Hello Everyone

Wasn't sure where to post this, but it is a hardware question, so....

I am learning video editing and I need to store all of my source files and proxy files to an external storage device. All the editing forums tell me to use a fast external SSD, which is quite expensive. This is for editing drone footage and I have a number of fast U3 SD cards lying around.

What would be the advantage (aside from the storage space) of an SSD over an SD card?

Thanks for any replies

Bob

Either can be made to work, but an external SSD drive as sole device on a USB3 interface SHOULD be significantly faster than any SD card, and should (if treated properly) have a longer lifespan. Some of that speed depends upon the CPU, memory, and other supporting hardware involved.

It sounds as if you are on a restricted budget. Many of us are right now. The question is if the difference in time and money is worthwhile based upon the value of your time and the urgency of your projects. No one will be able to answer that question for you, but if you can time someone who has an external drive AND some SD card to watch what difference it can make, that might help.

Someone should make a video about the testing. I have to wonder if someone has, and it is up on youtube waiting to be found!

Thank you for your replies. You have confirmed what I assumed to be the case.

Thanks again

Bob

The card reader on a computer is designed with focus on reading. It is mostly used to transfer data from a toy (smart phone, camera) to the computer. That is it's design purpose, not designed to send data in both directions at high speed, speed is not necessary for reading.

It used to be, the closer to the processor, the faster. The fastest memory was the L1 cache on the die, next fastest is the L2 cache on the die then the RAM, hard drive, PMCIA, optical drive, floppy drive. Then came newer tech for external media. like USB1.1, then something faster than USB (Firewire), then more improvements on USB. When it comes to speed with external forms of memory, the majority of effort to increase speed in both directions has been geared towards the USB bus.

Thank you. That is helpful. The video editors I use (Shotcut and DaVinci Resolve) can strain memory and hardware when using filters, complicated transitions and colour grading. When I load a clip, I'm assuming that it gets it from the storage drive and loads it into memory of the application while I do my editing. The slowest part of the process is loading clips stored on the computers spinning hard drive (second only to creating proxy files from each clip.) I don't know a lot about it, but it does makes sense that faster external storage would speed the process up. That was the reason for the question.

Budget is a constraint and NVMe capable SSD are pretty pricey, whereas a 256GB U3 SD card is a quarter of the price. If I wear them out with overuse, I would have to buy them 4 times to cost the same as a fast SSD. So, I wanted to know if the quality of the storage would be equal (no greater risk of file corruption.)

Thank you for your reply.

Bob

It's not just wearing them out - they are more fragile, especially under load. Can you afford to lose all the data on a card ?. If it's just practice and you don't mind reloading/recreating the data, go with the cheaper option.
I use SDcards on my pi3s and have had a couple go down the drain. I also use the same (type of) cards on my DSLR, but I use 2, and write all shots to both. They are not a bad option, but they are not the best option.

Thank you, Syg00. Since the video editing I do is predominately for my drone footage, I could just take micro SD card out of the drone and access it from the editing software. I've never tried that, but I may have just solved my own question. The micro SD cards have to be of good quality and speed because the drone records in RAW and 4K (though I rarely render in 4K, files are just too big.)

I have found a Sandisk Extreme with NVMe capability with 1050mb speeds for a reasonable price, but it's only for 500GB. I might just get that because the low volume of work I'm doing right now it may just be all I need.

Thank for your you input.

Bob

Video editing is mostly RAM and CPU intensive. If you read the video from the SD card, process it, and store the final product on the SSD that should be the best of both worlds. The real benefit to having the final storage on an external drive is portability between systems.

The camera is able to write the raw data on the SD card at max resolution so obviously the card is fast enough to store and view the data. My concern with the SD card is its tiny size and ease of loss or damage so the SSD seems the better choice

My Nikon D7200 has a very small cache, in order to do High Res video I require fast SD cards. This is what the fast SD card is designed for, for the camera with a small cache which is designed (the camera) to transfer cached data to the card as fast as the video is being produced.

Is a "card reader" designed to write to these cards as fast as the device it was designed for. The SD card was not designed for card readers.

I would agree with post #8. You have solved your own question.

The camera(s) use sd, you're going to use ssd. Writes are more punitive than reads to an sd card, iirc. So keep that in mind when developing procedures. Your data path should be

Camera(s) --> sd card --> ssd, and edit from there. If the cameras overwrite automatically, there's no need to delete.

I have a cheap ultra fast 256g usb ssd that cost $29.

I would eliminate one step there. Mine would be
Camera(s) --> sd card --> edit --> ssd Since reading from the sd card is quick and writing to the ssd is also much quicker than to the sd card.

Yours adds at least one more step and additional files on the ssd since I would assume the editing would not overwrite the original file(s).
Camera(s) --> sd card --> ssd --> edit --> ssd
If a backup copy of the originals is intended then the path taken is a moot point.

Yup, I agree
You're taking advantage of your hardware reading from the card reader, editing is done in RAM/swap, then saved/written to the SSD. Use both drives as designed to be used.