SSDs make great ingest drives thanks to their speed and portability. Copy over media and organize it while freeing up expensive camera cards. These don't need to be the fastest drives in your arsenal but you want to make sure they are large enough to hold all the media you plan on capturing. We recommend keeping a redundant copy of mission critical work in case a drive is lost or corrupted. A cost effective option for redundancy is a larger portable spinning drive that can act as a backup for more than one ingest SSD.
For those working in a studio environment: Although our Blackbox PRO RAID with Hub is listed as an archive selection, for creators looking to simplify their workflow, look to use the built in card readers to streamline the ingest process whether you're looking to use the RAID as the ingest or as a pass-through to your ingest SSD.
There are a lot of reasons to run your edit on an external SSD. They don't use up limited internal storage, they are less expensive than configuring a large internal SSD, and they allow you to juggle multiple projects located on separate edit drives.
The SSD you pick should be large enough to cover the potential size of your project and fast enough to handle the media types you plan to work on. Up to 4K requires 1000 MB/s, beyond 4K go Thunderbolt 3 NVMe @ 2,850 MB/s.
It's also important to keep incremental backups of your edit during the process. Look to use one of your ingest or archive drives. Create a temp folder and point your editing software's backup utility to it. This prevents you from having to start over if your edit drive goes down due to power loss or accidental corruption.
Whether you are a working professional, content creator, or the designated family vacation filmmaker, it's always a good thing to maintain some level of access to completed projects. Storing massive amounts of data on SSDs can get very expensive. While SSDs are great, spinning hard drives are a "fast enough" and cost effective solution. Look to use a dual-drive RAID, set to RAID-1 for additional redundancy and double the read speeds for when you need to revisit an old edit.
While hard drives are more reliable than SSDs specifically for long term storage, they are not immutable. We always recommend multiple copies on different media, and one of those preferably offsite. Look to supplement your strategy with a cloud backup.
