apple ProRes four to two to create optimized media first the LaCie drive with a clip selected from the menu bar I'll select file transfer media make sure only the create optimized media is selected and click OK [Music] seven minutes and 45 seconds to transcode a five-minute 4k clip with a library on the samsung t5 Drive Final Cut Pro transcoder the same clip slightly faster coming in at 7 minutes and 24 seconds the internal drive was even faster transcoding a five-minute clip in just 7 minutes and 11 seconds [Music] another time-consuming part of video editing is rendering files to test the render speed down in the timeline I have a roughly five minute project all video clips are in 4k with some having lots or color Corrections applied I also have a few titles and sound effects applied just to give these drives around for their money from the menu bar I'll select modify and render all on the lasing drive this five minute project takes about four minutes and 58 seconds the same project rendered on the Samsung t5 solid-state drive renders in about four minutes and 56 seconds and lasts with a project in the library on my internal drive this five minute project renders in about 4 minutes and 53 seconds all three of these numbers are fairly close together so I think it's safe to say a drive speed doesn't make much difference when rendering video and Final Cut Pro and for a lost test let's export this five-minute 4k project as a Master File [Music] with a project on the lazy drive it takes about seven minutes and six seconds to export the same project on the Samsung t5 only takes about four minutes and 34 seconds to export the internal drive is slightly faster exporting this five-minute project in four minutes and 33 seconds [Music] the internal drive on my macbook pro and the samsung t5 external solid-state drives perform very similar mos tests with an internal drive being slightly faster in most cases as expected the lake C disk drive was the slowest be most noticeable in copying files and exporting video as far as rendering and transcoding media it was right alongside the solid-state drives and speed it even outperformed the Samsung t5 and imported media into Final Cut Pro I wasn't really expecting that so I repeated the same test a few times and got very similar results [Music] as far as money goes an external solid-state drive such as a samsung t5 is your best bang for your buck you can save money by buying a mechanical disc drive but you will be given up speed and if money is no object upgrading and using an internal solid-state drive is your fastest and most reliable option for Final Cut Pro let me know in the comments below where you start your Final Cut Pro library and the pros and cons of it thanks for watching and I hope you found this video helpful I'll see you next week

Channel: Serge M

Views: 71,356

Keywords: FCPX External Drive Speed Comparison, samsung t5 vs lacie rugged, samsung t5 vs lacie, samsung t5 ssd, samsung t5 ssd review, lacie rugged thunderbolt, compare hard drive speed, hdd vs ssd, final cut pro media on external drive, external drive slow down fcpx, best external drive for video editing, best external drive for macbook pro, best external drive for fcpx, final cut pro external ssd, fcpx external ssd, use external drive in fcpx, final cut pro tutorial, lpt guy, fcpx

Id: lJWNG7acZ-o

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/FamilyFirstForever]

Thanks for taking the time to demonstrate the outcomes. Very informative.

[u/KB_Sez]

Thanks for this. I use several of the Samsung T5’s and they’re great thunderbolt drives.

I want to pick up one of the Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt RAID drives. It’s 4 TB made up of two 2 TB in RAID 0.

[u/Valium12]

Serge. Your FCPX videos are outstanding. Thx for the info and the work you do.