5 creative projects you can turbocharge with the help of a portable SSD

Creative professionals using their equipment to work outdoors.
(Image credit: Crucial)

Whatever your creative passions are, you need the right tools for the job. If you’re a professional photographer, graphic designer, or you’re simply working with video editing software, having a portable SSD can make all the difference to your workflow.

Such SSDs offer more than just portable file storage. If you’re rocking one of the latest high-end models - like the Crucial X10 Pro - you’ve got a rugged and lightweight storage solution that can be used for working on directly when you’re out and about. It’s easy to get yourself a powerful desktop PC, but as any busy creative professional will tell you, sometimes you need some extra firepower when you’re away from the studio – and, crucially, a wi-fi connection.

Modern portable SSDs can also offer a wealth of features, such as multi-device compatibility for those with heavy-duty camera equipment, ultra-fast data transfers, and top-tier encryption and data security features - the likes of which you’ll find in Crucial’s top-of-the-line portable storage. So which of your big creative projects would an X10 Pro help with? Let’s take a look.

1. Shooting out in the wild

If your photographic exploits take you out into nature to secure the perfect shot, you might not be able to enjoy the modern luxury that is on-demand cloud storage. 

Having high-speed storage with camera compatibility via USB-C is a vital addition to your forest-trail loadout, making a portable SSD a key inclusion - and with IP55 dust and water proof models like the Crucial X10 Pro, you don’t need to worry about your drive being exposed to the elements. 

Creative professionals using their equipment to work outdoors.

(Image credit: Crucial)

2. Working with 4K video 

Thanks to the high-speed data transfers of modern premium SSDs like the Crucial X10 Pro, which offers read/write speeds of up to 2,100/2,000MB/s, you can comfortably write 4K video directly to the drive.

This can be a huge draw for anyone doing intensive video-editing work from a laptop rather than a full-size desktop PC – granting you access to peak performance even if you’re using a compact device. 

3. Graphic design wherever you go 

Graphic artists can often find themselves working with large files from their artistic software of choice. An external SSD can give you terabytes of extra storage space, so you’ll never be limited by the capacity of your laptop hard drive. It's ideal for all those essential design iterations – or just the freedom to express yourself without limits in the early stages of any big project.

The Crucial X10 Pro portable SSD.

(Image credit: Crucial)

4. On-location filmmaking 

If you work in the film industry (or perhaps you’re responsible for producing short-form commercial video content of a luxurious quality), you’ll often find yourself shooting on location rather than on a set.

In those situations, you won’t always have access to your full suite of hardware, restricted instead to just a laptop; here, a portable SSD can help you work without limitations - and with capacities of up to 4TB on models like the Crucial X10 Pro, you don’t need to worry about running out of storage.

5. Music editing at any studio, anywhere 

Anyone who has worked with music editing software will be familiar with the lengthy process of exporting and transferring audio files. With the high capacity and high transfer speeds of portable SSDs like the Crucial X10 Pro, you can enjoy the speeds of a high-performance PC without needing to buy a whole new computer. And that means a lot of power in your pocket too!