Why I didn't use the internal SSDs? The laptop Nand flash is soldered directly to the motherboard, so if your computer breaks, from a drop, pulled cable, or liquid spill, all your data is very likely gone or unavailable for weeks or months even. Whatever drives you edit from, I recommend SSDs with TLC Nand (avoid QLC). There are other drives from PNY that can go to 4TB+ but for my needs the 2TB was enough at that time. I was using the 2x 2TB Samsung T7 (one as a daily clone backup). While you could edit off of your laptop, generally I recommend using an external bus powered SSD drive. I did a lot of travel editing for work for the 2 months this year, including editing on planes and trains. I just don’t want to spec out a MacBook Pro and then have the external drive bottleneck its performance while I’m editing, even if it’s a fast external drive. I've heard mixed opinions that you could have better performance working entirely off your MacBook instead of working off an external hard drive/shuttle drive.Īre the internal drives on the M1 Max MacBook Pro fast enough that all of the footage could be on it and I'd be tapping into its peak performance? Or would I be better off editing from the footage on an external SSD? It would be an extra step having to transfer the footage from the hard drive to my MacBook every time I start a new project, but worth it if I’m getting max performance. My iMac Pro handles this pipeline just fine. Occasionally I will work with the raw footage in Premiere and attach the proxies. I work in Premiere and my workflow is as follows: cut the offline with 1080p ProRes Proxy files, do finishing/prep, then do the online/conform with 4K (sometimes up to 6K) files. (The latter of which is mostly used as a shuttle drive and probably isn’t the fastest). I’m a professional video editor and have always edited on an iMac Pro with an external RAID drive or a Lacie Rugged USB-C. This would be a MacBook that I’d bring with me while traveling/working remotely, so I want something powerful.

I'm looking at getting the 2021 MacBook Pro 16-inch with the M1 Max chip and 64GB of memory, but I'm trying to decide how much internal storage I want.

Best external ssd for video editing mac