High-end Solid State hard drives (SSDs) have all but replaced the traditional spinning drives, but for the best SSDs, you're going to have to spend a fair amount. In this short video, learn how to easily create your own which will outperform many on the market.
Us photographers and videographers use a lot of hard drives and space. I have SSDs and external drives I work off and back up to, then off-site back-ups as well as cloud storage; it's a lot. With the drives I work off of, I need SSDs to run the files smoothly and quickly as even large PSDs and medium format raw files can be taxing. When it comes to editing 4K video and above, unless you have time and patience to burn, you'll not only need an SSD of reasonable size, you'll need one that can read and write at a high speed too.
The problem is for that, you're going to want an m.2 SSD and so the price just continues to rise. If you're looking for a standalone m.2 SSD of a reasonable size (4 TB or more) that comes in an enclosure, you're going to be spending between $700 to $1,000 dollars. However, Cody Wanner walks you through how you can create your own for under $550 by buying an m.2 internal SSD and enclosure separately and combining them.
As is usually the case with all things computer, many are put off of DIY solutions because of perceived complexity and risk of failure. The idea of "building your own computers" is seen as something akin to building your own car, when in actuality, it's barely more difficult than some Lego sets. This DIY M.2 4 TB SSD has a write speed of 3 GB per second and a read speed of 3.4 GB per second, which blows most ordinary and older SSDs out of the water.