***Copying an SD Card
There are a handful of things things to consider when it comes to how or even if you copy source footage from a camera's memory card (be it SD, P2, SxS, XQD, AXS, SR and so forth) and with most things in video post production, they're informed by what you need for your edited master.
Is the camera native source footage going to be used in the Timeline or is it going to be transcoded to a mezzanine CODEC for editing?
Is the footage on the memory card just for the current project or does it contain a footage for multiple projects?
If the footage on the SD card is for just the current project, I prefer copying the entire SD card; however, if it contains a footage for more than one project, I prefer to use the Media Browser in Adobe Media Encoder to select the clips needed, add them to the AME Queue, and then set the "Media" folder for the current project as the destination for the transcoded media (and I usually transcode to Apple ProRes422 LT or Apple ProRes 422 HQ, but any mezzanine CODEC will work). Of course, don't wipe the SD card until all of the transcoded footage has been checked. If the project is quick turnaround for social media, I don't worry too much about archiving the camera original footage. If it's anything else, (documentary, informercial, commercial, television, cable, scripted of any sort, training video, or whatever), I treat the camera original footage like it's gold.
Premiere Pro, of course, has options for handling footage on a memory card in the Ingest tab of the Project Settings window.
***Using USB3
As a freelancer, I've completed more projects than I can count on external drives (from back in the days of SCSI to FireWire to USB3 to Thunderbolt - USB2 was always too slow, even even during the heyday of DV-NTSC). If I could wave a magic wand and make high capacity, high bandwidth storage available on every workstation or laptop, I would. (Better yet, if I could make SAN storage available to everyone editing video everywhere, I would.) As with internal storage, as long as the sustained data transfer rate of the storage media exceeds the data rate fo the edit settings, you're good to go. There's also making sure that you don't leave important files behind when moving from workstation A to workstation B, but that's something that's relatively easy to learn.
I'd have the lab users opt for USB3 mobile SSD drives first (or the newer, high bandwidth USB3 Flash drives - just be certain that the read and write speeds are what's needed for the edit settings). If the project is 1080p, standard USB3 drives will work. If the project is 2160p or larger and the chosen storage media, whatever it is, isn't fast enough for the native or transcoded media then Premiere Pro's Proxy workflow can be used. (Side note: The main thing that I would change about PR's Proxy workflow is being able to start with the proxy files for a more traditional offline/online workflow instead of the high resolution files, but that may never happen. As Adobe Sensei gets more integrated into Adobe applications, it would also be great to have artificial intelligence comparing proxy clips to high resolution clips should they ever need relinking.)
If the workstations support it and the lab users can afford it, I'd pick Thunderbolt (1, 2 or 3) over USB3.
Desktop drives and RAIDs can also be used, but if a mobile drive works for the project it is much easier to carry around.
Most importantly, I strongly encourage students purchase whichever type of external storage they choose in pairs: one is the primary storage and the other is the backup storage. Then use a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac) or EaseUS (Windows) to schedule cloning the primary drive to the backup drive on a regular basis (I've always gone with nightly).
Fonts and 3rd party plug-ins are also something to be thinking about, but this has less to do with USB3 mobile drives and more to do with lab users being on different computers at different times. On the font side, fortunately Adobe made all of Adobe Fonts (formerly TypeKit) available to Creative Cloud users. I'm not sure I'd set a rule about only using fonts from that library, but it certainly minimizes down time due to missing fonts.
