Like you probably don’t… I also don’t like giving more money to tech companies
for a tiny bit of extra storage.
Whether it’s the new M2 MacBook Air,
the iPad, the Tab S8 Ultra. It costs a LOT of money to have the bigger internal SSD drives.
It’s a tactic by these companies to get us to spend more
and sometimes it makes sense.. depending on the workflow but most of the time it’s a rip off.
Well, with this little guy here makes that problem go away.
I am Alex and I do down to earth tech videos.
This is the Acasis USB 4 NVMe SSD enclosure.
On screen: USB 4 NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure PCIe M Key, B&M Key
## M2 MacBook Air Let’s start by taking a
look how good this thing is. This is the brand new Apple M2 MacBook Air.
I did upgrade the memory on this to have 16GB RAM….
but I left the internal SSD exactly the same as base model with only 256GB.
As a creative, that level of storage is really not gonna go very far.
So I needed something that… not only allows me to SAVE larges amount of data
but because of my workflow, I need it to be super fast too.
To give you an example, I have Final Cut Pro here and I loaded up a huge video timeline here.
It’s not the most complex edit you will ever see but I have TWO 4K camera angles, one of them
being a ProRes 4:2:2 and I have applied different LUTS and adjusted the colour grading individually.
I also have MotionVFX which I use for special motion graphic effects. If you are interested
in this kind of stuff, I will leave a link to them in the description,
they are awesome for video editing.
Anyway, all video and audio are saved on this enclosure, there is nothing saved locally.
I am scrubbing through the timeline here, and frankly…
it feels like I am doing my edit like I normally do on My M1 Max MacBoo Pro.
And as you can see, the performance is astonishing. The power of the M2 chip,
that 16GB of RAM and access to this fast SSD drive is making everything an absolute delight to use.
What’s really surprising is that I didn’t have to change the performance settings
at all, the playback is incredible.
Sure, the exporting of this video is important but being able to
work… and Multitask completely running off of an external SSD is a game changer for me.
I appreciate that this is not really a machine for video editing
and I have done a couple of videos with more relevant use cases for the MacBook Air…
But clearly, with this Acasis enclosure,
the MacBook Air doesn’t even break a sweat when editing this video.
It does get a little warm. It operates at about 36 Celsius /
97 Fahrenheit but after about an hour of video editing, it did go up to…
But it doesn’t become dangerously hot or anything,
just make you install these cooling pads as well. They send a couple in the package.
In some of the footage you see here
I don’t have it installed but that’s only because it looks better on camera without it.
**File transfer** If you don’t care
about editing videos but you want to know how FAST this thing is, check this out…
Actually before I show you how fast this is, just a quick reminder to like this video
and if you like my stuff it would be awesome if you subscribed.
YouTube can be a real pain sometimes and not recommend this video for the right audience
unless you interact with it. So if you watched this far, I really appreciate it so
leave me a nice Taco emoji. I don’t know… I am a bit hungry and I could do a nice taco.
Anyway…following the theme of this channel, I tried to keep this speed test to a relevant level.
So I am not gonna be moving 100s of Gigabytes here because that’s not what MacBook Air users do.
But I have three examples here. And I moved these files FROM
AND to the enclosure so you have an idea of read and write transfer speeds.
Here is how it long it takes to move a 5, 10GB and 20GB folder into the M2 MacBook Air.
Doing the same transfers on the M1 Max MacBook Pro,
it’s even faster because it has a faster controller, bigger SLC cache.
On the Air, you probably noticed a little slow down to move the bigger folder,
but on the M1 Max, I was able to all of the folders together, several times, under 10 seconds.
The moral of the story, this enclosure is FANTASTIC, be it for day to day usage…using
the MacBook Air, or something like the iPad Pro, iPad Air or Tab S8 Ultra.
Or for more Pro-like workflows like editing videos, or running virtual Machines from it.
I have this Windows 11 VM that I can now use completely off of this hard drive. That saves
me a ton of space on my local hard drive and I am able to run the machine without any issues at all.
Now, here is a bonus little item for you.
If you are looking for something that not only gives you fast storage but also extends
the number of ports no the M2 MacBook Air, the Tab S8 Ultra, or whatever it might be…
This right here is the Acasis 10-in-1 hub. You can attach a 4K60 monitor to it, you can attach
multiple USB-C devices to it and the best part… it can also house up to 8TB storage.
I have reviewed this hub on the channel so I will leave a link to that down below.
The lovely YouTube people reckon you’re gonna like this video over here and I made
this playlist that I think you will like too. I am approaching 200 videos on the channel,
so I am sure there will be one there that you like.
Hope to see you there, bye.