For the average home/small business user, a RAID5 disk set with 4 or more drives in it is going to be your best bet. USB-C is the most common connection for systems these days, but USB3 or Thunderbolt are options as well. If you have a PC then you can go SATA.
The thought crossed my mind. Is there a difference between an NAS box and a RAID drive? A friend has a Drobo NAS and it’s really cool but not inexpensive by the time you populate it. And then there is the question - This is a bit redundant but technically not backup, is it?
That is, a fire or theft could hurt you. So if you have, say, 20T of NAS or RAID then you need that much (or more? maybe if your B/U is doing incremental backups).
I bought a couple of 8TB Costco external drives at $129. This is my thought although I just got them and haven’t done it yet. Tell me if this makes any sense at all.
I’ll stick one Costoco 8TB drive (call it Costco1) on my old not-suitable-for-editing-Imac where I will put all Adobe CC projects inclusive of clips. I will run the other 8TB drive as backup with Time Machine backup and select that drive only for backup. I have a 2015 MB pro what is pretty fair at running CC. I have a folder on the MB ‘adobe’ that has folders for my projects. I’ll put that on the backup scheme as well to the same B/U drive on the Imac. However, I need to move the raw data to the MB to work with it. I have tried and SSD works well. Maybe I’ll just keep it on SSD while working a project but it’s a pain as I move around a lot an prefer to move it to the machine for working on it. So maybe I’ll put the clips in the MB in another folder such as ‘adobe clips’ so it won’t be backed up a second time. Then I’ll edit and work on projects on the MB. When done, move the completed project to Costco1 and purge the clips from the MB.
In theory,
- the original clips will always be stored and backed up
- the ongoing Adobe project du jour will be backed up by Time Machine incrementally whenever I can sync with the mother ship
- the clips won’t get doubly backed up
- the final Adobe Premiere, After Effects and such project files will be ‘archived’ and backed up when they get transferred back to Costco1
My concern might be that to re-edit a project, I might scramble references to file locations with all the moving around in the event that I had to move the project back to the MB Pro. But I imagine that if I simply put the files back in their original ‘adobe’ and ‘adobe clips’ folders then all would work. Might have to just give this a trial run.
Keep in mind that Costco1 is sort of luke warm storage but that’s OK since I won’t be working off that drive except for archive. I moved some things around on it the other day. It’s slow although it is USB class 3. But the price is right.
This brings up another random thought . . . would only be suitable for archive because it would be slow
Is there an app that allows one to create a RAID array from external USB drives? For ex, get a USB hub, put it on your Imac. Grab some cheap external USB drives. Plug into the hub. Let the app create your RAID drive.
With 4x 12TB drives, you’ll end up with about 36TB usable and at least a modicum of redundancy for drive failure. A lot of my customers keep a spare drive sitting around in case one fails, so that they have an immediate swap-out. These little boxes (filled with drives) start at about $1500 and go up from there. Both editing speed and some protection in a single box.
Would this be a RAID drive or NAS . . . or as I mentioned is there a difference . … sorry for repeat question.
If what you’re looking for is cold storage, for data that you doubt that you’ll ever touch again, or backup (NOT Archive though) something like Amazon Glacier is a decent solution. Just watch out for restore charges. Otherwise, there are hardware solutions for data storage such as Sony’s ODA system, or LTO that uses data tape still. These make for good, large volume storage of video, but we are talking ‘decent used car’ price points here.
Thanks 
Using SSD drives for moving data around is still pretty popular. You can look at transcoding down to low-res files, which are much easier to transport over the web, but that takes lots of horsepower/time to do so, plus can create workflow/relinking headaches for sure.
Transcoding. I read about it and it’s cool that you could do that.
Is this the idea?
- Create a low res version of your clips.
- Somehow link them to the originals in an Adobe project file on the ‘home’ computer, I imagine.
- Ship off the low res stuff or carry it with you and do the editing in low res up to the final project.
- Sync the project file back to the central computer with the ‘mother project’.
- Render the final cut using the local original clips on the master computer.
Agree!!! Might work but there could be some major headaches if you could not relink the clips. I did try to work around this once a few months ago in my own way. I rendered a few of clips to low res. Made a test project and did some editing with a multicam sequence. Then I tried replacing the low res clips with the originals in the same location with the same name. Premiere did not like this approach. 
