Move over 800MB/s USB 3.1 externals, here come Thunderbolt 3 drives

There seems to be some competition improving the state of external drives. Most workflows are more than served by the kind of bandwidth available through the USB 3.1 protocol. There are always jobs that need more. Barefeats have done a new test comparing the fastest bus-powered SSD from last year with this year’s Thunderbolt 3 drives and enclosures from Sonnet, Netstor, AKiTiO and LaCie.

See how fast they can read and write data over on the Bare Feats site.

VR: Six 4K ProRes streams to the same drive?

Although read speeds are getting very high, write speeds are becoming more important for some productions. As well as quickly needing to make backups for gigabytes of camera media, some VR cameras can have external devices attached. The Insta360 Pro currently has a USB connection for an external SSD. It records media from six sensors at the same time to HEVC/H.265. Soon producers will want to record high-quality ProRes from 6 (or more) sensors at a time, and Thunderbolt 3 might be the answer.