When I’m at home editing on my desktop, I have a set of velociraptor 300gb drives in RAID 0 to give me speed. But on my laptop the 7200 rpm drive doesn’t always keep up. If you’re looking for RAID 0 speeds in a compact package a solid state hard drive (SSD) might be something to consider.

The average read speed on my velociraptor setup is around 130 MB/s. The average read speed on a modern 2.5 SSD drive is around 190 MB/s which is more then enough to keep up with HD editing. The down side is of course the price. The cost of SSD drives has dropped quit a bit over the last few years but you can still expect to pay around $250 for a 128gb drive. The Velociraptor 300gb drive, on the other hand, is around $140.

Depending on the size of project you’re working on, 128gb might not be enough space, so you might have to split your project up into a few sections. This might be a little bit of a pain, but if you need the speed, it’s worth the hassle. I can usually squeeze a 15 to 20 minute timeline into about 120gb depending on the number of cameras and effects. So for music videos, safety videos, and commercials you should have plenty of room. You can buy larger SSD drives but the price jumps up fast.

Some will say SSD drives are safer then spinning drives. I personally don’t trust having an important project with no backup. You can always back up to a cheaper 7200 rpm drive between projects.


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