- Hey, do you want a new MacBook for your birthday?
Ah, okay. So it says here, to upgrade the storage to 2TB
it's gonna be an extra $800 USD.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
It's no surprise that Apple products are expensive.
Many people can barely afford the base model MacBook Air,
and have to save up for months just to be able to buy one.
Upgrades such as increased storage are just not an option
for 95% of people, due to either not being able to justify
the cost, or simply not being able to afford it.
So what if I told you there's a way to get 2TB of storage
on your Mac, but for only one-third of the cost of what
Apple charges, or about $240 USD instead of $800 USD?
You'll also get to keep this storage option If you
replace your Mac in the future.
Sure, this storage won't be as fast, and it's not internal.
It'll be external, so that you have to carry it around
with you. But those are really the only negatives.
And you have to ask yourself if those two negatives
are worth an additional $560 USD.
For many people, the 256GB option of internal storage
is enough for their programs and essential files,
and large items like footage, pictures, or even games
can be stored externally. Yes, you can install games
and applications to your external drive.
Watch the video in the top-right to see how.
In my search to find the next-best storage option,
I came across NVMe M.2 enclosures.
They're relatively inexpensive, and allow you to connect
NVMe M.2 SSD drives via a USB or Thunderbolt port
directly to your computer.
I use M.2 drives in my Windows editing PC,
but I've never used them externally via an enclosure.
Now, before I get into the rest of the video,
if you really need an internal storage upgrade
and you can easily afford Apple's expensive upgrade options,
go with that. It's faster and you won't
have to carry a drive around with you.
However, the drive I put together only cost me
about $240 USD for 2TB, which is so much cheaper than
Apple's upgrade option.
First, you'll need an M.2 SSD.
I recommend this Crucial one, as it's relatively
inexpensive and Crucial is a good brand.
You can buy a different storage capacity if you want,
such as 500GB or 1TB, or even a completely different brand,
just make sure the drive type is M.2 NVMe SSD.
I'll have links in the description for all
compatible parts that I recommend.
Then, you will also need an enclosure.
I will have a video testing three different types
of enclosures, to pick the best one.
Each enclosure has its own pros and cons, but
I'll leave that for a separate video.
For the purposes of this video, I'll be using
the Plugable M.2 NVMe enclosure.
Which, although it is the cheapest option I tested,
it actually performs really well,
and is the one I personally use.
So let's jump into the studio and set this drive up.
So "building" this drive is actually super, super easy.
As I said before, you just need the enclosure, which is
the Plugable USB 3.1 Gen 2 NVMe SSD enclosure,
and also the M.2 drive, which as you can see here,
I have the P1 Crucial. There is a P2 version out,
which is a little bit better.
That's what I've linked in the description.
So, if we just take both of these out of their boxes...
So you can see here, with the Plugable enclosure
you get a few bits and pieces.
So you get the actual enclosure itself,
which doesn't need any kind of tools.
You also get a couple of cables.
So you get a short USB-C to USB-A cable.
You also get a USB-C to USB-C cable.
And you also get some little bits and pieces here.
So, some thermal pads, some little rubber screws there.
Again, it is toolless, but these little screws
you don't need tools for.
And obviously some instructions, so nothing too crazy.
Now, the M.2 NVMe drive is very similar. You don't really
get much in the box, but you don't really need it.
So you get an instruction manual, and you also get
the actual M.2 drive itself, which
as you can see there, is pretty small.
Okay, so let's actually build this thing.
Now, you can see here, there are two little arrows,
and then at the bottom there,
there's kind of like a lock/unlock.
All you need to do is just flick that down,
and this whole thing will slide out.
And this is where you actually install the M.2 SSD.
So, you simply grab the M.2 SSD,
you wanna line up this part...
And you just wanna pop that in, until it clicks.
And then you have a little rubber part here,
and you basically just want to push this down
until it's under the rubber.
Sometimes it's easier just to use your fingernail
to pull it back, so you can push it down like that.
And as you can see, that's fully installed
without any kind of tools.
Now, you can install the included heat pads
on the top here. I'm gonna leave that till later.
Is gonna help with the transfer between the actual drive
and the exterior of the case.
For now, all we need to do is literally just slide this in,
and it clicks shut. And you are good to go.
This is completely finished.
Okay, so now that we have our M.2 NVMe drive,
what are our competitors? So what are we up against?
Of course, obviously we have the upgradable Apple option
that starts at $200 USD and goes all the way up to $800 USD.
The next option we have is something I've talked about
in previous videos, and that is
something like a Samsung T5 SSD.
Now, pros of this is it's relatively inexpensive,
and it's relatively quick. You know,
pretty easy to connect, just a USB-C to USB-C.
But the big con to this is that it's not quite as fast
as this particular one over here.
And when I say not quite as fast, this thing is
almost three times as fast as this.
And one thing I forgot to mention is
this will actually be cheaper.
The next option we have is your standard just SSD drive.
Now, what you can do is you can buy one of these,
and then you can also buy an adapter, and then this
will actually just plug directly into your Mac as well.
Again, similar cons to the T5 SSD.
This is slower, and this is also a lot clunkier to use.
You have to lug around this weird adapter for it.
But it is another relatively inexpensive option.
Now, the final choice is your very, very standard and
typical hard drives. This is a 2TB hard drive from Seagate.
Very, very cheap. These things cost you almost nothing.
But the trade-off: they're big, they're clunky,
they're sometimes loud, and they're very, very slow.
Especially compared to all of these.
So right now, as you can see, I've just ordered
them in order from slowest to fastest here.
So let's take a quick look at this one.
Okay, so first thing's first.
Let's actually plug this into the computer.
Now you can see, I'm using an M1 MacBook Pro here,
again just completely base model spec, 256GB, 8GB of RAM.
You can see the USB-C cable I'm using here is actually
quite long. This is just a aftermarket one from Plugable,
so the same brand.
So I'm just gonna connect the drive to that,
and just put it to the side.
Now, it does come with this USB-C to USB-C cable.
It's a little bit short, so I suppose a little bit more
portable, but if you are using it on a desk setup like I am,
you can get a really cheap longer one that might make it
a little bit easier for you to use.
Now as you can see, it has popped up
in the top-right hand corner.
If it's not popping up there, you can go to 'Disk Utility'
and you'll probably need to format the drive.
I'll leave a link in the top-right hand corner right now,
showing you a video on how to do that, and also some
troubleshooting steps if it doesn't pop up.
But generally, you'll want to format it as
a APFS volume, like I have here.
You don't have to, you can choose other formats, but
this is gonna be the most compatible with Apple devices,
if you intend on only using it with a Mac.
If you're intending on using it with a Windows
computer as well, you can choose exFAT.
But again, watch the video I linked for more info on that.
Okay, so moving on, the first thing we're gonna do is
we're gonna do a Blackmagic disc speed test on this
NVMe drive. And we'll see what kind of speeds
we're getting just right off the bat.
So let's jump into the screen, and I'll show you.
Okay, so closing down 'Disc Utility', let's open up
'Blackmagic Speed Test', and we're going to make sure
we've selected our NVMe drive with the enclosure.
We're gonna open that, and we're going to
start the speed test.
So right off the bat, you can see here the speeds are
pretty good. We're getting about 850MB/s write speed,
and about the same, so 830MB/s read speed on the disc test.
This is doing 5GB files.
You can see down here the compatibility section.
This is gonna be totally fine for pretty much anything
you would ever be using, in terms of footage or files.
Unless you're using some kind of crazy high-quality
10-bit YUV 422 4k, you know, 60fps footage,
which I'll be honest, 99.9% of people don't use,
you're gonna be more than fine with these speeds.
So what I wanted to show you now is, just for reference,
this is the speed you can expect from the internal drive
on the Mac. So as you can see there, I mean it's gonna
be a lot quicker than what you're getting on
this particular drive, but you know,
if you want this thing, you really have to pay for it.
If you wanted the 2TB storage option inside your Mac,
again it's gonna be $800 USD.
But you will be getting some incredibly high
read and write speeds. And the other advantage is
you don't need to lug this around. It's going to be
internally on your Mac.
Now, one thing I'm gonna mention is probably one of the
biggest drawbacks of using an NVMe drive, especially
in an external enclosure such as this.
And that is heat.
So with an NVMe drive, doesn't matter if it's SSD
or PCIe, whatever it is, they're going to generate
a lot of heat. So they're gonna get very warm.
And this is generally only when you're
writing a lot of data to it.
Just everyday reading and writing, like
I can play games off this thing, it'll barely get hot,
I can edit off it, it'll barely be warm as well,
but if I'm transferring like hundreds of gigabytes
of files to this, it will get very hot, which is why
I mentioned previously, you can heat-treat this
by using thermal pads to extract a little bit more heat.
This isn't the biggest and most thermally efficient case,
it's quite small and quite thin.
Again, I'll be testing other cases that can dissipate heat
more effectively in that other video I mentioned
at the start of this video.
But from my testing so far, this really doesn't seem
too bad. I haven't run into many huge issues.
But in the off-chance you are transferring hundreds
and hundreds of gigabytes of files at once,
it will slow down, it will thermal throttle,
and you'll probably only get about half these speeds,
so about 300-400MB/s. Which is still pretty good anyway.
So what I wanted to do now is just do a quick little test,
so we're gonna actually transfer some files onto the
NVMe drive, so we're gonna write to it.
And we're just gonna see how hot it gets,
and also if we see a reduction in write speed
due to thermal throttling.
So we're gonna open up our NVMe drive,
and we're gonna get this test footage, which is
about 130GB in size. Now the reason why I've
selected this file size is, for those of you watching
this video, you probably only have a 256GB hard drive,
so this is probably the max amount of files and footage
you're going to be writing on and off
your internal SSD anyway.
So this kinda makes sense, having it this size.
So if we drag this onto the NVMe SSD, and then
we open up the stats here, we'll get a little bit
of a better look into how quickly it's going.
So you can see there, we're writing at about 870MB/s.
Which is very, very good. You can see there, 130GB
is only gonna take us about two minutes to write
onto this drive. So that's very, very impressive.
You can see here, we're actually hitting close to
1GB/s write speed. So right now, it's at about 900MB/s,
which is very, very impressive for such a
relatively inexpensive device.
Okay, so we've got a few seconds left. You can see here,
we are still at almost 900MB/s transfer speeds.
You can see here on the actual graph,
it hasn't dipped at all, and in terms of heat,
it definitely is warm, but it's nowhere near uncomfortable.
I would say it's probably about 30-35°C on the outside.
So really not warm at all.
Now in my testing, I've found that this thing
starts to thermal throttle around 400-500GB.
So if anything less than that, you're not gonna see
any kind of decrease in the write speed.
But for those times where you have to transfer like
hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes, you're only gonna
see about a 30% or 40% reduction in max speed.
So it's very, very impressive from such a budget setup.
Now if you are transferring files from the NVMe SSD
onto the internal drive of your Mac,
you're gonna be seeing pretty much the exact same results.
So right now, we're getting about 860MB/s.
Anyway that's it for me, guys.
Hope you enjoyed this video. If you are interested
in learning more about these drives, stay tuned
on my channel, I'll have some more videos on this topic.
If you have any comments or questions about things I
mentioned or did in the video, leave them down below.
But apart from that, I'll catch you guys in the next one.