Suggestion for a Portable Hard Drive to use with iMovies.

Take a look at this thread for some suggestions for an external drive.

Looking for an external Hard drive - Apple Community

An SSD (Solid State drive) would be best if you are going to use the drive actively to work on files, because an SSD drive is faster than an HDD drive. An HDD drive (mechanical spinning hard disc) also would work, particularly for static backups, like for Time Machine. It's just a little slower, and a little noisier.

I personally use 2 WD (Western Digital) My Passport for Mac HDD's with 4TB storage each, for all purposes. They cost about $110.

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-my-passport-usb-3-0-hdd?sku=WDBPKJ0040BBK-WESN

The drives should be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for HDD drives and APFS for SSD drives, although both formats will work for either drive. Those formats are required for storing iMovie libraries and Photos app libraries. They are not interchangeable with Windows machines. If you intend to use the drive interchangeably with Windows computers, or with a smart TV, then ExFat would be the best format. However, you should not store an iMovie library or Photos app library on an ExFat formatted drive.

No matter how much storage that one buys, it seems that they eventually will fill up. I bought a 4TB drive a couple of years ago thinking that it would never fill up, but it did. So now I'm on my second set of 4TB drives.

Also, get two drives so you have a double backup. External drives only last about 3 or 4 years before failing. I've had a couple fail and was glad for the secondary backup.

-- Rich

As Rich says, an SSD might be the better choice.

Crucial SSD drives have a pretty good reputation.

Here is a link with a similar question on the FCPX forum so the answers would also apply to iMovie.

You will see that Crucial X8 and Crucial X9 Pro are mentioned.

You may have difficulty locating a Crucial X8 now as the X9 Pro ( and X10 Pro) have recently been launched.

Be aware that there is also an X9 version i.e. Not Pro ,whatever that might be.

All available in 1, 2 and 4TB I believe.

The prices mentioned in the link are around November 2023 Black Friday so the prices now will be higher, and in any case the prices of SSD has risen globally in recent months, about 30% increase.

What you might consider is an SSD for day to day editing and then transferring your finished work onto cheaper HDD ,releasing the SSD for further editing on new material. So possibly a 1TB or 2TB SSD ???? and maybe a 4TB HDD ???

Which SSD drive for 4K video editing? - Apple Community