The brand new 14 inch and 16 inch macbook pros have absolutely astonished us with their
performance yet you can configure these machines any way you want them with more cores and more ram
however for storage the actual baseline amount of storage you get
is only 512 gigabytes is that enough in 2021 and should you consider picking this as your
baseline storage well personally i believe you should and let me explain to you why.
Hi it's Matt here, so that's right with the new 14 inch and 16 inch macbook pros, there are
loads of different options you can pick with in configuring how you want your macbook pro to be
however one thing what kind of stands out straight away if you pick the baseline macbook pro for
either the 14 inch or the 16 inch is you only get 512 gigabytes of storage now a lot of people
out there if you're a creator like myself you're probably thinking that's not a lot of storage and
to be honest it isn't this video that i'm creating right now will probably take up about half a mile
of that storage once it's edited and exported and everything like that so it isn't actually that a
lot so mainly we should probably pick ourselves a higher amount of storage the problem is with that
if you look here is that it's really really expensive to upgrade from 512 gigabytes even
to one terabyte not alone two terabytes or four terabytes that most of us actually have or would
like to have actually inside their macbook pro it gets really really expensive but don't worry
i think you should actually still pick this 512 gigabyte option and let me explain to you why
now the main reason why i would say stick with this 512 gigabyte storage option is because of
these options that i have right in front of me yes all of these what you see in front of me right now
they're all external hard drives now before you go and switch off this video i know everyone's
going to go oh external hard drives i absolutely hate them they're the worst things ever the thing
is what you've got to at stand is is the price difference between external hard drives their
performance what they can give you and also the performance if you picked a higher tier amount
of storage on a macbook pro so going up to one two four or eight terabytes so what i've got
here is three different drives in front of me all of them are two terabytes let's go through them
and let me explain about all the different drive options and actually how much they all cost so the
first drive that we have is the seagate drive you can see here it's a two terabyte drive option like
i already mentioned all of them are two terabytes now this drive you can pick it up for about 63
us dollars so around about 60 us dollars and it's a traditional normal spinny hard drive what i mean
by that it's not a solid state drive it's got a disc that spins around inside it so you will hear
a tiny bit of a whirring noise when it's in use now these drives are super cheap and super great
for backing up kind of your standard kind of document and pieces like that and also if you
finish with like some picture editing or video editing and you want to stick all your archives
and backs up these drives are really really good now one thing i will be testing is things like
video exporting and running video libraries off this actual hard drive in fact i'll be doing it
on all of the hard drives but with this drive i just wanted to quickly show you this is the
cheapest one here it's got usb 3 on it you could actually get a usb free to usb c end if you wanted
to do that but you wouldn't be able to really kind of run this at kind of thunderbolt speeds to get
full maximum capacity out of that but you might not actually need that as you'll see later on with
the benchmarks that we are doing in this video the next drive we have got is this sandisk drive right
here now this is a solid-state drive and you can pick this up on amazon for 225 so that is a really
good price for a solid-state drive especially that the read write speeds are around about a thousand
megabits per second where this is older sort of seagate drive here it actually runs at about
130 sort of megabit so it's much more slower this you're going to be getting about sort of
eight nine times faster sort of speeds on top of this as well it's thunderbolt compatible as well
and you also get a thunderbolt cable as you can see right here it's not just your standard usb
c cable it actually does have the chip in either end the great thing i love about this drive it's
nice and small it's really really portable and you will see a later on how good this drive really
is in some of the benchmarks now for some other people out there this drive might not be enough
for you so the next drive up is this one here it's a sambran rocket now this drive is incredible
you can get rewrite speeds of around about 3 000 megabits per second so that's about three times
the speed of this drive here it is far more pricey it does come in at 360 dollars so you can see it's
gonna cost you a fair bit more for this drive but you also get thunderbolt compatibility with this
and it also works with all the latest brand new macbooks in fact all of these drives today all
work with it as you will see so what we're going to do is we're actually going to put a final cut
library on all three of these drives i've just shown you and we're going to do the same export
of exactly the same video and we're going to see what we actually get back so for this final cut
protest what i'm going to do is export one of the videos i've made recently it's a windows 11 on an
m1 pro and m1 max macbook check out my channel if you want to see this video because i actually
have got it uploaded but what i'm going to do is copy this actual whole project and library over
between all my different sort of hard drives like my sandisk one here my spinny drive i've also got
my sabrin drive here i'm going to copy to all the different drives the exact same library i'm going
to do exactly the same export and that export is simply we're going to go up to the top here
and what we're going to do is we're going to do a youtube and facebook sort of export we'll go to
settings here we're going to leave everything on as they're kind of standard settings and i'm going
to run this as you can see it's 4.24 gigabytes so i'm going to export this onto my desktop and i'm
going to time this now on my iphone and we're going to see how long it takes so the results
are in and this is absolutely incredible obviously if we look at the seagate two terabyte hard drive
this was the slowest one because it's not an ssd drive but still it did it in nine minutes and two
seconds however if we look at the seven rocket the sandisk and also the internal drive of the macbook
pro what's meant to be a super speedy drive now it's actually really really close in fact
all of the times came within around about seven seconds of each other was absolutely unbelievable
and the main thing i would probably take away from this is that no matter what kind of ssd you pick
whether this is the internal one built into the macbook pro what's meant to be the most fastest
one out there or even if you pick yourself the most expensive fastest sort of ssd out there an
external one like the sabrin rocket there isn't going to be much difference if you just picked a
kind of traditional kind of ssd like the um sandisk extreme ssd that i have here like i
said everything is within seven seconds of each other so i don't know about you i actually am
quite shocked by the results there with final cut pro so what i decided to do after this
was actually connect up these drives into black magic doing the disc kind of benchmarking on that
and having a look at the speeds there so the first test i actually want to do is a speed test on the
actual built-in hard drive so i've already got the selected and see there's nothing else connected to
my macbook pro so i'm going to start this so let's see the speeds so look at that a write speed of
6300 and the read speeds about 5 000 there so that is really really remarkable to see that so it's
dropping down a little bit but we did just see that it was about 6 000 and then also about a 5000
so i'm going to stop the test there and then what i'm going to do next of all is connect
in my sort of seagate drive we've got here this is the spinny drive and let's see what that does
so the next drive i am testing right now is the seagate drive so it's this one right here and i've
also got it in a dongle so you can see it's all connected up it's going to move out the way there
but as you can see the kind of speeds i'm getting is a read speed of about 126 it's near that 130
mark there and then the right speeds as well we have actually hit about a hundred um it's not
showing it right now see if it will do it one more time in a second but um it actually is getting
right speeds of around about 130 there we go the read speeds dropped right down as well but trust
me it was guessing around about 125 130 speeds but they have dropped down it's depending on the
sort of different tests that happen there we go there's your right speed it's gone back up again
but let's move on then to the next drive so the next test i want so the next drive i want to test
is the sandisk drive so this is the smaller one uh this is the ssd drive so i'm going to connect this
up now and this is using a thunderbolt connection so with this in the connection now the usb
and it's all connected up what i'm going to do is select this extreme ssd by going here select
the actual drive the extreme ssd open that up and i'm going to start doing a test on this one
and straight away look at that you've got 900 megabits you've got 700 ish there and this should
increase up to about a thousand during this test here so it is slowly increasing the read write
speed so there we go another 900 there what's the redoing reads a bit more higher there a little 740
the right on the other drive is a little bit more slow again you can see here it sort
of plays around so i'm going to probably say around about a 900 megabit sort of write speed
and around about possibly about 740 750 um sort of read speed on this drive so it's quite
incredible to see this and also that it was funny that with the final cut pro export that the actual
speed was really really quick on this and it was very similar to the internal drive well let's
test out the last hard drive then so the last test is for the cyber rocket that we have here
i'm expecting some really good speeds of probably about 1 800 right 2 700 sort of read speeds if i'm
correct there so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to select this drive going down to it here
and we're going to click open and we're going to click start so straight away yep 1700 2600 read
speeds let's do that test again 1 800 2 600 yeah 2 700 near about so yeah those read write speeds are
super incredible but like i did say it was interesting to see with the final cut exports with
the sandisk this drive and also the built-in hard drive is to see what the kind of different speeds
we were actually getting but there we go there is a disk speed test on all four of the different
hard drives the internal and the free external drives so sure enough the results came through
obviously this one is definitely the slowest drive the seagate the sandisk yeah it's much more faster
than this drive but then obviously the actual kind of uh sabran rocket drive is the fastest drive
out there but as you saw with the likes of final cut pro the sand disk is probably actually still
worth getting over the actual san brunt with the amount of performance and actually the cost
of this drive and i think at the end of the day the end conclusion what we are seeing here
is actually the drive to properly actually get is actually the sandisk now obviously apple have
boasted about getting um faster kind of ssds inside their brand new macbook pros but for a
lot of creators out there you can see straight away that really that speed is not really being
tapped into to be honest you might as well not buy yourself the kind of higher amount of storage
and personally from my point of view and remember these are my own opinions i would actually buy
the sandisk drive right here yes this drive here is absolutely fantastic for doing all my backups
but for things like apps and things like that i will actually install them actually onto my
main macbook pro so for example like final cut pro lightroom photoshop they will remind on the actual
system and i won't actually be storing any of my actual data actually on this machine the other
cool thing i've got to mention right now is the availability of icloud so you could sign up to
icloud onedrive there's dropbox so you could stick kind of documents and things like that on that
instead of actually storing them on your macbook pro if you did pick that 512 gigabyte option
but at the end of the day as you can see here all three of these drives are absolutely fantastic
so this drive definitely is good for doing backups if you want to store everything onto it and once
you're not using any of your documents regularly anymore i would definitely recommend getting the
seagate but having said that if you are going to be a creator and everything personally in my
opinion as you've just seen here on this macbook pro what has an m1 pro inside it i'd actually pick
the seagate yes this is slightly faster but for the amount of money and the amount of difference
in doing kind of rendering and exporting same with video editing or even photo editing this
drive is far more worth it so personally going for the top speed tier in kind of exporting and
things like this and read write speeds as we saw in black magic going for the fastest always
isn't the best sometimes so yeah definitely do check out these drives and let me know
your opinions down below in the comments as well well guys it's also time to wrap up this video so
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button followed by the notification bell until next time guys i will see you really soon bye bye
you