Rugged external HD

I have been looking for a small external HD.
Most are rated 130 Mb/s. 5400 rpm.
I was looking for a 7200 rpm. 2TB.
I beleive that the 7200 will be a bit quicker?

I will use this as storage but I might edit.
Will 130 MB/s work well?
I'm workin with 1080.

Depends on the footage/codec you’re working with.

Under the assumption you’re working with 1080 HD Prores or Prores HQ, and under the assumption the sustain speeds are indeed 130 MB/S, then it should work. With that said, I would highly encourage 7200 rpm hard drive between the two. Also, make sure the mentioned speeds are sustained around 130 MB/s and not just “up to” (See if a friendly nerd on youtube did a speed test on said drive )

A good rule of thumb to determine if the drive will be fast enough is to take the megabits per second (mbps) of the footage and divide that number by 8. This result will give you the Megabytes per second (MB/S) required for playback on a drive. Afterwards, double that number to assure smooth playback. TL/DR formula is mbps / 8 x 2 = recommended drive speed for smooth performance.

So did a quick YouTube search, and if this is the drive in question, then there are definitely some limitations.



Due to the 5400 rpm, the disk speeds range from 30 to 60 MB/s as Mac Journaled format. You can get away with 24 or 30 FPS with prores for example, but faster FPS may be pushing it (Prores Hq is also highly questionable.)

5400 is ideally fine for storage, but push for 7200 rpm if you can for improved speeds. Also if speed is more important than storage, consider an external SSD.

Thanks for the info and the maths.
I am defenitely looking for 7200 rpm.
G-technology have a few 7200 rpm.

SSD would be great but the expense for 2TB gets quite high.

Albo wrote: ...SSD would be great but the expense for 2TB gets quite high.

You can get a 2TB Samsung SATA SSD for about $209: www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1520411-R...d_plus_internal.html

It would require an inexpensive $15 enclosure like this one: www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D2BHVBD/

Great. Thanks for the info.

Hi Albo
I support Joema's recommendation on creating your own external drive via separate drives and an enclosure. The enclosure he has linked to looks good. It is a USB3 gen 2 and USAP. USAP allows faster transfers. Not all enclosures support USAP but all Macs with USB3 do.
7200 rpm is ~33% faster than equivalent 5400 rpm drives, but lots of other factors can influence the speed including the chipsets use in device, amount of cache on board, type and arrangement of the flash memory, etc…. 2.5 inch drives are slightly faster than 3.5 inch HDDs.
The newest drives are faster in general than drives from just 5-10 years ago, so look for later models.
I use spinning drives as back-up drives (You do have at least a couple of back-ups?). I have a couple of SSDs that I load up for editing projects off of. SSDs are in general 4-5 times faster than HDDs.
1080p is not that burdensome for most computers, but remember that if you are doing multi-cam editing, each stream will more than double the bandwidth needed. Also if you use separate independent audio, this is an additional stream.
Your computer itself can also underperform if it has insufficient RAM, CPU etc… meaning that a spinning beach ball may be related to system bottlenecks, not just external drives.
Happy Editing
Hope this Helps, Greg
p.s. I highly do NOT recommend Seagate drives here's one reason why…
Lots of other drive savers have posted videos about how crappy these drives are.

I have no fear of Seagate. Having said that that was a laptop HD. If the laptop fell while it was powered on I would expect some damage to the hard drive.