SSD for my Camera

Doug Morse

13 Oct 2025 — 2 min read

Warning this is a technical photography post.

I bought a Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD for use with my Fuji GFX 100s ii. This is my experience with it. Mine supports USB 3,2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) and this is the maximum the camera supports. Buying an SSD with a higher USB speed is not needed.

First of all, the device works well. On the GFX 100s ii it has the advantage of being able to transfer from the on-camera SD cards onto the SSD through the camera menus. Just plug in the drive and you can move single images or an entire SD card onto the drive. No need for a laptop in the process.

This makes it an ideal backup or a place to move photos to make room for more, which is my primary use-case. I chose the 1 TB model as I didn't want to strain the battery on the camera and 1 TB is a lot of space for this use. I do not have any data to indicate the higher capacity models consume more power. They may take only marginal additional power. The camera can accommodate up to 2 TB SSD.

The other use is to record directly to the SSD instead of the SSD cards. This seems most useful for recording longer video sessions. Also one can record high quality like ProRes/ProRexHQ video on the SSD where the SD cards cannot handle the data rate. Burst modes are also higher or longer. Though recording to SSD is clumsy given the cable required so a means is required to attach the SSD to the camera for stability.

The first difficulty I encountered is the drive does not come formatted to work with the GFX. This just means you need to format it from the camera's USER SETTINGS menu. It seems that the formatted filesystem from FUJI is exFAT. This format is not easily compatible with Windows 10 on my laptop. It should work but a lot of deep diving in PowerShell and Linux under windows could not get the drive to mount. I did find a free utility called DiskInternals Linux Reader that will recognize the drive and allow me to copy files to my Windows hard drive.

I found the drive worked fine with my iPad Air (M3) on its natives USB-C interface. I could see all the files under the iPad files app. So all my use cases were fulfilled.

If you have Mac laptop then I believe there should be no problem mounting an exFAT formatted SSD.

The SSD should be helpful on long trips and not having to worry about running out of storage. I can also contemplate 17+ hour videos as well. :)

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