M1 Mac | Save Money with an External Drive

now one of the things that i've really appreciated about the m1 mac mini is the fact that this small investment has given me so much time back but one of the things that i want to discuss today is actually making a smaller investment to get a larger return let's get into it what is going on you beautiful humans welcome back to the channel and hey if you are new here welcome now i'm going to continue to update the community here with all of the m1 mac mini and really just the m1 silicon experience that i've been having i am going to do an entire overview on the mac mini i'm sure you've watched plenty of videos but today i really want to update the community on all the testing that is happening gaming is definitely coming i'm working on that right now but when it comes to video and photo and when we are looking at the ram and the hard drive the space and looking at the mac mini coming in at 699 us to have a machine that is capable of cutting this video scrubbing through an ak timeline really but here's the thing i i need you to think about the 699 price tag as a starting point to bump yourself up to really 899 us dollars and here's what i mean getting as much ram as you can afford and and what i want to do is make sure that none of you are blowing out your budgets to oblivion to where you're not going to recover if you gotta mow some lawns if you gotta shovel some snow if you have to cut back on some non-essentials around your house or you know going out if anybody's really going out but when it comes to the investment that you're making in this apple silicon if you are someone who is using ram intensive applications the m1 is so efficient but what i can tell you from all of my testing and i did a video on 8k uh video like cutting that video rendering it and it actually does work but i do have 16 gigs of ram yes you're seeing that happening on the base models but what i can tell you is i'm using that ram i am utilizing it to its fullest so that being said when we look at the ram that's where i think you should make your first investment if you can afford that extra couple hundred dollars because when we look at the hard drive space that's where we can save some money and here's the thing before we get too deep into this if you're someone who is cutting 8k uh raw video all the time transcoding it rendering it you might not be working on an m1 or you may be in a different sphere than i plan on working in the next several years but if you're someone who even is cutting 4k 10-bit 4k and using various codecs it is nice to actually have that extra ram even though the the applications are very efficient at least the ones that are um designed by apple right now and those that adobe is still working on uh to become efficient and being able to play well with the apple silicon and m1 specifically but what i will tell you is that as someone who has edited a lot of video for years on external drives like this ssd drives they work well they're very efficient they're portable it's great if you're doing client work something that you can hand off to someone you're you're working with so you could hand this off and have all of the raw footage in it and i did a video on editing on an external hard drive specifically at ssd and i will link that up but in final cut pro and really any nle you should be able to have all of your raw footage on here and for final cut pro specifically having your bundle your library as you're working in final cut pro so that means that final cut pro still exists on the internal hard drive however all of the raw footage and everything that you're working with and working on is happening on the ssd now i do have several of these drives i have the samsung t5 i also have one from sandisk and these are both read and write speeds of around 540 to 550 megabytes per second however we're going to be talking about what these benchmarks really look like in these advertised speeds so i'll talk to talk to you a moment about that because i also have a faster drive so these are usb uh type c also usb a 3.1 whereas the extreme sandisk this bumps up to still usb type c so using that thunderbolt connection in the back of my mac mini however this doubles the read and write speed relatively speaking because this is an nvme uh drive in here and so it's it's a faster drive and we'll talk about that but again we're talking about advertised speeds and i'll actually talk to you about why i i made this investment but i still use these as well now of course the internal drives in these computers are wicked fast and you are certainly going to get the best performance because you won't really have any bottleneck happening from an external drive so that video that i did and i'll link that up where i literally scrub through cut 8k and 4k footage in that timeline it wasn't transcoded there was no optimization of that footage at all and it took two hours and 27 minutes to render it from raw to be able to post on youtube and that was just a two minute clip now i did something kind of i think kind of silly because honestly if you're cutting that kind of footage as i said before and really working with it and you're using an ssd so i did a little test and i tried to render the same timeline same time i didn't change anything and i this thing took over 11 hours to render i had to leave it overnight and then came back and it was still just as i was coming back to the computer it was just about to finish rendering so over 11 hours on an external ssd it didn't fail it so it didn't crash it didn't overheat the computer kept going the ssd was i mean it stayed connected so nothing there were no issues and i was actually most surprised by that but if you're someone who is like yeah i'm going to be editing this type of footage and putting it on an external drive like this and then i'm just going to leave it overnight i'm not recommending that and that is really like an outlier use case but of course moving over to a more realistic timeline and what i've been doing for years is my own 4k footage and it was a 17 minute timeline cut corrected luts transitions and so that editing took about 6 minutes and 11 seconds on the internal drive of the mac mini however on the samsung t5 it took about 8 minutes and 32 seconds so of course when you look at it like that and you think like all right just another couple of minutes to to render this and and have this you know work for me to save a bundle um because obviously we know that the storage with apple is at a premium and to put that that more toward the budget of the ram i think two minutes is reasonable as far as the efficiency is concerned and like i said the 8k raw footage i mean that is a complete outlier you're doing completely different kind of stuff and you're probably not doing it on a mac mini and you probably have several terabytes of internal storage anyway and of course segwaying over here to the advertised faster drive of the sandisk extreme and having double read and write speeds really what it came down to is a 28 second savings of a render time so the thing is is that that might not mean that much to you and when it comes to making these purchases right now there's a ton of sales and these two drives are within anywhere from 10 to 30 dollars of each other i do recommend at least at a minimum a terabyte drive but getting these um anywhere from 129 to 139 us and so i mean i remember paying twice that for the t5 when it first came out so you're going to look at a 20 to 30 difference between the two and of course putting it into perspective when you're transferring from the internal drive to these external drives you'll notice a bit of a bump and you know like i said same thing with transferring between these drives that's where you're really going to see those advertised speeds however when it comes to rendering i was getting like a peak read of around 125 and a peak right of about 183 or so on the extreme because there's a bottleneck happening so you have these very fast cars on a highway and able to go very fast but as you're going through the lanes and paring down and kind of crunching down and putting that data putting the cars through those lanes you're gonna have a bit of a slowdown so you have to ask yourself realistically is it worth the extra money now for me the reason why i wanted to go ahead and invest in this faster drive was the fact that you can still use these ssds to record externally on other devices cameras and so to be able to have the ability to have a read and write speed of twice that of the t5 although the t5 is going to be just fine and of course there is a t7 that's equivalent to this extreme but i'm just telling you that if things are really tight as far as the budget's concerned i i edited on this t5 for years and it has held up quite well and then of course building on the internals just really quickly in that the t5 has the sata again very responsive and the operating temperature so those thermals per my infrared thermometer i was getting anywhere from 25 to 30 degrees celsius when it came to just that render and it sustained that for the longer render as i was watching it for like hours it didn't really go too much above that however with the extreme and the nvme drive that's in there you're going to expect a higher operating temperature and those are the things that you might see in reviews that there is these things do get hotter and of course i was getting somewhere in the neighborhood of around 40 degrees celsius and so for those of you who understand drives you might think like well i don't know if i want that to be sustained and even going higher some folks have even gotten that to go higher and does the longevity of the drive is that reduced because of those thermals and those are some things that you might want to consider however i did make the investment and i think it's a good investment and of course sandisk does actually come i believe they are coming with a five-year warranty um as far as any data loss or replacement or anything like that so for me it's kind of in peace of mind but this t5 have been rocking it for at least the last couple of years with no issues all right you may have some questions and of course those of you that already have machines that may only have the eight gigs of ram i'm not necessarily saying send it back but just understand that i am noticing a lot more efficiency with 16 gigs of ram based on the other reviews that i'm seeing on those base models that is my use case that is what i'm seeing this isn't just pure benchmark so hit me up below you know where i'm hanging out either here on on youtube or i'm also hanging out on twitter so follow me over there you go out there and do those things that matter you keep rocking the faces i'm going to keep creating some more value here some more m1 content for you and i'm going to be getting to some gaming here so you go do the things and i'll catch you right back here on the next one

Channel: Kevin Ross

Views: 170,792

Keywords: Before buying a M1 Mac, Save money with an external drive, apple m1 review, m1 mac mini review, should i get 8 or 16 ram, mac mini m1, mac mini m1 review, apple silicon, mac mini m1 video editing, video editing with an external drive, best external, best external hard drive for mac, m1 macbook pro, m1 macbook air, Kevin Ross, Kevin Ross RN, apple m1 chip, m1 macbook, apple m1, m1 macbook pro ram, apple silicon mac mini, apple silicon mac review

Id: gbL_amCt8wg

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020