Build Cheap M.2 SSD External Storage - Stop Buying Flash Drives

you shouldn't be buying flash drives in 2023 I'm going to show you why [Music] back to my channel so what I'm going to do in this video let me set this up you shouldn't be buying flash drives in 2023. I'm going to show you why first of all what I'm going to do is you know these little flash drives just like this one right here this one's 256 gigabytes they become really cheap I'm going to show you my screen over here this one's about 28 bucks and this little teeny footprint 256 gigabytes is pretty good for 28 bucks right you would think that but don't buy this I'm going to show you how to basically make something like this for about the same cost exactly I think it's 28 or 29 bucks with an m.2 drive in it and four you know that's going to basically blow this other thing away over here this thing says it's rated for about 400 megabytes per second it's not this thing over here pretty much is and I'm going to show you the time difference I'm going to give you so to set the video up I'm going to show you moving 3.6 gigabytes on this little thing here versus this big thing over here and show you the major difference of this and how long it takes and also then just show you kind of you know why I chose this because basically what this comes down to is this is actually an m.2 SATA closure it's not even an nvme there's a reason I chose this number one is so I could get the cost around that 28 bucks the SATA m.2s are a little bit cheaper right now and so is the enclosure but number two cider runs a lot cooler right and if I'm using a cheap enclosure like this I definitely want to make sure that the drive's not running too hot like an nvme Drive runs so that's another reason to use SATA I know a lot of people are going to say well it's not as fast it's not as good and it's not but I'm going to show you just proving it when I show you this versus this that if you're just moving data for backup and storage this is going to be plenty for most people and I'll prove it to you and then I'm going to prove to you exactly what I put in here just to prove that it was a 28 bucks here's what I bought over here this is basically the ssk aluminum it's an aluminum enclosure and basically here it is right here there's an aluminum sleeve that slips onto this and I'll show you some close-ups as I'm talking about it and it's super easy it literally you have to slide the drive in here you basically put the aluminum piece on it and there's one little screw that you screw in and it's done the cable here comes with basically it's a cable that goes to USB a on the end here but it also has a dongle that actually goes USB a to USBC sorry I'm picking up the wrong thing that's actually right here and so can you can plug into USBC and USB a and it's only 12 bucks you can see on the screen over here so I picked one of the cheapest ones you can get but I know this company ssk and they're actually really good for for what you get for the money and then that sets that and that's going to be basically a SATA that's the key there you have to get it SATA um and then beyond that let me just get a little bit more into it so the drive slides in here there's nothing even to basically screw in once you put the drive in and you don't even need to put a heat sink on this because of the fact that it's a side of drive it doesn't get that hot compared to the nvme drives all right so that's 11 12 bucks and then for the drive what I did is I used I'll show you close-ups but it's kind of time Tech it's a it's a drive that I found a while ago they're 16.99 for 256 gigabytes so in in you know if we look at the reviews here it's basically going to be I think it's like a 4.7 so black people like this drive very inexpensive 16.99 the edits at 11.99 right there at the 28 or 29 bucks so it's going to be the exact same cost as this little flash drive for 256 gigs of storage right so let's put these things head to head and show you the differences here and show you how much this thing blows the other one away and why you would never want to buy a flash drive again all right so when you put the drive in the first time you're going to get this screen click initialize right there and basically what's going to happen is you want to make absolutely sure you don't select your main Drive you're going to erase anything you select here so make sure you select the ssk media that's going to be the name of this device this this aluminum enclosure select that and make sure it says the 256 gigabytes the drive that we just had then you want to click erase right here and then next you just basically can leave it as well first of all let's just name it something that we can recognize here but beyond that we want to make sure the format is apfs and then guid partition map right there then click erase you can click right there it's going to go ahead and erase the disk again you do not want to erase your main drive here and then you're done basically and this is how you format the drive for a Mac alright so now that we have the drive I want to show you how fast we can move a file over so look at the size of this file that I'm going to be moving to this new Drive I just created it's 3.6 gigabytes so it's a pretty substantial file you can see it right there let's go ahead and move this over to the new drive we just created and let's see how long this takes we're going to wait a couple seconds before the screen comes up there it goes it's taking takes about you know a little bit less than 10 seconds I would say maybe eight or nine seconds and there you go it's done so there's a speed test on the drive we just created now let's see how that flash drive how long that takes all right now we have the flash drive this is the Samsung Drive I told you that's the same cost but it's dirt slow it says it's rated at 400 megabytes per second but let's go ahead and see what this really is I'm not even going to let this go so let's just let this thing come up here you can see that it's at 134 megabytes of 3.6 so it's going to go a lot slower it says it's about two to two and a half minutes here two minutes or so versus the 8 or 10 seconds on the other one so I'm not going to let this go too much further because I think the point is proven that it's going to take probably 20 or 30 times as long all right so what I want to just show you is just the speed of the drive here we're going to do a quick speed test again this is SATA it has to go through the enclosure so I'm going to go ahead and select the right drive here now keep in mind an enclosure and all the cables do give it some overhead so while this drive is rated at like 500 megabytes per second we're going to go ahead and select the drive right here and then I'm going to open it up but you're going to see it's going to be slower watch this I'm going to go ahead and do a test here and you're going to get let's just see in the right it's about 300 and close to 340 350 on the rights and then on the reads I'm guessing somewhere close about 337 so you can see right there that it's not going to be the fastest um as far as the drive is concerned and but it doesn't matter you saw the difference there so for basic storage it's really really fast all right so basically you saw what I did here I just basically built this you can build it super quickly I mean I didn't show you how but it literally just takes you slide the drive in you stick on the aluminum part and you put one screw in you go ahead and you initialize it you format it and it works now the reason I use SATA again versus an nvme Drive is because it runs cooler and it's cheaper right now and I'm just using this for just basic storage like something where I'm not relying so much on the speed but it's way faster than a flash drive that I just showed you and then there's some other ones I wanted to show you up here like this team group one here it's 27.99 you can see it on my screen and that's basically going to be 512 gigabytes so if you want to make this bigger than 256 hey what is it it's just 27.99 plus the enclosure for 11.99 and you can even get some better deals here like the Silicon power one this is SATA also it's an m.2 SSD SATA 512 gigabytes only 22.99 so if I went this route 22.99 plus the 11.99 and it comes out to like 34 35 bucks for 512 gigabytes and you can see how that's going to make a lot of sense to you if you want an external storage all right so let's wrap this up so I like to make these videos because a lot of people are afraid to kind of put parts together because they don't know they don't know if they're going to work or not so I'm going to have the parts list in the description if you like this plus these other drives I showed you one's 512 gigabytes for 30 something bucks with the enclosure you can get that much storage and build it yourself you get the enjoyment out of kind of building things yourself and also knowing exactly the parts that you have in here you can also reuse the enclosure if there's a failure unlike the ones you buy but at the end of the day you just do not want to buy these little flash things you can see that it takes 10 or 20 times as long to move data get on those things and if they break their break for good you don't have you know you can't remove the drive and just put a new one in so I just you know try things out always try different things you can return them on Amazon I'll have links to this again in the description if you want to try them out but I hope this helps people out just showing you why you don't buy flash drives anymore just say no to them if you get them for free that's okay but uh you don't spend any of your good hard-earned money on them because they're just too slow right now in 2023 we'll talk to you soon peace

Channel: Craig Neidel

Views: 4,705

Keywords: build external storage, build external m.2 storage, don't buy flash drives, build cheap external storage, build cheap external storage for Mac, cheap external storage mac, inexpensive external storage, external ssd, external m.2 ssd, how to build external storage, external storage for m2 Mac mini, M2 Mac mini storage, Mac storage, build your own external storage, best external ssds, build external ssd m.2, cheap external storage, external macbook storage, Apple storage, M.2

Id: 64eVunUzwlg

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023