External drive
Also known as: external SSD, portable drive
The disk action footage lives on, chosen for speed as much as capacity because editing from a slow one is its own obstacle.
Updated
What it means
Action footage outgrows internal storage immediately. A single session at high Bitrate fills more space than a laptop has spare, so an external disk is not an accessory.
Two kinds matter for different reasons. A fast solid state drive is what an edit runs from; a large spinning disk is where finished sessions are kept. Asking one disk to do both jobs is how people end up unhappy with it.
Speed is the part people get wrong. A drive fast enough to copy files is frequently not fast enough to play several 4K streams at once. Capacity is easy; throughput is the specification that matters.
How it works in practice
The working pattern is two copies minimum. Footage on the edit drive and the same footage on an archive disk, because a card gets reused and a single copy is not a backup.
Cloud backup is the third copy rather than the first. Uploading hours of raw files takes longer than most people have patience for, so the local disks do the daily work.
Proxies reduce the demand. Proxy editing from a slower disk works where the originals would stutter, which is what makes a modest drive usable for a long timeline.
What to watch out for
Drives fail without warning, and the failure takes the only copy. An edit drive is working storage and not an archive, however long a finished project is left sitting on it.
Bus speed caps everything. A fast drive on an old port runs at the port's speed, and the symptom is a timeline that stutters while the disk is barely working. The specification on the box was never the problem.
Full drives slow down too. A disk near capacity writes more slowly and makes Rendering and export take longer, which reads as a machine problem rather than a storage one.
How RawClip handles it
Uploading raw footage avoids the local disk problem for the analysis step, since the files are read from the upload rather than played from a drive. The delivered result is small enough that keeping it alongside the originals is not what fills a disk.