Fast Editing Drives for 4k footage
With all of our projects moving to 4k, I’m finding my Drobo 5D just can’t keep up even with Thunderbolt 1 and the a 480 ssd cache drive. The read write speeds are 303MB/s and 257 MB/s respectively. I edit on the iMac Retina so I wanted to see if I could take advantage of their new Thunderbolt 2 ports. I figured 2 SSDs in raid 0 would be pretty fast. I wanted something with at least 400gb that would be enough for the majority of my projects. I would still back them up on a Raid 5 device daily. This would be for pure speed.
I landed on the Akitio Thunder2 Quad Mini without drives. It's only $300 and then you can choose your own drives. 255gb SSDs are as low as $75 right now.
The downside is there is there is no hardware Raid so I needed to us Soft Raid Lite ($50) to set it up. The other downside to a software raid is the data can’t be read by another computer.
I set this up in RAID 0 and ran Black Magic Disk speed test. I was greeted with a wonderful surprise! 927.4 MB/s write and 1213.0 MB/s all for only $650. Now I’ve breezing through my edits!
Would love to hear of any alternative’s you all use for fast hard drives. I would have been ok with just a 2 drive bay, but couldn’t find one in the SSD form factor that supported Thunderbolt.
