Final Cut Pro, read/write via External Hard Disk

final-cut-provideo editing

Please forgive my silly question but can videos be edited on FCP via external HDD? My MBP is running out of storage and I want to start learning video editing where all everything is to be done through external HDD, no SSD involved. Possible? Thanks!

Best Answer

The short answer is yes.

However, I would definitely suggest using at minimum, a USB 3 drive, but for best performance you will want a Thunderbolt drive.

To give you an idea of what the performance metrics of different interfaces are, I've compiled a quick summary:

  • SATA III (Internal Hard Drive) - 6Gpbs
  • USB 3.0 - 5Gbps
  • USB 2.0 - 480Mbps (or 0.48Gbps)
  • Thunderbolt - 10Gbps

So, while you can use pretty much any external drive, how well it performs is completely dependent on what architecture you use to connect it. My recommendation is go with Thunderbolt.

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