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[H2] Find the best external drives for photos and videos.

Find the best external hard drives and SSDs for creative professionals who demand speed, reliability, and ample storage. Whether you’re editing high-resolution video, managing large design files, or backing up important projects, these top-rated drives deliver the performance and durability you need. With options that offer lightning-fast transfer speeds, rugged builds for on-the-go use, and generous storage capacities, you’ll be equipped to handle even the most demanding creative workflows with ease and confidence.

[H1] External hard drives and SSDs for creative professionals.

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[H2] Key features of photo and video hard drives and SSDs.
Explore the essential features of external hard drives and SSDs for photo and video—lightning-fast transfer speeds, ample storage, rugged durability, and broad compatibility—built to streamline every stage of your creative workflow.

[IMG: White graphic on black background states 1 to 48+ terabytes, referencing external drive capacity.]

High storage capacity drives.

Store massive RAW photo libraries and ultra-high-resolution video footage with ease. External drive capacities from 1TB to 48TB+ ensure creatives can archive, access, and manage large projects without constantly deleting or transferring files.

[IMG: A white icon consisting of a stopwatch with a speedometer at the center represents speedy data transfers.]

Fast data transfer speeds.

Speed up your workflow with blazing-fast data transfers. External SSDs and Thunderbolt-enabled hard drives allow for seamless playback, real-time editing, and quick backups, saving time during demanding production and post-production tasks.

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Durable and rugged.

Fieldwork demands tough gear. Rugged external hard drives and SSDs resist drops, dust, moisture, and shock, making them ideal for photographers and videographers who shoot in unpredictable or extreme outdoor environments.

[IMG: Two white arrows follow each other in a rectangular loop to signify travel and go-anywhere portability of external drives.]

Portability and compact design.

Slim, lightweight external drives easily slip into bags or pockets, allowing creative professionals to carry terabytes of media wherever they go. Perfect for location shoots, travel assignments, and mobile editing setups.

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Professional grade performance.

Built to keep up with high-bandwidth applications, some external drives support real-time 4K/8K video editing, high-resolution image rendering, and rapid file access—promoting smooth performance under creative pressure.

[IMG: Circular arrow icon over rectangular portable drive icons represent the data backup process.]

Backup and data protection.

Many external hard drives and SSDs include automatic backup software, RAID support, and hardware encryption to keep your data secure. Protect against accidental deletion, hardware failure, or theft without slowing down your workflow.

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Broad compatibility.

Photo and video hard drives and SSDs are compatible with macOS® and Windows®. They are optimized for software like Adobe® Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Lightroom. Whether you’re using USB-C, USB 3.2, or Thunderbolt 4, these drives connect with ease.

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Comprehensive warranty and support.

Enjoy peace of mind with your external hard drive or SSD purchase. Our external drives come with robust warranties and complimentary Rescue Data Recovery Services.

[H2] External drives built for creative professionals.

Creative professionals worldwide trust Seagate and LaCie for high-performance storage built to meet the demands of modern content creation. With over a decade of innovation, LaCie drives are used by top photographers, filmmakers, and studios for their speed, reliability, and durability—making them a trusted choice in the creative industry.

[H2] Choosing the right external drives for photos and videos.

Not all external drives for photos and videos are built the same—and choosing the right one can elevate your creative process. Whether you’re editing 8K footage, storing RAW photo libraries, or backing up large projects on the go, Seagate and LaCie offer tailored external storage solutions for every stage of your workflow—from ultra-portable SSDs to high-capacity RAID systems.

[H2] Speed, storage, and security explained.

When working with massive media files, speed and reliability matter. Seagate and LaCie external hard drives and SSDs feature fast USB-C, Thunderbolt, and NVMe technology for seamless data transfer. With options ranging from 500GB to 48TB—plus built-in backup and encryption tools—your data stays safe, accessible, and workflow-ready wherever creativity takes you.

[H2] Rugged and portable hard drives and SSDs.

LaCie rugged portable drives are built for life on the move—shock, dust, and water-resistant, and tough enough for field shoots and travel. Lightweight yet powerful, these external drives let creatives safely capture and store work in real time, no matter the environment. Perfect for fast file dumps and mobile editing under pressure.

[H2] Studio powerhouses: desktop and RAID systems.

For demanding studio workflows, LaCie desktop and RAID drives deliver massive capacity and fast performance. Designed for heavy post-production work, options like the d2, 1big Dock, and 2big RAID provide scalable, secure storage with advanced connectivity—ideal for managing, editing, and archiving your most complex creative projects.

[H1] External hard drives and SSDs for videos and photos FAQs.

It depends on your workflow. Solid-state drives (SSDs) offer faster data transfer speeds, making them ideal for real-time editing, quick backups, and working with high-resolution files. They’re also more portable. External hard drives provide more storage at a lower cost, great for archiving large libraries or long-term storage. Many professionals use both—SSDs for active work; hard drives for backup.

Setting up your Seagate external hard drive or SSD is quick and easy. Just connect the drive to your computer using the included USB or Thunderbolt cable. Your device should recognize it automatically. For optimal performance, you may want to reformat the drive to match your operating system (exFAT for cross-platform, NTFS for Windows, or APFS for macOS). You can also install Seagate Toolkit software for backups and management.

Yes, most Seagate external hard drives and SSDs are compatible with both Mac and Windows. Many come preformatted in exFAT, which works with both systems. If your drive is formatted specifically for one OS (like NTFS for Windows or APFS for Mac), you can reformat it to suit your needs. Seagate also offers software tools to help with formatting, file transfers, and cross-platform use.

Seagate and LaCie drives are built for the speed, capacity, and reliability creative professionals need. Fast external SSDs enable smooth real-time editing of high-res video, while high-capacity external hard drives let you store and back up massive media libraries. Rugged models support on-the-go shoots, and desktop RAID systems streamline complex workflows—letting you focus more on creating and less on managing files.

Absolutely. Seagate and LaCie external drives are designed to handle high-resolution video, including 4K, 6K, and 8K footage. With fast SSD options, Thunderbolt and USB-C connectivity, and high-capacity models up to 48TB or more, they support smooth playback, real-time editing, and fast file transfers—making them ideal for professional video production and post-processing workflows.

Key factors include speed, capacity, reliability, and connectivity. Choose an SSD or a high-RPM hard disk drive for faster data access. Look for USB-C or Thunderbolt interfaces for maximum transfer speeds. Consider at least 1TB for HD projects and much more for 4K/8K. Durability, RAID options, and compatibility with your editing software are also important for smooth, secure workflows.

For large video projects, especially in 4K or 8K, a minimum of 1TB is recommended—but 2TB to 8TB is more practical for active editing. If you’re working with multiple projects or high bit-rate footage, 10TB or more may be necessary. Always allow extra space for cache files, backups, and exports. A mix of fast SSDs for active editing and high-capacity hard drives for storage is ideal for efficient workflows.

It depends on your needs. An external SSD is ideal for photographers who need fast data transfer speeds, especially when editing large, high-resolution images. However, if you need to store a large number of photos and prioritize cost-effectiveness, a traditional hard drive offers more storage for a lower price. Many professionals use both—SSDs for active editing and hard drives for archival storage.

Yes, especially models like the LaCie Rugged series, which are built specifically for travel and fieldwork. These drives feature shock, dust, and water resistance, making them ideal for harsh environments. Whether you’re shooting on location or traveling between gigs, Seagate and LaCie drives offer the durability and reliability creative professionals need on the move.

Yes, external hard drives—especially those designed for creative professionals—can absolutely support professional editing workflows. High-speed models with USB-C or Thunderbolt offer fast data access for HD and 4K editing. For even better performance, RAID systems or SSDs are ideal for handling large files and real-time editing. Choose a drive with enough speed, capacity, and reliability for your specific project needs.

A 1TB to 2TB external drive is typically ideal for a graphic design student. This provides enough space for large design files, software assets, class projects, and backups without worrying about running out of room. If you work with high-res images, video, or 3D design, consider 4TB or more. An SSD is great for speed, but a hard drive offers more space at a lower cost for long-term storage.

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As widespread adoption of data-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies speeds up worldwide, data centre operations are facing unprecedented energy demands and a growing carbon footprint. They are grappling with escalating environmental concerns while also striving to scale compute power and storage capacity and to meet their total cost of ownership (TCO) goals.
According to McKinsey1, the power needs of data centres are expected to triple by the end of 2030. “Skyrocketing compute and data demands are being further accelerated by gains in computing capabilities alongside reductions in chip efficiency relative to power consumption,” the analyst firm noted.
As global data storage leader supplying the world’s leading data centres, Seagate has a front-row seat to the conversations around data centre sustainability and growing demand for cost-efficient data storage. Among other things, working with our customers has taught us that TCOand sustainability goals are notmutually exclusive — often they are one and the same.
To better understand the link between TCO and sustainability, we decided to survey data centre professionals. This report, informed by their insights, reveals a critical gap in understanding data centres’ sustainability challenges, and the ways these challenges affect the entire supply chain. These insights can inform decisions that supportboth business growth and environmental goals.
It need not be either or.

This Seagate Technology report is based on a commissioned global study conducted by independent research firm Dynata, with fieldwork by global communications consultancy Current Global.
The study included both qualitative and quantitative research to examine the AI-intensified strain on data centre sustainability and opportunities for increasing the efficiency of operations.
The research began with in-depth qualitative interviews with five senior experts in data storage and infrastructure from the United States, Germany, China and Japan. Each expert has over a decade of experience in data centre planning, operations, and sustainability, which enabled robust insights into industry challenges and emerging trends. These insights informed the design of a global quantitative survey.
The quantitative survey gathered responses from 330 data centre professionals across 11 markets: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, North America, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. All respondents work for companies that manage at least 50 terabytes of storage, with most overseeing up to five petabytes. Participants included CIOs, CTOs, IT VPs, directors, executives, COOs, line-of-business leaders, storage architects, and solution architects in data storage companies and organisations that supply or provide data storage solutions.
The study explored the current landscape of data centre efficiency and sustainability. It aims to provide industry leaders with data-driven insights to guide business-boosting, sustainable decision-making.
Seagate is a global leader in scalable mass-capacity data storage, delivering more than four and a half billion terabytes of capacity over the past 45 years.

Data Centres and AI Impact
Data centres are the backbone of today’s AI economy. Modern-day rapid adoption of AI technologies has resulted in data centres facing unprecedented energy demands and a growing carbon footprint. The survey’s results make two things abundantly clear: 94.5% of the survey respondents reported that their companies face increasing data storage needs. 97% anticipate AI’s growth to further impact storage demand.
This corresponds to a growing energy demand. According to data from IEEE: by 2030, data centre energy demand is projected to grow significantly, potentially accounting for 8% of global carbon emissions, up from 0.3% in 2022.
To keep pace with AI innovation, organisations must scale their data infrastructure while aligning with corporate sustainability mandates. Increasingly, businesses face expectations — and sometimes regulatory requirements — to operate data centres both cost-efficiently and sustainably. It can be challenging to reconcile these two expectations because the more energy data centres use, the trickier it is to reduce their carbon footprints.
For this reason, total cost of ownership (TCO) is sometimes seen as at odds with sustainability goals. The survey on which this report is based found that: Environmental impact is a concern for nearly 95% of respondents. But only 3.3% of the surveyed data centre professionals said their companies prioritise low environmental impact in data centre purchasing decisions.
Still, other findings rendered by this survey clarify that TCO and sustainability are far from competing priorities. The TCO and sustainability considerations can and do often align, offering opportunities for operational efficiencies and environmental impact reduction.
The study found that data centre operations are affected by factors that embody both TCO and sustainability goals. Among them are:
Energy consumption. High energy usage drives both operational costs and carbon emissions, with 53.5% of respondents identifying this as a significant concern.
Raw material requirements. Nearly 49.5% of the surveyed data centre professionals cited the large amounts of raw materials needed for infrastructure as a key issue.
Physical space constraints. Close to 45.5% of respondents highlighted the financial and logistical burden of limited space.
Infrastructure costs. High construction costs for sustainable infrastructure (identified by 28.5% survey takers) and acquisition costs for data centre components (27% respondents) significantly impact capital expenditure (CapEx).
Lifecycle extension. Over 92% of respondents agreed that extending the lifecycle of storage equipment is important, emphasising durability to reduce replacement and maintenance costs. (In contrast, only 15.5% of respondents considered lifecycle extension a top purchasing factor for data storage infrastructure or equipment, and 12.1% chose durability as an important factor.)

[IMG: The infographic notes how TCO and sustainability often go together, offering chances to reduce environmental impact and boost efficiency.]

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[IMG: The infographic notes how TCO and sustainability often go together, offering chances to reduce environmental impact and boost efficiency.]

These concerns underscore the multifaceted nature of data centres’ TCO, which integrates both CapEx and operational costs — and directly bears on sustainability. Improving energy efficiency reduces both emissions and operational costs, and extending equipment lifecycles minimises e-waste and raw material demand.
This isn’t to say that sustainability doesn’t complicate TCO calculations — it can do that.
For example, power consumption is an inherent part of the TCO equation. But, as data centre operators know, green energy sources may be more costly up front. When that’s the case, the focus on the nature of energy procured adds cost and efficiency constraints to an already challenging cost efficiency problem.
[H3] A Threefold Choice

As the increasing use of AI drives up data creation, organisations need more room for ever-expanding data volumes, and many struggle with space limitations. Spatial constraints affect their ability to expand and implement more sustainable storage solutions. In addition, high up-front costs associated with sustainable infrastructure remain a significant barrier to progress. About 82.5% of respondents said they lack the physical space to build sustainable data storage infrastructure.
When asked about the top three barriers to sustainable data centre operations, respondents pointed to lack of physical space (45.5% of respondents); cost of constructing storage infrastructure (28.5%); and cost of acquiring data centre components (27%).
Because of these barriers, organisations often face a threefold choice. To accommodate skyrocketing volumes of data, they must choose one of the three: Scale up (add more storage within existing centre footprint) Scale out (add a building or expand the data centre footprint) Migrate data to the cloud
Each of these options comes with TCO and sustainability trade-offs.
[H3] Sustainability Strategies

The survey revealed that businesses are increasingly adopting a number of strategies that align sustainability with TCO goals.
Renewable energy sources. Nearly 62% of respondents reported using renewable energy sources to power their data infrastructure.
Renewable energy infrastructure. Close to 58% of survey takers said their organisations are investing in renewable energy infrastructure.
AI-enabled storage and sustainability ops. Additionally, 55.5% of represented organisations are implementing AI-based systems to optimise storage operations and enhance sustainability monitoring.
Despite these efforts, challenges remain. Many companies struggle with high infrastructure and component costs and space limitations.
The Path Forward
Addressing these challenges requires a shift in how the industry approaches TCO and sustainability. Increasingly, they go together. When sustainability goals do complicate TCO plans, attention needs to be paid across the entire ecosystem to: Scope 1 (greenhouse gases, or GHG, that an organisation emits from sources it owns or controls directly) Scope 2 (GHG deriving from an organisation’s purchase of electricity, steam, heat or cooling) Scope 3 (GHG emissions originating from business operations by sources that are not directly owned or controlled by an organisation)
The AI-amplified impact on data centre sustainability calls for innovative and holistic thinking about data centre practices. Among other things, this means looking beyond operational carbon emissions (Scope 2 and Scope 3) to include evaluation of embodied carbon — or, carbon emitted during upstream extraction, production, transport, bill of material, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution stages of a product’s life cycle (Scope 3).
As the boom of AI applications stimulates the growth of data centres, collaboration and innovation across the supply chain will be key to achieving a sustainable and more efficient datasphere.

In today’s AI economy, the rapid adoption of smart technologies is driving a sharp increase in data storage demand. Nearly all survey respondents (over 97%) expected AI to have a substantial impact on storage needs. But data always leaves a footprint: data centres consume energy and generate emissions.
The AI-driven rising demand for data storage directly increases the carbon footprint of data centres. As data volumes grow, so does the energy required to maintain them. Of course, AI’s energy demands extend beyond data storage. The most energy-hungry areas include compute, networking and data processing.
The whole supply chain matters, too. Components manufacturing for AI — such as specialised processors and hardware — is highly energy- and resource-intensive, increasing the embodied carbon of these components. (Embodied carbon refers to the quantity of GHG emissions related to the upstream extraction, production, transport, bill of material, manufacturing, packaging, and distribution stages of a product’s life cycle.) Consequently, both the production and operation of AI systems contribute to a larger carbon footprint, intensifying the environmental challenges faced by data centres.
In response to this new demand, data centres have begun toprioritise sustainability and decarbonization. Nearly all survey respondents (close to 94.5%) reported that their companies are working to lower the carbon footprint of their data storage operations.
The survey found that to reduce their environmental footprint, companies are primarily adopting renewable energy: 61% of respondents reported that their companies use renewable energy sources to power data infrastructure. Nearly 58% of respondents said their companies were building new renewable energy infrastructure to power data equipment. Close to 42% of the data centre professionals surveyed reported implementing AI-driven solutions to better determine their data storage or operational needs.

[IMG: Bar chart shows top ways companies cut the environmental impact of data ops: renewables, cloud migration, and AI to determine data storage needs.]

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[IMG: Bar chart shows top ways companies cut the environmental impact of data ops: renewables, cloud migration, and AI to determine data storage needs.]

Another strategy is cloud migration. Nearly half of respondents (over 47%) believed migrating data to cloud systems helps reduce their company’s carbon footprint. Cloud service providers, with theirbest-in-class practices and infrastructure, have an advantage in lowering the environmental impact of data operations.
However, enterprises looking to deploy this strategy need to keep in mind that cloud migration can also be seen as shifting responsibility rather than eliminating impact. While cloud providers may operate more efficiently, the environmental burden remains. It is merely transferred from individual companies to the cloud providers, who must manage energy and resource demands. This underscores the need for a holistic approach to sustainability, where both cloud providers and their clients work together to minimise the carbon footprint of data.
In transitioning to more sustainable data storage operations, companies face significant challenges. They include physical space constraints, costs, high energy consumption and effective assessment. Let us take a closer look at each of these factors.
[H3] Challenge: Space and Cost

top three barriers to sustainable data centre operations are the lack of physical space (45.5%), the cost of constructing storage infrastructure (28.5%), and the cost of acquiring data centre components (27%) (see Figure 2).

[IMG: A chart shows top barriers to sustainable data storage: limited space, high infrastructure build costs, and expensive data centre components.]

Enlarge

[IMG: A chart shows top barriers to sustainable data storage: limited space, high infrastructure build costs, and expensive data centre components.]

Not surprisingly, physical constraints — such as space limitations for new infrastructure — ranked as the biggest challenge, with 45.5% of all respondents citing a "lack of physical space" as t

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