Hi there,
I've come to an impasse on the making after a period of what feels like exhaustive research on external nvme SSD's for my iMac video editing setup. My knowledge and experience has maxed out, and I was wondering if anyone with better insight would be so grateful as to help me with some final considerations?
Having held on and agonised about upgrading my iMac for some time, I passed on the 2019 releases in the hope the 2020 update would be the big shift and when it turned out to be the final Intel specs instead, I agonised further on whether to spec up a 2020 27" i9 to the max since they have an SSD and the T2 chip at least. But needing 8 years out of an iMac I decided it would just be a bad investment. The timing sucks. But becasue I need a solution to the hapmered nature of editing 4k, I ended up spending less than half my budget for now, on a base 2019 i5 model with one bump up on the GPU. I'm also currently awaiting the order of 64gb of RAM and intend to use this set up for a couple of years until I make up the budget up again with the intention to purchasing a high spec ARM iMac when they eventually finally arrive and have been road-tested sufficiently.
My issue stems from the fact the SSD portion of the 1TB Fusion Drive is a meager 32GB. To keep the system as tip-top as possible for video editing I intend to just have the OS and my creative apps on the internal drive so hopefully they'll stay optimally, on the blade partition. The rest of the Fusion drive will just be used for archive storage of old projects or personal media archiving that will be accessed very infrequently. I'm considering somethig like a T5 for the rest my apps and the Adobe premiere media cache. I need intend to have a 1TB external nvme solution to run all things video editing off exclusively, including 4k footage at times. I'm really stuck between a rock and hard place on whether to invest for the future 2+ years don the line or something a bit more modest for the next couple of years and just what level of speed is truly necessary to begin with.
1. Most primarily I have found data metrics confusing. As I have it, the file format/codec data rates are given in megabits per second (/mbps), whereas drive speed tests like that by BlackMagic, give results in megabytes per second (/MBps). The capitalisaiton being the distinguisher. There's 8 bits to a byte so the Blackmagic benchmarks can be multiplied by 8 if you want a direct comparison of the drive speed against the codec bitrate you'll be using. Do I have this correct?
2. I have educated myself on interface bus types and know they are the deciding factor in getting as closest to the capability of your connection type, which is often a misonoma if you have a Thunderbolt 1 drive with a 7,200 plate in it or a Thunderbolt 3 that only uses USB 3, or has SATA III under the hood for e.g.
Despite the speeds available on some m.2 nvme thunderbolt drives, it feels to me that even USB 3.1 gen 2x1 (10gbps) should be more than enough, despite the fact you never get anwhere near that. But if a device can at a minimum, say write 800MBps which seems realistic for many external SSD's, that would allow a theoretical data rate of 6,400 mbps (850x8). Looking at codec white papers, this seems huge and more than enough for the highest file formats I'm likely to use such as Pro Res HQ or Black Magic Raw 3:1 at the top end. Even with thermal throttling, it seems that there would still be head room. But am I missing anything here? I've read conflicting things on these boards for e.g. that you really should use Thunderbolt 3 for 4k editing from an external drive but also other people say they are happily using Samsung T5's without hitting a bottleneck. Why this conflicting sentiment?
With all the issues on thermal throttling on PCI4 and PCI3gen4 drives like the Samsung x5 and compatibility issues on separate drive and enclosures. A big part of me just wishes to something like a Samsung T7 or the San Disk Portable Pro V2 would just be enough for 4k editing. It's a shame in the case of the later, that the iMac Thunderbolt 3 ports don't support USB 3.2 gen2x2 at 20gbps.
Apolgies for the verbose post, I just wnated to be clear on the context of my issue and clear that I have done a certain amount of research to get to this point. Any pointers would be massively appreciated
I've come to an impasse on the making after a period of what feels like exhaustive research on external nvme SSD's for my iMac video editing setup. My knowledge and experience has maxed out, and I was wondering if anyone with better insight would be so grateful as to help me with some final considerations?
Having held on and agonised about upgrading my iMac for some time, I passed on the 2019 releases in the hope the 2020 update would be the big shift and when it turned out to be the final Intel specs instead, I agonised further on whether to spec up a 2020 27" i9 to the max since they have an SSD and the T2 chip at least. But needing 8 years out of an iMac I decided it would just be a bad investment. The timing sucks. But becasue I need a solution to the hapmered nature of editing 4k, I ended up spending less than half my budget for now, on a base 2019 i5 model with one bump up on the GPU. I'm also currently awaiting the order of 64gb of RAM and intend to use this set up for a couple of years until I make up the budget up again with the intention to purchasing a high spec ARM iMac when they eventually finally arrive and have been road-tested sufficiently.
My issue stems from the fact the SSD portion of the 1TB Fusion Drive is a meager 32GB. To keep the system as tip-top as possible for video editing I intend to just have the OS and my creative apps on the internal drive so hopefully they'll stay optimally, on the blade partition. The rest of the Fusion drive will just be used for archive storage of old projects or personal media archiving that will be accessed very infrequently. I'm considering somethig like a T5 for the rest my apps and the Adobe premiere media cache. I need intend to have a 1TB external nvme solution to run all things video editing off exclusively, including 4k footage at times. I'm really stuck between a rock and hard place on whether to invest for the future 2+ years don the line or something a bit more modest for the next couple of years and just what level of speed is truly necessary to begin with.
1. Most primarily I have found data metrics confusing. As I have it, the file format/codec data rates are given in megabits per second (/mbps), whereas drive speed tests like that by BlackMagic, give results in megabytes per second (/MBps). The capitalisaiton being the distinguisher. There's 8 bits to a byte so the Blackmagic benchmarks can be multiplied by 8 if you want a direct comparison of the drive speed against the codec bitrate you'll be using. Do I have this correct?
2. I have educated myself on interface bus types and know they are the deciding factor in getting as closest to the capability of your connection type, which is often a misonoma if you have a Thunderbolt 1 drive with a 7,200 plate in it or a Thunderbolt 3 that only uses USB 3, or has SATA III under the hood for e.g.
Despite the speeds available on some m.2 nvme thunderbolt drives, it feels to me that even USB 3.1 gen 2x1 (10gbps) should be more than enough, despite the fact you never get anwhere near that. But if a device can at a minimum, say write 800MBps which seems realistic for many external SSD's, that would allow a theoretical data rate of 6,400 mbps (850x8). Looking at codec white papers, this seems huge and more than enough for the highest file formats I'm likely to use such as Pro Res HQ or Black Magic Raw 3:1 at the top end. Even with thermal throttling, it seems that there would still be head room. But am I missing anything here? I've read conflicting things on these boards for e.g. that you really should use Thunderbolt 3 for 4k editing from an external drive but also other people say they are happily using Samsung T5's without hitting a bottleneck. Why this conflicting sentiment?
With all the issues on thermal throttling on PCI4 and PCI3gen4 drives like the Samsung x5 and compatibility issues on separate drive and enclosures. A big part of me just wishes to something like a Samsung T7 or the San Disk Portable Pro V2 would just be enough for 4k editing. It's a shame in the case of the later, that the iMac Thunderbolt 3 ports don't support USB 3.2 gen2x2 at 20gbps.
Apolgies for the verbose post, I just wnated to be clear on the context of my issue and clear that I have done a certain amount of research to get to this point. Any pointers would be massively appreciated
