You’re recommended to use OWC’s free software to verify your external drive is fast enough to store ProRes video recordings made with your USB-C iPhone.
If you plan on shooting 4K HDR video at 60 frames per second onto an external drive, especially in LOG color, you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max along with an external storage device that’s fast enough to record ProRes footage.
Unfortunately, your iPhone won’t warn you if the connected USB drive or SD card reader is too slow for recording ProRes footage. The last thing you want to see after a long day spent shooting on location are dropped frames, but that’s exactly what you’ll get ended up with if you rely on cheap USB storage.
OWC Drive Speed: Can your drive record ProRes video?
To help with that, Other World Computing (OWC) has released an iPhone app for testing if an external drive meets Apple’s requirements. The OWC Drive Speed app verifies video data transfer rates and storage limits with the connected drive.
View OWC Drive Speed on the App Store
You’ll see the drive’s data transfer speed expressed in megabytes, based on the selected video format, frames per second and duration. With an external drive or memory reader connected to your iPhone’s USB-C port, open the OWC Drive Speed app, select the storage device and click the Start Test button.
“Drive Speed supports a wide range of external storage devices, including USB drives, SSDs and even single and dual memory card readers,” reads the OWC blog.
Avoid cheap, slow drives
For those unfamiliar with OWC, this is one of the oldest and finest resellers of various Mac accessories, including high-performance external storage devices such as the Envoy drives that are often praised for their reliability and speed, as well as speedy memory cards like the Atlas Ultra CFExpress Type B cards.
The USB-C port on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max is capable of the fastest 10Gbps transfer speeds, but you need the right cable. These phones ship with a cable that maxes out at USB 2.0 transfer speeds (480Mbps), the same as Lightning. To take full advantage of the USB-C port on the iPhone 15 Pros, you need to purchase a USB 3.2 Gen 2 that can transfer data at 10Gbps.