Fastest External Storage For Your M2 Mac mini

I'm going to show you how to build some external storage that's actually faster than the built-in storage on the M2 Mac Mini let me show you how welcome back to the channel we all know the cost of storage on Apple devices whether it's an M2 Mac Mini or a Macbook or anything like that we don't want to get robbed by Apple is that correct I think we all agree with that for sure anyways you know adding I think going from the base 256 gigabytes all the way up to 512 is an extra 200 bucks going up to I believe one terabyte is 400 bucks going up to two terabytes is 800 that's actually more than buying a M2 Mac Mini by itself the base model and a lot more actually so why would you do that when you can build external storage like this so I wanted to go ahead and show people how to do this and how fast this thing is this thing's blazing fast what are the parts you should use and why you should do this so sit back and relax and we're going to go through exactly how to build your own storage that's faster than the built-in M2 Mac Mini Storage for a lot cheaper let's get into it all right let's cover a couple things so the base model M2 Mac Mini I believe the storage on there if you get the 256 gigabytes is only about 1700 megabytes per second if you get the 512 that jumps up to about 2700 bytes per second well what I'm going to set out in this video is I'm going to try to make something that's close closer to 3000 megabytes per second and going to be a lot cheaper to add additional storage this way than just adding it to the internal M2 Mac Mini so can we do it and can we set out to do it so that's what we're going to find out now if you watch my channel before you know I did a video on this Hub this is for the M2 Mac Mini as well the problem with this one here is it's basically only going to be 10 gigabits per second there's actually storage on the bottom of it and I'll show you a close-up of that and you can go ahead and add an SSD in this and this is a great hub for additional storage for an M2 Mac Mini the problem is this is 10 gigabit per second as far as the connection so the speed here is only going to be about 800 megabytes per second give or take so that's actually a lot less than the 1700 that comes with the base model then I did another video over here this is a satachi hub it sits on kind of top or bottom of the actual Mac Mini and this one over here the problem with this one this one's kind of outdated this one was only five gigabits per second connection and you could only get about 500 megabytes per second and actually probably less than that 400 megabytes per second because it was a SATA m.2 drive that can go in this one so that one didn't work that well either if you want really fast storage all right so in this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to build this one here exactly with the enclosure and the SSD that I use with close-ups then I'm going to do a test on Blackmagic to show you how fast this is stay tuned for that and then I'm going to show you how fast it is to move a couple files then the 8 gig file I think and then a 20 gig file and see how fast that is on a drive like this and you'll be shocked just trust me you're going to be shocked at that all right so let's talk about the enclosure first and then I'm going to tell you the drive I use and why I use that so the case is basically and I'll put it down here because I'm not sure I'm saying it correctly it's the acasis it's the tbu 405 that's the case that I used it's a full aluminum solid construction it's about 139.99 so it's 140 bucks you know and I'll tell you why in a second it claims that it's 40 gigabits per second as far as the speeds way better than the 10 gigabit per second on most of these things and that's one of the reasons you're paying more for sure now on the back of it it has four screws you simply unscrew that up and you put your SSD in drive in here and then basically it came with some heat tape but I read that it was maybe too thin so I bought a one millimeter tape you can see the blue one there I put that on first then it was still not touching the back plate with the tape so I put on the white tape and now it does so it seems like it's basically cooling this okay these are going to get warm to the touch no matter what they're going to get slightly maybe even hot to warm because you're using a Gen 4 or gen 3 m.2 nvme drive those always get hot as long as the tape is touching the back I think you'll be fine though but you can experiment how you want it to cool this so that's not what this is all about but overall this is a great device again it takes Gen 4 or gen 3 drives and but there's specific drives that this thing needs to take to get the speeds we're going to talk about and what those speeds are so let me explain the drive now and why I chose it and what's the cheapest option you can get to get those speeds all right so this is the drive I use and I'll get into that in a second but what what this company they recommended on their website was basically the Samsung 980 Pro all right well you know can be one terabyte two terabytes and that's actually going to be I think about 140 bucks so it's steep you know that drives pretty expensive and then there's also they said Western Digital work really well and they said the sn850 or the sn850x and again that drives about 110 bucks 109 bucks so that's expensive so I went online and I started researching this what are people what do they use with this enclosure and what speeds have they gotten and the drive that I found works the best is right here this is basically going to be the Western Digital black it's called the SN 770 and it claims it's up to 5150 as far as megabytes per second I'll show you close-ups of the drive here in the box and everything so I picked this one up now why did I pick this up instead of spending the 130 bucks on a terabyte for the pro version of the Samsung drive or the other one that was 110 bucks yeah I mean believe it or not I actually picked this up let me show you right here on my screen I got this for 59 nine bucks so you can look on my screen right here you can see 59 it's on sale right now it's actually 54 off so I'm not sure it's gonna last like that so you may have to come back and try to find it for that cost later but anyways so that's the drive I picked because I found out that this drive is very successful at getting those speeds and you're paying a lot less there obviously paying 59 Bucks versus paying 130 or 110 bucks you save a lot of money all right let's look at my screen over here we're going to do this Blackmagic test so first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and just make sure I select the correct drives I'm going to select Target drive I'm going to go over here and I'm going to click on the Western Digital black right here you can see it click on that gonna go ahead and open that up so now we're actually on the Western Digital black the one I just installed the external enclosure and we're going to go ahead and run this test and let's just see how fast this is as you can see it's 2745 on the rights 27.40 on the reads again it's running a second time look at these speeds they're pretty incredible that one's a little bit slower but still Ultra fast so at the end of the day we're talking 2 750 megabytes per second all right so what I did for full disclosures I formatted this as apfs for a Mac but if you wanted to work on a Mac and a PC you can just do xfat you know go ahead and format it as X fat and it should work it should be about the same speed I haven't tested it but I saw some examples online um and so you can see 2750 megabytes per second now again the base model M2 right here is basically going to have about 1700 megabytes per second so that's a thousand megabytes per second faster and even the 512 gigabyte versions only going to be like 2700 somewhere in that range so this is probably actually even faster than the second version up so this is going to be capable of doing anything like video producing or anything like that if you want to do it off the drive it's actually really good at that and so you can't go wrong with something like this because it's just so Ultra fast it doesn't get incredibly hot as long as you have it touching the back plate all right for the second test I want to show you something go ahead and look at my screen here so here's four files they're basically about a gigabyte total in size I'm just going to show you how fast they can move over so watch this I'm going to put this in here now you don't even tell that they moved over and they already moved over so that takes literally one second right it's it's done that's nothing so let's go ahead and do some bigger files all right so this bottom file right here this is eight gigabytes eight gigabyte file watch how fast it does is I'm gonna go one two three I've dropped it in there did it even copy over let me open this up there it is 8.9 8.19 gigabyte file it's done all right now I'm going to take both of these files right here and that's going to equal about 20 Gigabytes of size 20 Gigabytes how long would that take with a slow drive I'm gonna go ahead and drop it right in here like this now let's Let it go there it goes you can see it's going 7 8 10 11 12 15 16. so it takes about five or six seconds and it's done you can see it right there we open it up and that's basically eight 8.19 gigabytes and 11.8 so it's almost you know 20 21 gigabytes in size right there in about five or six seconds so let's wrap this up so why would you buy this again the speed obviously but number two is let's think about this for a second 59 bucks 60 bucks for the drive 140 bucks that's 200 bucks for both in for one terabyte you spend 400 apple right you can actually pick up a two terabyte drive it's basically the same type of drive here it's going to be the sn772 terabyte for 126 bucks and then you can add the enclosure so you're like at 230ish somewhere in there but you'd be spending 800 bucks for that at 800 versus 2 something there's the main difference so you want to probably pick up the two terabyte drive have that incredibly fast storage at 2750 megabytes per second and uh it's golden right you can do all of your editing on this if it breaks you can replace it versus having to you know your computer over using your internal drive that's basically soldered on these are the advantages of doing this and just kind of an experiment but I can't like at the end of the day I can't recommend any other drives even though others are recommended out there definitely try them out Post in the comments what you guys have tried I know for a fact if you try to use specific drives a lot of drives just don't work as well and you won't get these speeds so you definitely want to use the one I recommended or one of the ones they recommended and if you try something else just don't be shocked if you're only getting like 1400 megabytes per second or something like that because that's what a lot of the comments say is a lot of people aren't able to get these speeds unless they get this specific drive or the drives they list in there like the 980 Pro so at the end of the day let's wrap this up these are what my videos are all about just helping people figure out how can you do things that a lot of times other big YouTubers don't talk about and hopefully you can subscribe and help me grow my Channel I want to do this full time soon and I need your help from it so please subscribe if you can and we'll talk to you in the near future peace

Channel: Craig Neidel

Views: 46,630

Keywords: m2 mac mini storage, fastest external storage, fastest external M.2 storage, fastest external SSD, fastest external M.2 SSD, m2 mac mini external storage, how to add external storage to your M2 mac mini, Best external Apple storage, external Apple storage, build fastest external storage, ACASIS TBU405, ACASIS 40 Gbps enclosure, Thunderbolt 3 enclosures, Thunderbolt 4 enclosures, fastest m.2 NVME enclosures, WD Black SSD, WD Black M.2 SSD, top external storage devices, M2 mini

Id: KcPKabfeNQs

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023