External SSD for a Mac (confused)

[Mark Lewis]

I currently have a 2TB SSD that my video stuff lives on while I'm working on it on a Mac studio. (Final Cut, PS, etc)

It's getting too full as my working files are getting longer so a simple upgrade needed to 4TB.

Whats the fastest I can get? Getting confused over a plug and play external (like I have) or a SATA or Mi2 in an enclosure?? I don't want to get a more expensive option if it's then held back by plugging into a thunderbolt slot anyway??


And this is just a working disk (an extension of my mac's HD basically - I have a RAID setup on a NAS for stuff that's archived off)

[wyson]

What Mac model have you got?

[Mark Lewis]

2022 Mac Studio Apple M1 Max

[danb79]

FWIW I use a Crucial 4TB SSD in a UGreen enclosure with my M4 iMac for all my iTunes stuff and it's faultless

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-PCIe-Gen3-NVMe-In...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/UGREEN-Enclosure-External...

[Mark Lewis]

danb79 said:

FWIW I use a Crucial 4TB SSD in a UGreen enclosure with my M4 iMac for all my iTunes stuff and it's faultless

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-PCIe-Gen3-NVMe-In...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/UGREEN-Enclosure-External...

So that’s the bit I don’t understand-doesn’t that enclosure limit the speed you can achieve? Surely the iMac and the SSD card are way faster than the enclosure allows them to be when accessing data on the card?

[wyson]

Get a thunderbolt enclosure. That will ensure the best speeds. Don’t know what version of Thunderbolt your Mac Studio has, probably 3 or 4. Should be good for 40Gb/s (perhaps half that for the transfer rate) so is more than fast enough for most SSD’s.

Need a thunderbolt cable for that as well. Certified ones aren’t cheap, so see if they are included or not.

Find out what version of thunderbolt your Mac has and then buy the appropriate enclosure / cable.

Edited by wyson on Wednesday 26th February 10:49

[mmm-five]

I've got plenty of Crucial external SSDs (the X10 is the fastest), but they're still limited to USB-3 speeds (about 1000MB/s).

For my 'fast' external storage I use a Crucial T500 (about 4x better endurance than the P models) in an OWC Express 1M2 enclosure (TB4/USB4), which allows about 3000MB/s. It's bus-powered, so very portable, but more expensive than a basic USB one (but that's always been the way with Thunderbolt products).
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-express-1m2
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2150957/owc-expres...

If you forget to use the proper TB4 cable (included), or you use the front ports on a M1 Studio Max (Ultra is TB4) then you'll drop down to USB-3.2 speeds of about 1000MB/s.

There's a newer version called the ThunderBlade, which allows multiple drives, but it also needs external power.
https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade

Edited by mmm-five on Wednesday 26th February 11:01