Hero Image I've built editing workstations for other people and for myself, and the storage question always takes way longer to answer than people expect. Everyone wants to know which SSD is the "fastest." But the more useful question — the one that actually matters when you're six hours into a color grade and your timeline is stuttering — is which SSD stays fast under sustained pressure.

Video editing is genuinely brutal on storage in ways that gaming and general computing just aren't. You're not simply reading large files. You're simultaneously reading source footage, writing cache files, generating proxy media, and exporting a final render. All of that happens at the same time, for hours on end. A drive that looks blazing fast in CrystalDiskMark can completely fall apart during a real editing session.

Why Editing Destroys Cheap Drives

Three things make video editing different from other workloads.

Sustained sequential writes. Every time you create proxies, render previews, or export your timeline, the drive absorbs tens of gigabytes in huge sequential writes. Gaming is mostly sequential reads. Office work is tiny random writes. Editing is the opposite — massive, relentless writes that don't stop.

SLC cache exhaustion. This is the dirty secret of consumer NVMe drives. Most of them use a chunk of their NAND flash as a fast SLC cache, which gives you those impressive initial burst speeds of 5,000-7,000 MB/s. But that cache is limited. Once it fills up, the drive falls back to its native TLC or QLC speed, which on cheap drives can be as slow as 400-600 MB/s. For a quick game install, you'll never notice. For a 30-minute 4K ProRes export, you'll notice immediately.

Post-cache sustained speed. This is the number that actually matters for editing. The Samsung 990 Pro sustains around 3,400 MB/s even after the cache is exhausted. A budget QLC drive might drop to 600 MB/s. That difference means the difference between an export taking 4 minutes or 20 minutes.

The Drives Worth Buying

For most editing workstations, I keep recommending the Samsung 990 Pro (2TB). Its sustained write performance after cache exhaustion is basically the best in the PCIe 4.0 class. It runs cooler than most competitors, and Samsung's firmware quality is consistently solid. I've had zero issues across multiple workstations.

The WD Black SN850X trades blows with the Samsung and is absolutely worth choosing if you find it cheaper on a given day. Performance is nearly identical in real editing workflows.

What about PCIe 5.0? The Crucial T705 puts up insane sequential numbers (14,500 MB/s reads), but once the cache is exhausted, its sustained write speed is only marginally better than the Samsung. And it runs significantly hotter, requiring a proper heatsink. Unless you are regularly editing 6K or 8K RAW footage, PCIe 5.0 doesn't justify the price premium for editing work.

Separate Your Drives

This is the single biggest workflow improvement you can make, and most people skip it.

When your OS, applications, project files, and DaVinci Resolve cache are all fighting for bandwidth on the same physical drive, everything slows down. Resolve's cache system is particularly aggressive — it writes gigabytes of data while you're simultaneously scrubbing through your timeline.

My recommended setup is dead simple:

  • Drive 1 (OS + apps): A basic 500GB or 1TB NVMe. Doesn't need to be fast. A WD Blue SN580 is fine.
  • Drive 2 (projects + media): This is where the Samsung 990 Pro goes. 2TB minimum, 4TB if your budget allows.
  • Drive 3 (archive): A large SATA SSD or external HDD for finished projects and raw footage you're done editing.

Point your Resolve or Premiere cache to Drive 2, and suddenly your timeline scrubbing gets noticeably smoother.

NVMe vs SATA: When Does It Actually Matter?

For 1080p H.264 or H.265 editing? SATA is genuinely fine. A 550 MB/s SATA SSD handles those codecs comfortably.

But the moment you step up to ProRes, RAW, or high-bitrate 4K, NVMe's sustained throughput becomes essential. More importantly, NVMe handles deep I/O queues far better than SATA. When Resolve is issuing simultaneous reads and writes across multiple video tracks, NVMe maintains much more consistent performance. SATA drives can briefly stall when I/O queues build up, and that shows up as dropped frames on your timeline.

My rule of thumb: if you're a hobbyist editing 1080p YouTube videos, save money and use SATA. If you're working professionally or regularly touching anything above 4K H.264, NVMe is the correct answer.

Don't Worry About TBW

People obsess over TBW (Terabytes Written) ratings for editing drives, and it's almost always unnecessary anxiety.

A heavy editing workflow might write 100GB per working day (proxies, cache, exports, saves). At that pace, five days a week, you're writing about 26TB per year. A 2TB Samsung 990 Pro has a 1,200 TBW rating. At your pace, that drive would theoretically last over 46 years.

You will upgrade your entire workstation three or four times before TBW becomes a factor. Stop worrying about it. Just buy a quality drive from Samsung, WD, or Crucial and focus on getting your edits done.

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