Ultimate Guide for Storage for Content Creators
updated for 2024
I’ll admit this is not a sexy topic, but every content creator and videographer should at some point care about storage. I’ve created the ultimate guide for storage for content creators from cloud storage down to your SD card. All my digital nomad friends know I have a lot of storage whether it’s hard drives or cloud storage.
Your laptop or computer hard drive
If you’re a videographer creating a lot of good content or shooting in 4K or even 5.7K or doing client work eventually you are going to run out of hard-drive space. Those 500gb or 1TB SSD drives are not going to last very long. What is the solution? I like to use external USB3 drives. They are still relatively fast and offer the fast value for storage. I trust the Seagate and Western Digital brand in this space. USB3 hard drives offer the best bang for the buck, but they are not the best for working storage. In 2024 I’m using an 18 TB external hard drive by Western Digital for about $300 or less. I have about 3 or 4 of these now. I have you have the budget go for the RAID option for better redundancy in case one of the drives fail.
my laptop has 500gb ssd for working storage
When I actually video edit I do it on my local SSD laptop hard drive (working storage), which is why I always recommend getting at least 500GB. The USB hard-drives are just for storage. I’ll copy footage over to my internal hard drive if I want a good editing experience.
Larger external USB 3 storage with a plug
In my bases around the world I invest in the larger drives like the Seagate 6TB with 2 additional usb ports and 2 months of free Adobe Photoshop. I also trust the Seagate expansion hard drives.
Portable External USB 3 Storage
when it comes to portable drives I also trust seagate hard drive.
My favorite are the 5TB or 4TB Seagate external drives. They are reliable. I think have 8 or 10 of them. They are great for travel and you can offload footage from your SSD onto here. I use for for raw footage and curated footage backups.
All the hard drives mentioned including the Seagate 5tb you can purchase and view in the link below. Some of them even come with 2 months of Adobe Photoshop so check the label.
Portal External SSD Hard-drives
In recent years I’ve started to use external SSD hard-drives due to the speed and the performance of these hard-drives. I like the Samsung T7 Series as well as the Extern You can use them to store videos and connect to your phone and even the Panasonic GH6 camera can record pro res footage to this SSD with a firmware upgrade. You may have seen CF Express cards that are supported in the GH6. These are still more expensive than SSD hard-drives for high performance storage.
External SSD drive connected to my GH6 camera
SD Cards
I use these mini sd cards on my drones and mirrorless cameras for shooting 4k
When it comes to SD card you’ll want a reliable and fast enough card to read and write that powerful 4K footage. I’ve used these Sandisk Extreme mini sd cards with the SD card Adaptor for years. For 2024 I recommend getting at least 128GB SD cards as video file sizes are getting faster. I’ve recently switches from External to Lexar for my GH6 primary camera. I’m using the Lexar professional 128GB 1667X
Cloud Storage
You also recommend having a cloud storage solution to backup my valuable assets. and deliver video files to clients. I may talk about this more in the future, but for now I prefer to use google drive’s 2TB paid plan as well as Dropbox 2TB. I like that they are well supported, have servers around the world for consistent international performance, and good apps for retrieving and sending links on the go!
Check out my full content Creator Gear Guide and get the PDF
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