It's the age old question.
Is the storage capacity on the base model Macs enough,
or should you pay more to upgrade it?
Well, the answer has changed quite a lot
in the last 12 months.
And spoiler alert,
if you truly don't need extra storage, don't bother,
but if you think you might,
then there are actually several really important factors
that you should consider before making a decision.
Let me explain.
Quick thanks to Odoo for sponsoring this video,
but more on that later.
Now, I've been buying Macs for over 10 years,
and not once have I ever bothered
to upgrade the internal drive to a larger capacity
than whatever is offered in the base model.
I mean, sure,
look, I struggled a little bit
with the old 128 gigabyte SSD MacBooks,
but it was never really a massive issue for me.
It was enough for the apps I used every day, some files
and also some movies every now and then.
And don't forget about cloud storage either,
which is a really easy way
to free up some space on your computer.
And if I ever needed more physical storage,
well, that's where an inexpensive external drive came in.
And I actually made my very own super cheap
and super fast external SSD
that cost a fraction
of what Apple would've charged to upgrade.
And this is something I've actually recommended
most people do
if they want to save a boatload of cash,
so I will link that video down below.
But like I said before,
my opinion on this has changed slightly
in the last 12 months.
Starting with the most obvious reason, speed.
The SSDs on the M1 Macs are blazing fast.
Particularly on the more recent Apple Silicon Macs
with the M1 Pro,
Max or Ultra chips.
Now the base storage options are quite fast,
but when you upgrade the SSDs the speed also increases
with each upgrade tier.
Typically you will see those max speeds
that Apple advertisers on their website,
only on the four terabyte
and larger options.
Take my 16-inch M1 Max Mac MacBook with a four terabyte SSD.
Just look at those crazy read
and write speeds.
Now this speed has a number of benefits.
Transferring and reading large files is faster.
If you're a photo or video editor,
the experience is much snappier,
and you also see a general performance boost
across your entire system
due to a feature called swap memory.
But more on that later.
Now, most people believe
that simply buying an external SSD is much better value
than upgrading the SSD in your Mac.
But is that still true?
Well, if you're just after a big chunk of storage
and you don't need anything too fancy,
there are a number of inexpensive options out there.
I mean, you have the Samsung T5 SSD.
You also have the old school.
Old school mechanical hard drives,
And sure, options like
that are going to save you a ton of money.
Even moreso if you have a desktop Mac.
Most people don't mind having an external drive
plugged in all the time.
But don't forget about speed,
quality and convenience,
especially if you have a MacBook.
Starting with speed,
you simply cannot get anything
that comes even remotely close to the sheer speed
of the upgraded internal Mac SSDs.
For reference, one of the most premium
and high performing external drives out there
is the Rocket XTRM -Q from Sabrent.
Now I have the four terabyte version.
It's great, but it's almost as expensive as simply
upgrading your Mac's SSD to four terabytes,
it's only half as fast,
and you have to carry it around with you.
So, when you examine the trade offs a bit closer
and consider the external drive alternatives
and your budget, of course,
those SSD upgrade options
on the Apple website may not be as outrageous
as you might have initially thought.
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Okay, getting back into the video,
let's now talk about something called swap memory.
Swap memory is actually an ingenious solution
to make your computer faster.
It's existed for a very long time
and is used on almost all operating systems
including MacOS, Linux and Windows.
Its purpose is to move processes and programs
that aren't currently being used out of physical memory,
which is your RAM,
and onto virtual memory,
which is essentially just temporarily writing this data
to your SSD.
It's kind of like a builder moving a tool
from his hand to his tool belt.
It's still close by if he needs to use that tool again,
but it's not as fast as having
that tool already in his hand,
ready to go.
Likewise, on your computer,
swap memory frees up RAM
and allows your computer to multitask
and just crunch data faster
than it otherwise would be able to.
But this process does have a few side effects.
Firstly, your SSD is nowhere near as fast as your RAM,
even the super fast upgraded SSDs
that I mentioned earlier on the newer M1 Max,
although their increased speed
will still increase performance significantly
when compared to a base model SSD.
Secondly, swap memory writes data to your SSD.
How much data do you ask?
Well, back in 2021,
some of you guys might remember
especially if you've been a fan of this channel,
there were a number of reports going around
that Apple Silicon Macs were writing terabytes
and terabytes of data every single week
to their internal SSDs.
Now, this has mostly been debunked,
including by myself on this very channel.
But I have heard of a few edge cases
where people were writing hundreds
of terabytes of data a year to their SSD,
mainly from swap memory usage,
which MacOS seems to employ more regularly
than other operating systems.
This is often due to having insufficient RAM in your system.
For example, if you should have upgraded
to 16 gigabytes of RAM,
but you just stayed with eight gigabytes
but we will discuss
that a little bit later on.
Firstly, let's talk about how writing tons
of data to your SSD might actually shorten its lifespan.
As you already know,
the SSDs on Apple Silicon MacBooks are solid.
That is they cannot be removed.
Now on the Mac studio, it does appear
as if you can replace the storage module inside.
But again you're kind of at Apple's mercy as to whether
or not they will actually replace it for you if it does die.
And don't forget as a consumable product,
your SSD will eventually die.
And one of the biggest contributors to a dead SSD is usage,
writing data to the SSD.
Now I made a video a while ago,
going into detail on this topic.
Spoiler alert, your SSD is most likely going
to last a very long time.
probably longer than however long the Mac itself will.
And I will link this video down below
so you can find out exactly how long your SSD will last.
But if you are someone who writes a ton of data to your SSD
or maybe you work with a ton
of video footage
or you don't upgrade your RAM
and use a lot of swap memory,
it is possible
that you might wear it out faster than expected
especially if it's one of the smaller capacity SSDs.
This is because smaller drives
have a correspondingly smaller TBW
or Terabytes Written value.
Which is essentially how many terabytes you can write
to a particular SSD before it might start to have issues
or have a greater risk of failure.
For example, if you upgrade your max SSD
to one terabyte instead of the 256 gigabyte option
you are quadrupling your TBW,
which means in layman's terms
your one terabyte SSD should be able
to write four times as much data
as the 256 gigabyte SSD
before possibly developing issues.
Again, I explain this in much more detail in that SSD video,
I mentioned earlier.
Just data writes alone are only one
of several contributing factors to SSD lifespans.
Now, of course, any component can fail at any time
which is why having a proper backup is so important.
Google the three, two, one backup rule.
If you are interested in learning more.
Finally, it's time to talk
about the most important factor in my opinion.
And that is convenience.
Now, if you are someone who knows
they're going to regularly need more storage capacity
than what the base model options can provide,
maybe you're doing video or photo editing
or you just want to store a lot of data on them.
Do yourself a favor
and just get the bigger SSD.
Of course, if your budget can allow for it.
Now on my personal machine
I have a 16 inch M1 Max MacBook with a four terabyte SSD.
Yes, I cringed really hard
at the checkout on the apple website when buying it.
But four months later it's been worth every single scent.
No more forgetting my external drive at home
or at work.
No more cables
and drives dangling off my computer 24/7,
insane read and write speeds.
And it's just so nice being able to dump
or download all my data into my Mac
and forget about it.
Sure, I mean, there are advantages to an external SSD.
They're generally much cheaper
and can be kept even if you sell
or lose your Mac.
But for me again, the ease of use
is something I can never go back from.
Personally I keep a ton of B-Roll footage permanently
on my Mac.
As well as all current media projects I'm working on.
Once I'm done everything I want to keep from
that project is transferred to my 100 terabyte NAS.
And over three to five years of plugging in external drives
and whatnot every single day,
that extra couple of hundred bucks is a drop in the water.
At least for me personally,
like guys, I understand that you know,
upgrading SSDs is a lot of money
so this is only if you can afford it.
Because again, most of you guys are probably going to be fine
with the base model option.
Okay, so should you upgrade the RAM or the SSD?
Well, that's its own entirely separate video.
In fact, multiple other videos to answer that question
and you're not going to like what I'm about to say
and that is that it depends.
I mean, there are hundreds of workflows out there
and it really is specific to what exactly you're going
to be using this computer for.
So it's impossible for me to sum up succinctly
in just a few sentences in this video.
One thing I will mention though,
is that if you don't have sufficient RAM,
depending on how intense your workflow is of course,
it will result in increased reliance on swap memory,
which slows down your system
and also writes lots of data to your SSD.
So my advice is to upgrade the RAM first.
Do your research,
find out roughly
how much RAM you think you're going to need.
There's a ton of videos out there
including multiple on this channel.
And you need to find out
if the base model amount of RAM is enough.
If it is not enough,
upgrade your RAM first
before considering SSD upgrades.
Using the M1 Pro MacBook for example,
that starts at 16 gigabytes of RAM.
The vast majority of people will be fine with 16 gigabytes.
So they can instead put any extra budget towards the SSD.
Apart that guys hopefully you found this video interesting
and or helpful
and I'll catch you in the next one.