External Hard Drive for Video Editing

[Fifteen15]

My laptop is a 2016 HP Spectre x360 - i5 6th Gen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD. I use Adobe Premiere Pro but when I start adding multiple effects, transitions etc then it starts bogging down the laptop and it becomes slightly laggy. Also export times for a 7 minutes 1080p video can take up to 2 hours. I'd imagine editing 4k would not be possible - or extremely difficult/stressful with my set up.

What's the bottleneck here? the CPU or the RAM, or both?

Also, I'm planning on buying an external hard drive to store all my media from and edit straight from the external hard drive, keeping it separate from my main SSD in the laptop. Any recommendations? Will an SSD be worth the extra cost in terms of speed and reliability, or will a SSHD do?
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[P.]

Laptop is the bottleneck.

Change to PC with decent specs and you'll have less issues.

[Fifteen15]

[P.]

For my main drive, yes. For constant writing and access, so file storage, no. I use actual drives for that.

[doggone]

When you're rendering you could check task manager to see what's maxed out - CPU most likley.
Adding external drive won't help except it's a good place to keep your videos rather than fill up main drive.

Recent versions of Premiere have inbuilt ability to use smaller proxy files which helps a lot especially with 4K

[RhynoCZ]

[Fifteen15]

[oldpink]

I do a lot of video editing and work from a PC as anything going to an external drive will bottle up even with USB3 esp as Adobe creates very large files if you have multiple efx or layers involved

one option would be to increase you internal SSD's capacity with a 1tb USB drive to back up to once you finish the editing

I have 2 x 2Tb drives with a large cache and high data rates dedicated to video editing
and even these are filling up quickly
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[Im-a-Ridah]

[ScaredyCat]

If your video editing software allows you to use proxy media use that while editing. If rendering is an issue you could do export the video with some layers / effects and then build a 2nd project using that export and adding the layers / effects yo temporarily disabled to that.
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[stinkwheel]

Buy a mac?

Just saying. Sounds like a job for a mac.
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[chris-red]

Is there anything that actually makes Macs better at this sort of thing or is it just the marketing image?
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[chris-red]

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[ScaredyCat]

[M.C]

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[Im-a-Ridah]