External SSD For Mac Explained: Save Your Money, Your Storage, And Your Mac!

hey everyone kyle erickson here so let's say you're out shopping for a new mac and you're on the apple site you've got a bunch of options to choose from when it comes to storage all of these have increments of 200 which seems pretty pricey when you start looking around at what high performing ssds cost there are portable or external drives that you can either buy or build yourself for much cheaper but not only that once you've chosen an internal drive for a lot of these macs that's it they're part of the machine they're integrated into it and they're not serviceable or removable and that presents a problem of its own for anyone that's owned ssds over long periods of time you may know that these don't last forever eventually they will stop working after a certain amount of data has passed through them now over the years that point of failure and the longevity of ssds has increased quite a bit most people may not ever experience failure but not having serviceable storage may still make some people uneasy i know some folks buy the highest performing machines available and want them to last for 10 years and with the newest m1 chips it may be some cause for concern with the introduction of apple silicon we've seen some problems with the ssd transferring a lot more data through swapping virtual memory to the internal storage there were tons of issues with this a year or so ago when it'd be writing an enormous amount of data to your ssd and since it's gotten a lot better through updates but some people do still have concerns with this there are some workarounds for actually disabling virtual memory swapping but another thing that you can do is move a lot of your stuff over to another drive to kind of offload at least some of that work not only that but there are quite a few advantages to having a portable ssd they're a lot cheaper if you're mobile or switching between machines it's easier to move your working files from one machine to another and you can get incredibly fast transfer speeds on them like i'm talking just as fast as the internal drive but there are a lot of things that you need to be aware of if you're shopping for external drives so my goal here is to really best inform you so that you can make the right choice if you're looking to pick one of these up just so you don't get burned or get something that's not going to work for you and i also want to go through formatting and setting one of them up properly there's really two ways that you can go for external drives you can buy a ready-made portable drive that's just plug and play or you can build your own by buying an enclosure and an nvme drive yourself until recently i've just been using a portable sandisk extreme pro usb 3.2 gen2 ssd that's a lot of words which has worked really well for me with heavy usage these are super affordable drives and they are pretty quick as well they support 10 gigabits per second transfer speeds and i believe they list it as possibly going up to a thousand fifty megabytes per second but that really is in ideal conditions realistically you're looking more like seven or eight hundred megabytes per second or so that's still good enough that you can edit a 4k timeline off of one of these things and probably run some games although i'm not really sure how many mac users are going to be doing that it's still not going to be as fast as the internal drive but it is still very usable the thing that you do have to watch out for with these drives is being really careful which brand you're buying i used a crucial x8 portable ssd for quite a while and i found it started getting really hot and doing some strange things and i think a lot of those issues stem from these companies manufacturing these as more of a casual storage option if your drive is in constant use it's best to stick with a really well-known proven brand like sandisk or samsung just another brief note here if you're on a mac chances are that your device will not support usb 3.2 gen 2x2 which is just another iteration of usb3 the key difference being that it supports 20 gigabits per second transfer speeds you'll see versions of the sandisk drives that are gen 2 by 2. they're probably going to be a little bit more expensive but if you plug them into most macs you're only going to get regular usb 3.2 speeds so just something to be aware of the next real step up in performance would be looking at something like a thunderbolt portable ssd which does get a lot more expensive and you do have fewer options there there's still a totally valid route to go but another option and to me a little bit more interesting is buying something like this which is an ssd enclosure which allows you to throw an nvm e drive into this little case and it turns into a portable drive now you can get these enclosures that support usb 3.2 with thunderbolt and usb4 but all with varying price points the enclosure that i bought after a bunch of research was the aces usb 4.0 enclosure which sells for about 140 by the way i'll link all this stuff in the description if you're interested in any of it but the occasions enclosure from what i can tell was the most preferred one out of everything that i've seen and to be fair the speeds that i get from this thing are outrageous this is pretty much on par with my internal ssd i'm getting like 2700 megabytes per second transfer speeds and doing anything with this i literally can't tell the difference if i'm running off this drive or the internal storage getting those speeds though is a whole other story you might think that you'd be able to just pop in an nvme drive just go to town with this but that's totally not the case if you go look on the amazon listing for this enclosure you'll see that some drives aren't supported as well as others and they can produce varying speeds there are a lot of forum posts on this topic as well with people trying out a bunch of different options but the drop that most folks seem to have the best results with is the western digital sn750 i actually had a hard time finding that specific model so i went with the sn 770 which i'm pretty sure is just the next iteration of the sn750 and it works really well it's super easy to install and set up on your mac which is the next thing that i want to touch on both for the drive in this enclosure and portable ssds when you first install your drive and pop it into your computer you might find that you get a message that the disk isn't readable by this computer which is totally normal you just need to format the drive and you do have a few options there if you head over to disk utility you can see your drive there and in my case it's already formatted but you'll see something very similar here and all you need to do is click erase and you'll have a bunch of options that you can choose from in this next screen you can obviously name this whatever you want and under format you'll have a bunch of options to choose from the the two that you really want to take note of here are the ap fs and exfat options if you're just using this on a mac or between macs your best bet here is going to be apfs apfs was designed specifically for ssds and it does a lot of things better than the other formats here just in terms of it being faster and it is more reliable there's a mac os journaled option in there as well but i really wouldn't use that unless you're running a spinning hard drive or you're planning on using this for time machine backups exfat is the only other option that i'd probably consider but only in a specific use case with ap fs it won't work with windows and the nice thing about xfat is it does work with both mac os and windows the downside being if you have some kind of failure let's say your power goes out while you're doing something on this drive or you have a faulty cord or it gets yanked out there is a much higher likelihood of corrupting the drive because it's not journaled at all there can also be some issues now and then when you're using an ex fat drive between operating systems so just be aware that while it is usable it may not be your best option a lot of times when you buy these ready-made portable drives they will come formatted with xfat but you can't switch them over to apfs just as easily once you've got everything formatted it's super easy to start moving over files and working directories and it's also very simple to move over applications as well i can head over to my applications folder on my internal drive and just start dragging apps from there over to my external drive and in most cases those are going to run without any issues i find that they start up way faster off this usb 4 drive as well so that's an added bonus and i'm not cluttering up that 256 gig internal drive and speaking of clutter there is one final thing that i want to mention here a lot of times when you're getting rid of things from a drive or from your machine in general it can be pretty clunky and you don't necessarily know if you're removing everything off of your computer or not i know personally once that i've been using my machine for a long time i have files all over the place left over from previous app installs and i get to the point where i just wipe my computer and start fresh one app that has really helped me out with this is clean my mac x i'm always quite skeptical when it comes to these types of apps but i do know a lot of folks in the tech space who are using cleanmymac and i decided to give it a whirl and i was super impressed with it it allows you to clean up disk space remove any unwanted apps and also find any malware through their malware removal module it's just a really great little hub for managing your storage i recently used this to clean out a bunch of old files like a leftover parallels install that i was testing out on my m1 i just deleted parallels and i found all this junk left over and this app really helped me clean that up along with a bunch of other old unused stuff and i also found some malware too which was really nice to get rid of full disclosure i actually reached out to macpaw who builds this software to see if we can collaborate on a video i've been using this product before i ever contacted them i'm never gonna put something like this on the channel or promote something that i don't personally believe in so if you are at all curious about this software or you do want to grab a copy yourself there is a link in the description it's super useful for anything related to managing your storage and taking care of nasty things like malware i know that there's probably a lot to unpack in process here but i hope this was informative and you found it useful my main goal here was just to give you some info in hopes that it does provide you with some value make you a little bit more comfortable navigating through things like storage if you have any questions about any of the stuff that i talked about in this video please leave a comment down below or if you just want to share your favorite pet names that's okay too please hit that thumbs up if you enjoyed this video subscribe if you feel like we may have been siblings in a past life thank you so much for watching i will see you in the next upload [Music] you

Channel: Kyle Erickson

Views: 724,243

Keywords: external hard drive, external ssd mac, best external ssd, mac mini m1, best ssd for mac, best ssd for macbook air, best ssd for macbook pro, macbook pro, mac mini, macbook pro storage, best ssd, best ssd for video editing, ssd for video editing, best hard drive for video editing, best portable ssd, external ssd, best portable ssd 2022, best external hard drive, acasis ssd enclosure, nvme enclosure, thunderbolt 3, thunderbolt 3 ssd, best thunderbolt 3 ssd

Id: PMX3GFrvnlA

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022