Oh damn. I was looking more at the position of the cats not the black of their fur.
Can’t unsee that anymore.
Friends, would any of you recommend an external hard drive? Been out of the electronics game for too long. I am quickly hitting the limits for how fast my MacBook Air runs out of storage when editing video.
I’ve had no problems with Western Digital external hard drives for the past couple of decades. I’ve had several and would just buy bigger ones on a Black Friday when I ran out of space.
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Appreciate the rec 
Do you have an idea of how much storage you need and is it mostly for archival purposes?
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I’d take TBs.
This is for active video editing. The files in Final Cut Pro can get quite sizeable once I’m cutting footage and layering graphics. I am tired of running out of space in the middle of a project.
My recommendation is probably less useful for that purpose. I think the main concern is video quality and data transfer speed. It seems like the same brands get recommended for this purpose and your main constraints will be computer specs and budget. I don’t really edit videos, so I’m sort of guessing, but I feel like I can come up with a better answer than ChatGPT.
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Yes good points. I’ll worry about a more refined purchase when I’m more familiar with industry standards for hardware and I’m not worried about price. It’s helpful just to talk through options.
This, external drives like that arent great for immediate and repeated use. Let me check and see what my favorite youtube uses.
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No idea what your budget is, and hes certainly on the higher end of creators when it comes to his setup, but Diskstations offer a ton of storage with easy and quick transfers to and from your PC.
Thats one of the lower end ones, I think the one he mentions in his room tour video is 30TB or so for about 5K
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Heh that is awesome but maybe several years in the future. I would be glad to find something between $50 to $100. I am not cheap, just poor and disabled.
Synology has smaller units with fewer drives, you can also put in the hard drives you need and grow it over time. Check some YouTube vids on them. Costco had 8tb Western Digital external drives for less than 200 a while back, I picked one up to back up my NAS.
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Internal drives are cheaper if that’s the priority. If it’s big enough, you can find 2 TB SSDs for <$100. That maybe be smallish for video, idk, but would be faster than a HDD. You want PCIe (data bus) + NVMe (communication protocol). It’s easy to find these in the M.2 form factor (you need a slot for it directly on your motherboard or an available expansion slot and an adapter).
If you want something external/bigger that’s also cheap, you could find a used HDD on eBay. That would probably be impractically slow for editing but ok for longer term storage.
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Since the editing is being done on a MacBook Air, is it preferable that any external hard drive be portable?
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That’s awesome thank you.
I was looking at something like this with a read/write time of 400/mb/s, days transfer rate 3200 megabits/s. This is an SSD for gaming.
WD 2TB Elements SE - Portable SSD, USB 3.0
Not comfortable opening the computer to give it a new internal drive. I would need to know someone local. And maybe not be afraid of them 
No preference
Oh, sorry! I didn’t see this was for a MacBook Air. Depending on the model, replacing the internal SSD looks like it ranges from easy on 2017 or earlier models, to impossible on newer ones. Here’s a video to give to an idea of the process.
There might be fewer internal drive options for you and you would also have to deal with migrating your data and operating system, so I don’t blame you if you don’t want to deal with it.
The problem with an external drive is they’re just much slower, by like 10x. Could still be fine for your purpose, idk.
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I’m okay with slow. Forces me not to get ahead of myself.
I also doubt my current hardware is running so fast that I’d really be in a position to contrast and compare.
I will price point a few external SSDs from WD with several TBs and USB 3.0. I can use that to really explore what resources impact what I’m doing vs what would be awesome for anyone else but I’d never notice so no need.
External SSD seems like best balance of simplicity, price, capacity, and speed. Good luck!
We’ve been pretty busy lately, so we’re going to have a house cleaner come every other week for a little while. First visit is tomorrow. My wife knows they’re coming tomorrow.
My wife is vacuuming.