Which Popular USB SSD Should You Avoid? (And what to get instead)

hey everybody I've got kind of a short video for you here today if you happen to be in the market for a portable SSD to use with a camera or a hyper deck recorder or an a-time switcher I've got some recommendations for you and some tips that don't make your buying decisions a little bit better and I want to make one specific call out on a product I see used all the time which actually doesn't really work in this particular situation so with that let's actually just Dive Right In hey everybody I see disgust online quite a bit whether it be Facebook Discord or other online forums various places email whatever people talking about with various models of ssds that they use in order to record footage off of a camera or hyper deck or atem switcher and there seems to be some inconsistency on what products work well and which ones don't but I'm going to start right off and say that I see one mistake being made more often than not and that is people using the Samsung t7 drive for that particular type of situation for that as a solution for recording video and I see the same thing coming up over and over and over again lost footage drop frames a boarding recording uh you name it like just general instability with this particular drive with a lot of these recorders and that's been my experience as well the Samsung G7 is incredibly popular but it's not well suited to this particular task so while it might work well with the computer it's not going to work well with video recorders and there are some specific reasons for that and I'll get into talking about that a little bit here in this video but at the same time I'm actually going to make some recommendations a couple recommendations on some products you may not be familiar with which actually do a much better job and actually cost less so let's take a look at the drives that I actually have here in front of me these aren't the only ones that I've evaluated but they're the ones that I thought would probably be most interesting to the viewers here on my channel so in the middle here I've got that some Samsung t7 this is the one terabyte version of that drive uh I've done thorough testing on this and all the other ones and I have some graphs to indicate why this one actually fails in video recording next to it'll have a SanDisk Extreme Pro that's another one I see mentioned quite a lot this one is certainly better than the Samsung and I know a lot of people do have success with this drive and that includes me I've I've had these actually work for me fairly well but at the same time after I've done some benchmarking on this one this is probably not necessarily the best choice either moving over here and take a look at a couple other drives from crucial this is a crucial X8 this is actually designed to compete with these particular models here the t7 and the sand extreme Pro it's kind of in that same price Ballpark and this one does work better than those but it's not necessarily the best value and and that's where the crucial X6 comes into play and I'm going to show you some performance graphs on all these drives and you can certainly make buying decisions of your own but for my money I'm going to be investing in The crucial X6 drives for most of the video projects that I happen to work on it's not only the cheapest but it's gotten very consistent performance which makes it work really well for video production then on the opposite side here I've got kind of the build your own this is a sabrant enclosure with whatever SSD nvme SSD you want to happen to pop in there this one right here actually has a Samsung 970 Evo drive in it but you can put in whatever Drive is going to have the performance and capacity that you need for your particular needs I use these enclosures all the time and I will be making a specific recommendation on a drive you can put in there that gives you a lot of performance very consistent performance and is quite affordable so uh let's actually take a look at some of the performance on some of these drives and why some work better than others so if you haven't seen this before this is a feature I have on my website where I catalog performance of all the different media that I happen to use and I I do accept submissions from other users I created a piece of software called DJ Drive tool a number of years ago and it's designed to recover data off of a failing drive but a side effect of doing that is actually benchmarking the drives and so it actually will generate some pretty cool statistics about the performance of the drive and create some graphs about how the drive performs over the entire span of storage that's available so with that said uh we can go over and take a look at the Samsung t7 and you and you'll be able to see fairly easily why this drive is not necessarily great for video work so let me take a look at this chart right here so these are our performance numbers for both read and write speeds we've got new Max on average standard deviation minimum and then these numbers here indicate performance over the course of the entire volume and these numbers right here for example the five percent number is actually probably the most meaningful of all the numbers that are here on this chart which is basically saying that 95 of the time this drive is going to perform at this rate or faster and that's really what you need to pay attention to when you're buying a drive for use with a recording video the video can be very demanding because it just comes in Non-Stop it's a consistent stream and never slows down and unless I drive is specifically designed to handle that it's probably going to fail now if we take a look at the chart here we can see that happening so the blue line up top here is read performance and that seems to be pretty consistent across the entire drive but we take a look at the red numbers here those are your right performance data and it's pretty clear from this that it's kind of all over the map and that's why these drives actually fail because you just can't predict how how fast the drive is going to be and as we're testing you can see at the very beginning it's pretty fast but it drops before too long and that's when we start to have issues with video failing so either frame is being dropped or outright just stopping in the middle of a recording so because of that the t7 is really not in a great drive for use with recording video and unfortunately I see people using these all the time and I see people complaining about them all the time ironically the older T5 which has been discontinued for quite a while is actually better for recording video than the t7 and that's probably why people like them or I've tried the t7 because the T5 actually did work recently well for that you would think a newer upgraded drive would be better turns out it's not and most people who use the t7 have found that they just don't work consistently for video work all right let's take a look at the next one here this is one that I don't have on my desk here but it's a SanDisk Extreme portable this is the non-pro version of this particular drive and we can see here that the performance Summers on this one are actually worse than the t7 so this is a drive that's sort of meant to compete in some in that same same portion of the market but look at our five percent number and it's 359 megabytes per second which you would think it would be enough but it's actually not when it comes time to go to Right video data to the drive consistently over the course of minutes or out even hours so I know the people who have tried this drive and have had very limited success if not outright failures with it and so this would not be a drive that I would recommend for using with video production let's go to the pro version of that which is one of the ones that I do have here on the desk you can see here that it starts out going really fast you know we've got numbers close to a gigabyte per second but it drops off after in this particular Drive the two terabyte version the performance drops off after half of a terabyte which means that the drive has a buffer and it's filling up and it's no longer able to maintain those high speeds so this is one of those drives that it can work but generally speaking only for shorter recordings if you start to use it for for longer runs you probably will find that you start to have frames dropped and the ore recordings aborted prematurely so not necessarily a drive that I would recommend personally I I don't know some people have had luck with these but based on these numbers that I'm seeing here at the performance of this drive is not something that I would necessarily recommend myself all right let's move over to this crucial X8 this is again a drive is sort of price to compete with the extreme extreme Pro and the t7 uh it's priced in that same ballpark uh I know this chart's a little bit hard to read but you can see that the performance is actually pretty consistent all the way from beginning to end and so this is a drive that I would absolutely 100 trust for recording video and it's actually ironically less expensive than t7 and the SanDisk Extreme Pro and yeah it's it's just a great value all around so in this case the five percent number is 813 that means over the course of the entire drive 95 of the time it was writing at 813 megabytes per second or faster and so this drive would absolutely be able to keep up with the demands of recording video all right now we'll take a look at the one that I actually want to recommend this course of this video that's the crucial X6 so even though this is meant to be a lower end Drive than the X8 that we just looked at its performance numbers are actually really close and so we come here to our five percent number four right 739.4 megabytes per second that is easily enough to handle any of the video loads that we kind of encounter with people who watch this channel so if you're recording video off of a camera whether that be compressed or raw or whatever or recording off of an atem or any other sort of device which is going to be generating video like a hyperdeck this crucial X6 seems to be up to the task it's actually quite a bit faster than the more expensive options and it's actually the least expensive version of the bunch so in this case this drive is currently selling for 59 for a one terabyte version and again it's able to write continuously for 730 plus megabytes per second over the course of the entire disk therefore it's going to be a great choice for recording video all right so uh with that said you can also assemble your arm your own and I'll have links to this particular enclosure popping up here but this is again the sabrant enclosure this runs about thirty dollars it's really easy to work with this in order to pop the drive in you just basically turn that lever put the drive in lay it down and then rotate the lever back over and then close it up and you're good to go so super easy to configure and it makes it really easy to swap the drive out if you ever want to upgrade it or you want to have a series of drives that you swap in and out of there on demand so this makes it really easy to do that now my favorite nvme SSD for this particular enclosure is currently the Samsung 980 Pro Series those used to be really expensive they were kind of a premium device and their performance is still absolutely amazing these are drives that are capable of riding five gigabytes per second pretty consistently uh with the prices in memory dropping in the last few months this drive has become extremely affordable I would recommend just going straight to the two terabyte version and it's regularly priced at about 125 right now I've Seen It Go as low as 99 but it's typically kind of in that 125 range right now you have the 30 enclosure on there and you've got a two terabyte drive it's going to boil the doors off the performance of all the rest of these things and it's going to do so at a price that's less than some of these other models so if you're adventurous enough to try and create your own drive then that would be a fantastic way to go so anyway that's going to about do it for this video so if you have other drives that you recommend that you've used that actually work really well I'd love to hear about that in the comment section down below or if you've got questions about these or anything else related to video production you can ask those in the comments as well or even better join us over on my Discord server djp.ly Discord and you can ask your questions there to a huge community of people who work in video production professionally and are very eager to answer questions and help about where they can so again that's going to do it for for today so thanks everybody for watching and have a fantastic day

Channel: Doug Johnson Productions

Views: 52,342

Keywords: Doug Johnson Productions, DJP, Live Video Production, Event Video Production, Orem, Utah, Live Streaming, Internet Streaming, livestream, livestreaming, live video, blackmagic design, atem

Id: isYOCwPzOTQ

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023