I recently got into making videos, editing photos, and using the photos and videos for my new channel. I am searching for an external hard drive that I can back up all of my videos and photos on in case something happens to my computer. I am looking for an external hard drive that is probably at least 5 terabytes. The one I am currently considering is 14 terabytes. As someone who is new to making videos, video editing, and storing larger format files on my computer, how large of an external hard drive do I need? What are the best brands? What external hard drives do fellow Mac users use?
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Best External Hard Drives for Videos
- Thread starter MacDividend
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All depends if you told us what Mac you have then we could point you the quietest largest drive!
Try to go with the 3 2 1 rule if possible.
3 copies
2 different media
1 offsite
How much are you willing to spend? I spent a bit of upfront cost to set up a Synology NAS and it was a great idea. I also have several external hard drives for my most important copies. And I have one of them at a family members house. I also have some of my compressed files in the cloud. Sure if something bad were to happen where I lost my offsite backup and my NAS and external hard drives, I would lose my master files, but I would have the compressed ones still.
As you are just starting out, maybe go for 2 of the 8 TB Western Digital external drives (or Seagate too).
How big are you video projects going to be? Do you create master files then compressed files, or do you just store the compressed files?
My NAS is 20 TB. I have it set up where 2 drives can fail and I still keep my data.
I have a 2019 Macbook Pro. Yes, I am just starting out so I am just beginning my search. The average length of my video projects will be about ten minutes each. My last video was close to 10 gigs. I have three folders for organization. The first is for the original file. The second is for the edited file. The third is for the compressed files. I backup the originals to the cloud as well.
If you working with video then you should really get a modern Smart NAS like the Synology 920+ because it can also stream to any device on your network plus install a free VPN server to see you video on rode through VPN! This way you can tool around on any Wi-Fi and see you saved media!
I have an older NAS as I got it in December 2017 - DS1817+. It has 8 drive bays, all filled with 4TB Ironwolf drives.
Yea I’m glad for you but I was trying to inform the op to steer him to the beat way to save personal video/media files on to share across their whole home!
Not sure why my message required a comment like yours. Glad for me? I wasn't suggesting your message or advice was wrong.
Appreciate both of your help with my question. I'll probably start out with something basic to begin with then upgrade to a Synology or a NAS drive of some kind once my channel starts monetizing and I need to get more sophisticated. I'll save the recommendations for later.
Whatever you pick, you want redundancy. Losing 14TB worth of stuff is not funny. Unfortunately, if you really want that huge storage space, you kinda better jump to the aforementioned solutions like Synology right off the bat. Then you can spend your resources into upgrading the storage instead of wasting money on individual external drives.