Certainly for a Backup, going with an affordable drive setup like this (after the initial Backup is done and you're only adding incremental changes), the speeds do not need to be Video Playback and one might be able to afford 2 Backups (keeping one offsite!), I have to say @DavidHarry you hit ALL of the important considerations during your explanation of doing the Drive Erasure, finding the Drive and pull downs in the Disk Utility. You left nothing to chance for a beginner with the latest version of Mac OS, explaining the Finder Preferences, etc. This is clearly targeted at the budget conscious and possibly first time Mac buyer and full-fills everything that needed explaining. Beautiful presentation and meaningful advice for the larger and non-technical audience. 👏
Remember for long term storage, it’s best not to use an SSD of any kind. It’s not really an issue if the drive is connected, but they are not suitable for archive purposes because the data will start to degrade if the drive is never powered up to refresh the NAND memory. If you want to store old videos or photos for the long term, then a regular mechanical hard drive is the best way to go - stored safely they will last for decades.
Hi. Yes, most of the information in this video is for people who are not too technical. A lot of “how to” guides miss out on some of the steps and aren’t very clear, which can confuse those who are less technically orientated. Thanks for your comment 👍 Cheers, Dave.
@@chrisward000 I disagree. I have many decades old HDD's (and newer ones), and they tend to be VERY unreliable. Just last week I attempted to transfer old photos from a 2008 Samsung 1TB 3.5" SATA, which appeared to be OK at first, but then the pickup arm started to make horrible clicking noises. The drive was unreadable. The drive was connected via a SATA 3 cable, and power, direct to a Gigabyte motherboard. There should not have been any issues IMO...
You bought the base M4 Mac Mini and now you want to add some external SSD storage. However, do you really need a super fast Thunderbolt 5 SSD or Thunderbolt 4 SSD or even a USB4 SSD? Maybe you don't need super fast speeds and all you need is as much external SSD storage that you can get for the lowest cost. In that case, a SATA SSD inside a USB-C to SATA enclosure may be all that you need. In this video I show you how put together the 4TB ORICO Y-20 SATA SSD with an ORICO USB-C enclosure. The video also shows how to format the SSD for your Apple Silicon Mac and I also do a number of speed tests. For these types of external SSDs, you only need a 5Gb/s USB-C to SATA enclosure. As 5Gb/s is faster than the speed of the SATA SSD. Here's a video showing video editing from a SATA SSD with am M4 Max MacBook Pro using DaVinci Resolve Studio: Is A SATA USB-C SSD Fast Enough For Video Editing On Your Mac With DaVinci Resolve Studio? th-cam.com/video/aYG5EEmH8sY/w-d-xo.html Video chapters: 00:00 Intro 02:36 How to build the SSD 08:10 Setup information 11:52 How to format your SSD 17:25 M4 Mac Mini synthetic disk speed test 19:56 M4 Mac Mini real world disk speed test 22:45 Results for M4 Mac Mini real world disk speed test 23:55 M4 Max MacBook Pro synthetic disk speed test 25:43 M4 Max MacBook Pro real world disk speed test 29:05 Results for M4 Max MacBook Pro real world disk speed test 30:39 End summary Here's some links to the stuff used in the video. If the ORICO enclosure is not available at your local Amazon, you can use the version that has the USB-C to USB-A cable if you are on a Mac with USB-A ports. If not, you can just any SATA to USB-C enclosure that comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable. IF USING MY AMAZON LINKS AND YOU LIVE OUTSIDE OF THE USA, MAKE SURE THAT THE LINK HAS SENT YOU TO THE CORRECT PRODUCT. MY LINKS ARE FOR AMAZON.COM AND THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO REDIRECT TO YOUR COUNTRY IF IT'S NOT THE USA BUT THE REDIRECTS ARE SOMETIMES WRONG, SO JUST MAKE SURE. I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THIS, THIS IS DOWN TO AMAZON. Try this code for the Orico SSD if ordering on Amazon.co.uk it might give you 5% off J8XJVXB9 Orico Y-20 SATA SSD 4TB ➡ amzn.to/4iUiiQ0 Orico Y-20 SATA SSD 2TB ➡ amzn.to/49WDyAg Orico Y-20 SATA SSD 1TB ➡ amzn.to/429Xle3 Orico USB-C to SATA enclosure ➡ geni.us/JuXXXXg M4 Max MacBook Pro 16" ➡ geni.us/70Xn M4 Max MacBook Pro 14" ➡ geni.us/57QzTfu M4 Pro MacBook Pro 16" ➡ geni.us/qSYR M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14" ➡ geni.us/4thf yu0 M4 MacBook Pro 14" ➡ geni.us/Y7TFR Mac Mini M4 ➡ geni.us/oibaLH Mac Mini M4 Pro ➡ geni.us/ImJto AMAZON ASSOCIATE DISCLOSURE: I am an Amazon Associate. My Amazon links are Amazon affiliate links. I earn money from qualifying purchases when you use my Amazon affiliate links. OTHER EARNINGS AND COMMISSIONS: I also earn money from other product links within my video description. For the sake of clarity and for the avoidance of any confusion, assume that I earn money from commissions from any and all links that I have within my video description. Amazon links to stuff used in this video: The gear that I use, have used or reviewed that I would recommend. Cameras: amzn.to/3PzC8mI Microphones: amzn.to/3tD6FaM Computers: amzn.to/3tuwHNr Phones: amzn.to/3ttqjWN iPads & Tablets: amzn.to/46t8wxG You can also send me a coffee donation via PayPal if you found my video super helpful: www.paypal.me/DavidHarry My Amazon pages with videos and product links: Amazon USA www.amazon.com/shop/davidharry Amazon UK www.amazon.co.uk/shop/davidharry If you would like to help my channel please use my global Amazon Affiliate links. I will be paid a small commission for anything you buy from Amazon when using these links. These commissions don't cost you any extra but really do help me to buy gear for my productions and to review: Amazon USA: geni.us/Amazon-USA Amazon UK: geni.us/Amazon-UK Amazon Deutschland: geni.us/Amazon-Deutschland Amazon France: geni.us/Amazon-France Amazon España: geni.us/Amazon-Espana Amazon Italia: geni.us/Amazon-Italia Amazon Canada: geni.us/Amazon-Canada Contact for product reviews: TH-cam@DavidHarry.com www.DavidHarry.com I’m David Harry. Thank you very much for watching this video, take care and goodbye now. Cheers, Dave. #DavidHarry#LiverpoolTV
don't forget that some transfer speeds, such as cables, is given at for example a10Gbps ... that's BITS not BYTES - there are 8 bits in a byte. so 400Mb here, its compared to 3.2Gbps not too shabby. Correct be if I'm wrong
Hi. All the measurements in this video were in bytes but yes, there are 8 bits in a byte when measuring storage. So yes, 400MB/s is the same as 3.2Gb/s or 3200Mb/s. Cheers, Dave.
He's absolutely right. It seems to me that the whole pursuit of speed is like if someone is trying to catch the mythical unicorn. But the main question is whether I even need this speeds, or will I use it.
Perhaps this is a thought to consider. My fastest SDXC-card is a V90 with 300 MB/s write speed and it i sufficient for the camera to continuously record some of the biggest file formats the camera can produce, so a read and write speed of about 300-400 MB/s seams to be sufficient for at least one video stream. Great video. Thanks.
Yes, that’s absolutely right. I use SATA SSDs in my Atomos Ninja for recording ProRes 422 HQ 4K 60FPS, which requires over 1800Mb/s. The 400MB/s that this SSD is capable of is 3200Mb/s. So given that most video cameras record around 100Mb/s. You can easily use SATA SSDs and high end SD cards for video editing. With the SATA SSD you’d also be able to edit a number of simultaneous streams, depending on the bit rates, as the SATA SSD has better seek times and the necessary buffer. I show this is in one of my recent videos. Cheers, Dave.
being new to Mac and having gotten the base m4 and I am using a starfield edition 5TB xbox seagate external HDD for my Time Machine backup drive. also just doubled the storage with the sandisk ultra dual drive go use type c with up to 400 MBs speed 256gb for $29 @ Best Buy. now I just need to figure out how to get my music, pics, videos, to live on the sandisk and free up the room on the internal I would be in love with this setup.
There is a way to set up a fast external drive and have that be your "working drive" and route everything to that (bigger) ext drive. It requires moving the right system folder unto the external then deleting that folder from the internal....boom, the M4's internal drive remains mostly untouched ....and the faster the drive the better the performance...but make sure and do your research first.
Do not move your home folder to an external drive, there’s a load of potential issues doing that. Plus you have two points of failure for your OS. The better option is to install the OS direct to the external drive, if you need a larger OS/boot drive. Cheers, Dave.
Your videos are great, thank you very much for the insight and clear instructional format. Nice also to see as a Brit, a youtube video from a UK creator. You mentioned at the end of the video that for editing these drives and speed are sufficient. The many videos available on youtube are generally of creators explaining how fast something is for 10mins, moving files from one place to another but nothing relating to a guy who needs to edit videos all day from an external drive. Explaining if scrubbing through a FCP video is either smooth or jittery. How often you see the spinning wheel etc. while actually working on a video. Also, are there heating up issues meaning the drive works slower the longer you work. As I said, like your videos but some real life working while using recommended gear over long lengths of time would be really, really useful. Put some fast forwards on so we can see you working for a number of hours of course :) Keep up the good work man!
I couldn’t get the backing off the foam pads on my Orico caddy, so I used some sticky spacers on top of the SSD to keep it from moving. The caddy is okay, but lacks any form of LED, so you have no idea if it’s connected.
Same here, it was a bit tricky. I had to pre-peel it as I knew I would have had issues doing it “live”. In the UK this enclosure only £8 when I was sent this one, so I’m not too concerned that it doesn’t have any led indicators. You could of course use a different enclosure if you wanted but this one works fine and helps to keep the cost down. Cheers, Dave.
great content sir, i bought a base M4 Mac mini . I need a 2TB SSD, but I don't know what to buy, my main purpose is not backup, but to use the SSD as a main/home drive, what do you recommend me in this regard, thanks in advance. P.s. I have thunderbolt 5 cable.
@@ozer-u9p Hi. Thank you 👍 I would not recommend moving your home folder to an external SSD, for a number of reasons. The main reason is that you will then have two potential points of failure. A better solution would be to install macOS to the external SSD, however, this has a few limitations if you want to use things such as Apple’s AI. In any event, for either scenario you are best using the fastest external drive possible that you can afford. I definitely would not recommend a SATA USB-C SSD for such things, it will be a lot slower compared to the internal storage for your OS. BTW, you may already have a TB5 cable, however, your particularly Mac does not use TB5. Check back later, I’m uploading a video comparing the speeds of Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5 SSDs. Cheers, Dave.
is this the specific orico enclosure you used? ORICO 2.5 inch External Hard Drive Enclosure USB 3.0 to SATA III for 7mm and 9.5mm SATA HDD SSD Tool Free [UASP Supported] Black (25PW1-U3)
@DavidHarry What would you recommend for a time machine backup for a 2024 iMac M4 that has a 2TB internal SSD? I will use this iMac mainly for photo editing and general email, web browsing, etc. No video editing. I was thinking a mechanical hard drive might be a better choice than a SSD due to lower cost. Also, doesn't an SSD have a finite number of writes? If yes, should this be a consideration? I'd like a small form factor, usb-c powered drive. Thank you!
I personally see no need to buy a SATA SSD for external use, when you can pick up a Gen3 NVMe for roughly the same price. In both cases you'll need an enclosure, but even a cheap NVMe enclosure with a Gen3 NVMe inside will run circles around a SATA drive. There used to be a large premium for NVMe drives over SATA SSDs, but not anymore, at least from what I've seen. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, of maybe you can find some big sales sometimes on SATA SSDs for models that nobody wants. But in general, I'll never remotely consider SATA SSDs anymore, nor recommend them for others. NVMe drives are way more future proof than SATA SSDs.
Hi, Aaron. You failed to mention the two biggest issues with cheap Gen 3 NVMe SSDs, low cache and slow NAND. Most of these cheap Gen 3s and even some lower end Gen 4s, only have a small cache, some only capable of 10s of GBs and once it's depleted some of these SSD will drop down to about 200MB/s with their main NAND and this can get worse the more full the drive gets. In that instance, a SATA SSD that can sustain 400MB/s is going to be faster with large data dumps. Also, the vast majority of video edits are easily done from a SATA SSD. So you gain no advantage with a faster SSD, even a Thunderbolt 5 one. Depending on the country you live in, there can be quite a big difference in price between SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs will be a better choice financially. Bottom line, you will get exactly what you pay for with a cheap NVMe and USB-C enclosure and a SATA SSD can still out perform it in long data dumps, with no advantage whatsoever either for most types of video editing and music production. The argument for NVMe is a good one but only if you pay the money for a good SSD and enclosure. At which point you are putting more distance, financially, between it and a good, cheaper SATA SSD. Cheers, Dave.
@@DavidHarry As for speed with large data dumps, I'll defer to you and your testing, as I've never done that. As for pricing, at Amazon USA, according to the link you provided, the Orico 2TB SATA drive is $109.99. Again on Amazon USA, a 2TB WD Blue SN580 Gen4x4 is $109.99, the same price. Lesser known brands can be had for even less. Orico NVMe enclosures I see for $16, so no significant difference in price for either type of enclosure. The bottom line, based on what I know, is that whether your buying a SATA or NVMe, either drive is saving to flash chips, and those flash chips cost the manufacturer the same whether they're building a SATA or an NVMe drive. The underlying hardware technology is the same, only the controller chip/interface is different. The controller chip and manufacturing costs will likely be similar for a SATA or NVMe, though if the market is larger for NVMe drives (which I presume it is), then there might be a better economy of scale for the NVMe. If the bottleneck is in the flash chips and controller/cache, and that bottleneck is at a speed below the SATA bus maximum throughput, then a SATA and NVMe drive should perform similar in your test situation, right?. But if the bottleneck is at a speed above the SATA bus maximum throughput, then the NVMe drive will perform better than the SATA, right? It all comes down to which components (flash, cache) are inside the drive in figuring out the performance, and then figuring out whether that performance results in a bottleneck in the flash/cache, or with the interface (SATA vs PCIe), and then beyond that, the interface to the computer (USB/TB). Orico sells 2TB NVMe drives on Amazon USA, with their gen4x4 for $109.99 and their gen3x4 for $99.99, both of them with a cache. I'd be willing to bet they use the same chips in one of those two drives as they use in their SATA drive, with the only difference being the controller chip and interface/form factor. If you see the same (or even cheaper price) from the same company, which is likely operating on the same profit margins for the two products, using the same chips, then, to me, it indicates there is zero price advantage of SATA over NVMe, and perhaps even a price advantage for NVMe over SATA. I wonder if anyone's actually examined in detail two such drives from ORICO, or some other manufacturer and listed the chips being used.
@@aaronlee6821 Hi, Aaron. There are many types of NAND chips. What you said about manufacturers' costs being the same whether they're building a SATA or NVMe is not correct for the "flash" chips as you say. Take Orico as an example. They make a 4TB NVMe for £300 here in the UK. Yet the 4TB SATA drive costs only £170. I can absolutely guarantee you that they are not using the same NAND in both SSDs. As I've already said, the big issue with cheap NVMe SSDs is their cache size and NAND speed, with NAND varying a lot. The simple fact that certain SATA SSD's can sustain 400MB/s easily for at least 500GB of writing when a cheap NVMe can and will drop below 200MB/s once it's exhausted its cache and drops down to slow NAND and ends up below 200MB/s. Proves the advantage of a good SATA SSD over a poor NVMe SSD for particular storage use. If I can get the time I will try and do an example of this happening. As I do have an NVMe that will do exactly as I've just described and will lose out to a good SATA SSD for sustained writing when backing up large amounts of data. For the shorter bursts the cheap NVMe will win. However, short is very relative to what people do and also what the differences in caches are. I regularly move 500GB and even terabytes of data at a time. So for me personally, no SATA SSD or cheap NVMe SSD will be good enough. Which is why I use TB4 and TB5 with fast Gen 4 NVMe SSDs that have large cache areas, such as the WD SN850X. However, I still get frustrated with these "fast" drives when I'm trying to free up space on my media drives. If you find any videos or information about any teardowns as you described, looking at the NAND on two Orico's, as an example. Please let me know, as I'd also be interested to see that 👍 Cheers, Dave.
@@DavidHarry Thanks for the reply, David. As with you, I regularly transfer large amounts of data, similar to your 500GB/1TB transfers. So, as with you, SATA SSDs or cheap NVMe SSDs won't cut it. Thus, I'm not really presently interested much in either, but just saw your video and watched a couple sections of it, because a year or more ago I was actually comparing SATA SSDs vs NVMe SSDs vs SATA HDDs for storing lots and lots of data. I presumed at the time: 1. SATA SSDs are much faster than SATA HDDs, but SATA HDDs are much cheaper. 2. SATA SSDs are slower than NVMe SSDs, but are cheaper. Point 1, I found was correct, but for point 2 I found that in my location, SATA SSDs were not any cheaper, which I was surprised at that time, but it made sense to me when I thought about it. Anyways, I won't belabor this discussion, being it's not related to my current needs, but will inform you if I run across any other information that might be useful for others who are trying to decide between SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs. Cheers
@@aaronlee6821 Hi, Aaron. I think for the likes of you and I, the conversation of SATA SSDs is a bit moot. Seeing as neither of us are using a cheap NVMe for our main drives, SATA SSDs are even further down the list. However, in certain territories they are cheaper than cheap NVMe SSDs and could be a deal for some people. The main point of this video was to avoid the expensive SSDs for expensive Macs and to talk relative differences when talking about Apple's cheapest Mac. I also done a video recently showing practical video editing from a SATA SSD. Again, just to show people that it can be easily done and to stop people thinking that they "have to" buy the fastest thing possible. I think too many "tech" TH-camrs try convincing people to buy the "big ticket" items, that they inevitably get more affiliate income from. I have nothing against people making money from affiliations, I do it myself. However, I get pissed off when I see viewers being bullshited about such things when they are basically being lied to. There's one particular video by a big TH-cam channel that I have recently seen where they talk absolute bullshit about the 990 Pro and a TB5 enclosure. As soon as I can get my second TB5 enclosure (my Mac's storage is too small for the test) I will totally debunk this other video. Anyway, I'm going proper sideways now. so I'll shut my big fat mouth 😂 Hope to catch up soon again in the comments. Take care. Cheers, Dave.
Interesting my Mac mini Pro (24Gb RAM and 1Tb SSD) gives me a blistering Write /Read 6212 / 5082 while my 40Gbps enclosure with a 4Tb SSD Lexar rated forum to 7000 runs at 1/2 that - I get 2165/3428 which is disappointingppointimg but not an issues. It's still pretty fast ! But mine is a "Pro" not the base. Anyone considering a Mini should reflect on whether they need that processing speed to not.
Hi, Patrick. You will find that all fast SSDs wont run at the maximum speed of the Thunderbolt standard you are using, even though the SSD is capable of faster speeds. This is down to two reasons. For Thunderbolt 4 the first reason is that although Thunderbolt 4 is 40Gb/s, only 32Gb/s is allocated to data transfer. This is due to Thunderbolt using PCIe tunnelling and the PCIe bridge/controller is only PCIe 3 Gen 4 which is a maximum of 32Gb/s. The reason why you don't even get 32Gb/s (4GB/s - 4000MB/s) is because of various overheads. Also, video (DisplayPort) data takes preference. So if you use video on the same Thunderbolt 4 bus that your SSD is connected to, the video signal will be allocated bandwidth first and the higher the resolution and refresh rate of your video signal, the more bandwidth that will be assigned to the video signal, further reducing the bandwidth for the data from the SSD. This also gets worse if you use multiple monitors. Cheers, Dave.
The problem at least where I am from is that the difference in price between a an SSD and and NVME can be 20/30$, depending on model theres no difference at all.... So i might aswell get thre fast one.
Too bad I didn't see this earlier. Bought a Thunderbolt 4 encosure & 2B Samsung 990 EVO SSD. But realize that the M4 Mac Mini could read a but not wright to a NTFS SSD in a 10GB/s Enclosure fast eogh to read the files to play my Not to Complicated time lines. At 1/3 the price of the M4 MacMini it don't mater.
@@DavidHarry I just might once I get more details on backwards compatibility between Thunderbolt 4 & 5, since my MacBook is the M1 Max MBP with only TB4 Ports
Your "practical" write and read speeds are a little bit faster only because 400 GB isn't really 400,000 MB! You'd have to divide those 400 GB by 1.024 to receive 390,625 MB. But this is a minor thing to criticize ...
Nope, you are wrong. Storage, speed etc. is measured in denary/base 10 and not in binary/base 2. There are 1000 Megabytes in a Gigabyte. There are 1024 Mebibytes in a Gibibyte. These are two different measurements and all SSDs and storage etc. are measured in Megabytes.
It's overkill for most normies but it cost less than half of what Apple charges for storage...I saw YT video where the creator used 2 full Thunderbolt 4 NVMe drives in RAID O (splitting data across two 1TB NVMes .... for a big speed increase)....then use a slower but big USB-C SSD on the front connector as a backup for the whole shebang. The external drive speeds now kick butt on a base M4 mini. Basically, you can saturate the TB4 external RAID...but its important to have a current backup.
@@TheDanEdwards People use externals for other than TM backups, but even in that case I would rather have it done faster than slower. Also in this case his internal drive is full and is experiencing slowness, If it was me I would use an external to move more non essential apps to. Just my IMO though.
I have been thinking about a similar setup for time machine backups, it needs to be faster than my spinning rust USB drive. Looking at 2TB drives, there is no price difference between 2.5” sata and M.2 80mm versions and I do have a bunch of m.2 enclosures available. So I’ll go the m.2 route, but the SATA route would’ve still been a massive improvement for me.
Given that I have already demonstrated the fastest Thunderbolt 5 SSD you can put together, there's nothing wrong with me. So the question is. What's wrong with you, dude?
Certainly for a Backup, going with an affordable drive setup like this (after the initial Backup is done and you're only adding incremental changes), the speeds do not need to be Video Playback and one might be able to afford 2 Backups (keeping one offsite!),
I have to say @DavidHarry you hit ALL of the important considerations during your explanation of doing the Drive Erasure, finding the Drive and pull downs in the Disk Utility. You left nothing to chance for a beginner with the latest version of Mac OS, explaining the Finder Preferences, etc. This is clearly targeted at the budget conscious and possibly first time Mac buyer and full-fills everything that needed explaining. Beautiful presentation and meaningful advice for the larger and non-technical audience. 👏
Remember for long term storage, it’s best not to use an SSD of any kind. It’s not really an issue if the drive is connected, but they are not suitable for archive purposes because the data will start to degrade if the drive is never powered up to refresh the NAND memory. If you want to store old videos or photos for the long term, then a regular mechanical hard drive is the best way to go - stored safely they will last for decades.
Hi. Yes, most of the information in this video is for people who are not too technical. A lot of “how to” guides miss out on some of the steps and aren’t very clear, which can confuse those who are less technically orientated. Thanks for your comment 👍 Cheers, Dave.
@@chrisward000 I disagree. I have many decades old HDD's (and newer ones), and they tend to be VERY unreliable. Just last week I attempted to transfer old photos from a 2008 Samsung 1TB 3.5" SATA, which appeared to be OK at first, but then the pickup arm started to make horrible clicking noises. The drive was unreadable. The drive was connected via a SATA 3 cable, and power, direct to a Gigabyte motherboard. There should not have been any issues IMO...
You bought the base M4 Mac Mini and now you want to add some external SSD storage. However, do you really need a super fast Thunderbolt 5 SSD or Thunderbolt 4 SSD or even a USB4 SSD?
Maybe you don't need super fast speeds and all you need is as much external SSD storage that you can get for the lowest cost. In that case, a SATA SSD inside a USB-C to SATA enclosure may be all that you need.
In this video I show you how put together the 4TB ORICO Y-20 SATA SSD with an ORICO USB-C enclosure. The video also shows how to format the SSD for your Apple Silicon Mac and I also do a number of speed tests.
For these types of external SSDs, you only need a 5Gb/s USB-C to SATA enclosure. As 5Gb/s is faster than the speed of the SATA SSD.
Here's a video showing video editing from a SATA SSD with am M4 Max MacBook Pro using DaVinci Resolve Studio:
Is A SATA USB-C SSD Fast Enough For Video Editing On Your Mac With DaVinci Resolve Studio?
th-cam.com/video/aYG5EEmH8sY/w-d-xo.html
Video chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:36 How to build the SSD
08:10 Setup information
11:52 How to format your SSD
17:25 M4 Mac Mini synthetic disk speed test
19:56 M4 Mac Mini real world disk speed test
22:45 Results for M4 Mac Mini real world disk speed test
23:55 M4 Max MacBook Pro synthetic disk speed test
25:43 M4 Max MacBook Pro real world disk speed test
29:05 Results for M4 Max MacBook Pro real world disk speed test
30:39 End summary
Here's some links to the stuff used in the video. If the ORICO enclosure is not available at your local Amazon, you can use the version that has the USB-C to USB-A cable if you are on a Mac with USB-A ports. If not, you can just any SATA to USB-C enclosure that comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable.
IF USING MY AMAZON LINKS AND YOU LIVE OUTSIDE OF THE USA, MAKE SURE THAT THE LINK HAS SENT YOU TO THE CORRECT PRODUCT. MY LINKS ARE FOR AMAZON.COM AND THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO REDIRECT TO YOUR COUNTRY IF IT'S NOT THE USA BUT THE REDIRECTS ARE SOMETIMES WRONG, SO JUST MAKE SURE. I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THIS, THIS IS DOWN TO AMAZON.
Try this code for the Orico SSD if ordering on Amazon.co.uk it might give you 5% off J8XJVXB9
Orico Y-20 SATA SSD 4TB ➡ amzn.to/4iUiiQ0
Orico Y-20 SATA SSD 2TB ➡ amzn.to/49WDyAg
Orico Y-20 SATA SSD 1TB ➡ amzn.to/429Xle3
Orico USB-C to SATA enclosure ➡ geni.us/JuXXXXg
M4 Max MacBook Pro 16" ➡ geni.us/70Xn
M4 Max MacBook Pro 14" ➡ geni.us/57QzTfu
M4 Pro MacBook Pro 16" ➡ geni.us/qSYR
M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14" ➡ geni.us/4thf yu0
M4 MacBook Pro 14" ➡ geni.us/Y7TFR
Mac Mini M4 ➡ geni.us/oibaLH
Mac Mini M4 Pro ➡ geni.us/ImJto
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I’m David Harry. Thank you very much for watching this video, take care and goodbye now.
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I paired my base model M4 Mac Mini with a Crucial X9 Pro 4TB SSD and I’m very happy with them.
Nice drive 👍
Agreed! 👍👍I'll probably get a dock with a 2TB internal NVMe M.2 and use this as external storage and a 12TB HDD for backup.
Refreshing! Not just show the high end expensive stuff. There’s definitely a place for these in my opinion! Btw love your accent❤
Yes, there’s loads of videos about the fast drives and not everyone needs them. Thanks for the comment about my accent 👍 Cheers, Dave.
Just bought this enclosure to repurpose an old SSD into a backup drive - works like a charm
Yes, nice cheap enclosure that can be used for repurposing old SSDs and give you extra spare storage 👍 Cheers, Dave.
don't forget that some transfer speeds, such as cables, is given at for example a10Gbps ... that's BITS not BYTES - there are 8 bits in a byte. so 400Mb here, its compared to 3.2Gbps not too shabby. Correct be if I'm wrong
Hi. All the measurements in this video were in bytes but yes, there are 8 bits in a byte when measuring storage. So yes, 400MB/s is the same as 3.2Gb/s or 3200Mb/s. Cheers, Dave.
very clear video. In fact the best that I've seen that explains everything.
He's absolutely right. It seems to me that the whole pursuit of speed is like if someone is trying to catch the mythical unicorn. But the main question is whether I even need this speeds, or will I use it.
Yes. thats right. The big question with external storage is if you need the speed or not. Cheers, Dave.
Perhaps this is a thought to consider. My fastest SDXC-card is a V90 with 300 MB/s write speed and it i sufficient for the camera to continuously record some of the biggest file formats the camera can produce, so a read and write speed of about 300-400 MB/s seams to be sufficient for at least one video stream. Great video. Thanks.
Yes, that’s absolutely right. I use SATA SSDs in my Atomos Ninja for recording ProRes 422 HQ 4K 60FPS, which requires over 1800Mb/s. The 400MB/s that this SSD is capable of is 3200Mb/s. So given that most video cameras record around 100Mb/s. You can easily use SATA SSDs and high end SD cards for video editing. With the SATA SSD you’d also be able to edit a number of simultaneous streams, depending on the bit rates, as the SATA SSD has better seek times and the necessary buffer. I show this is in one of my recent videos. Cheers, Dave.
I tuoi video sono sempre professionali.
Continua così.
being new to Mac and having gotten the base m4 and I am using a starfield edition 5TB xbox seagate external HDD for my Time Machine backup drive. also just doubled the storage with the sandisk ultra dual drive go use type c with up to 400 MBs speed 256gb for $29 @ Best Buy. now I just need to figure out how to get my music, pics, videos, to live on the sandisk and free up the room on the internal I would be in love with this setup.
There is a way to set up a fast external drive and have that be your "working drive" and route everything to that (bigger) ext drive. It requires moving the right system folder unto the external then deleting that folder from the internal....boom, the M4's internal drive remains mostly untouched ....and the faster the drive the better the performance...but make sure and do your research first.
Do not move your home folder to an external drive, there’s a load of potential issues doing that. Plus you have two points of failure for your OS. The better option is to install the OS direct to the external drive, if you need a larger OS/boot drive. Cheers, Dave.
Thank you very much for your detailed and informative great video. 🙏🙂 May I ask where you come from? I love your dialect. 🤗❤
Thank you 😊
You're welcome 😊
Your videos are great, thank you very much for the insight and clear instructional format. Nice also to see as a Brit, a youtube video from a UK creator. You mentioned at the end of the video that for editing these drives and speed are sufficient. The many videos available on youtube are generally of creators explaining how fast something is for 10mins, moving files from one place to another but nothing relating to a guy who needs to edit videos all day from an external drive. Explaining if scrubbing through a FCP video is either smooth or jittery. How often you see the spinning wheel etc. while actually working on a video. Also, are there heating up issues meaning the drive works slower the longer you work.
As I said, like your videos but some real life working while using recommended gear over long lengths of time would be really, really useful. Put some fast forwards on so we can see you working for a number of hours of course :)
Keep up the good work man!
I couldn’t get the backing off the foam pads on my Orico caddy, so I used some sticky spacers on top of the SSD to keep it from moving. The caddy is okay, but lacks any form of LED, so you have no idea if it’s connected.
Same here, it was a bit tricky. I had to pre-peel it as I knew I would have had issues doing it “live”. In the UK this enclosure only £8 when I was sent this one, so I’m not too concerned that it doesn’t have any led indicators. You could of course use a different enclosure if you wanted but this one works fine and helps to keep the cost down. Cheers, Dave.
Eres un autentico crack hermano, muchas gracias!
great content sir, i bought a base M4 Mac mini . I need a 2TB SSD, but I don't know what to buy, my main purpose is not backup, but to use the SSD as a main/home drive, what do you recommend me in this regard, thanks in advance. P.s. I have thunderbolt 5 cable.
@@ozer-u9p Hi. Thank you 👍 I would not recommend moving your home folder to an external SSD, for a number of reasons. The main reason is that you will then have two potential points of failure. A better solution would be to install macOS to the external SSD, however, this has a few limitations if you want to use things such as Apple’s AI. In any event, for either scenario you are best using the fastest external drive possible that you can afford. I definitely would not recommend a SATA USB-C SSD for such things, it will be a lot slower compared to the internal storage for your OS. BTW, you may already have a TB5 cable, however, your particularly Mac does not use TB5. Check back later, I’m uploading a video comparing the speeds of Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5 SSDs. Cheers, Dave.
is this the specific orico enclosure you used? ORICO 2.5 inch External Hard Drive Enclosure USB 3.0 to SATA III for 7mm and 9.5mm SATA HDD SSD Tool Free [UASP Supported] Black (25PW1-U3)
It’s the one with the USB-C to USB-C cable.
Depends on use cases.
For casual use that’s fine but for production use that’s slow👎
What type of production are you talking about? You’ve not given any examples.
@DavidHarry What would you recommend for a time machine backup for a 2024 iMac M4 that has a 2TB internal SSD? I will use this iMac mainly for photo editing and general email, web browsing, etc. No video editing. I was thinking a mechanical hard drive might be a better choice than a SSD due to lower cost. Also, doesn't an SSD have a finite number of writes? If yes, should this be a consideration? I'd like a small form factor, usb-c powered drive. Thank you!
Can you make the 4TB as the main boot drive, replacing the internal drive ?
Yes but it would be a lot slower.
I personally see no need to buy a SATA SSD for external use, when you can pick up a Gen3 NVMe for roughly the same price. In both cases you'll need an enclosure, but even a cheap NVMe enclosure with a Gen3 NVMe inside will run circles around a SATA drive. There used to be a large premium for NVMe drives over SATA SSDs, but not anymore, at least from what I've seen. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world, of maybe you can find some big sales sometimes on SATA SSDs for models that nobody wants. But in general, I'll never remotely consider SATA SSDs anymore, nor recommend them for others. NVMe drives are way more future proof than SATA SSDs.
Hi, Aaron. You failed to mention the two biggest issues with cheap Gen 3 NVMe SSDs, low cache and slow NAND. Most of these cheap Gen 3s and even some lower end Gen 4s, only have a small cache, some only capable of 10s of GBs and once it's depleted some of these SSD will drop down to about 200MB/s with their main NAND and this can get worse the more full the drive gets. In that instance, a SATA SSD that can sustain 400MB/s is going to be faster with large data dumps. Also, the vast majority of video edits are easily done from a SATA SSD. So you gain no advantage with a faster SSD, even a Thunderbolt 5 one. Depending on the country you live in, there can be quite a big difference in price between SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs will be a better choice financially. Bottom line, you will get exactly what you pay for with a cheap NVMe and USB-C enclosure and a SATA SSD can still out perform it in long data dumps, with no advantage whatsoever either for most types of video editing and music production. The argument for NVMe is a good one but only if you pay the money for a good SSD and enclosure. At which point you are putting more distance, financially, between it and a good, cheaper SATA SSD. Cheers, Dave.
@@DavidHarry As for speed with large data dumps, I'll defer to you and your testing, as I've never done that.
As for pricing, at Amazon USA, according to the link you provided, the Orico 2TB SATA drive is $109.99. Again on Amazon USA, a 2TB WD Blue SN580 Gen4x4 is $109.99, the same price. Lesser known brands can be had for even less.
Orico NVMe enclosures I see for $16, so no significant difference in price for either type of enclosure.
The bottom line, based on what I know, is that whether your buying a SATA or NVMe, either drive is saving to flash chips, and those flash chips cost the manufacturer the same whether they're building a SATA or an NVMe drive. The underlying hardware technology is the same, only the controller chip/interface is different. The controller chip and manufacturing costs will likely be similar for a SATA or NVMe, though if the market is larger for NVMe drives (which I presume it is), then there might be a better economy of scale for the NVMe. If the bottleneck is in the flash chips and controller/cache, and that bottleneck is at a speed below the SATA bus maximum throughput, then a SATA and NVMe drive should perform similar in your test situation, right?. But if the bottleneck is at a speed above the SATA bus maximum throughput, then the NVMe drive will perform better than the SATA, right? It all comes down to which components (flash, cache) are inside the drive in figuring out the performance, and then figuring out whether that performance results in a bottleneck in the flash/cache, or with the interface (SATA vs PCIe), and then beyond that, the interface to the computer (USB/TB).
Orico sells 2TB NVMe drives on Amazon USA, with their gen4x4 for $109.99 and their gen3x4 for $99.99, both of them with a cache. I'd be willing to bet they use the same chips in one of those two drives as they use in their SATA drive, with the only difference being the controller chip and interface/form factor. If you see the same (or even cheaper price) from the same company, which is likely operating on the same profit margins for the two products, using the same chips, then, to me, it indicates there is zero price advantage of SATA over NVMe, and perhaps even a price advantage for NVMe over SATA. I wonder if anyone's actually examined in detail two such drives from ORICO, or some other manufacturer and listed the chips being used.
@@aaronlee6821 Hi, Aaron. There are many types of NAND chips. What you said about manufacturers' costs being the same whether they're building a SATA or NVMe is not correct for the "flash" chips as you say. Take Orico as an example. They make a 4TB NVMe for £300 here in the UK. Yet the 4TB SATA drive costs only £170. I can absolutely guarantee you that they are not using the same NAND in both SSDs.
As I've already said, the big issue with cheap NVMe SSDs is their cache size and NAND speed, with NAND varying a lot. The simple fact that certain SATA SSD's can sustain 400MB/s easily for at least 500GB of writing when a cheap NVMe can and will drop below 200MB/s once it's exhausted its cache and drops down to slow NAND and ends up below 200MB/s. Proves the advantage of a good SATA SSD over a poor NVMe SSD for particular storage use.
If I can get the time I will try and do an example of this happening. As I do have an NVMe that will do exactly as I've just described and will lose out to a good SATA SSD for sustained writing when backing up large amounts of data. For the shorter bursts the cheap NVMe will win. However, short is very relative to what people do and also what the differences in caches are. I regularly move 500GB and even terabytes of data at a time. So for me personally, no SATA SSD or cheap NVMe SSD will be good enough. Which is why I use TB4 and TB5 with fast Gen 4 NVMe SSDs that have large cache areas, such as the WD SN850X. However, I still get frustrated with these "fast" drives when I'm trying to free up space on my media drives.
If you find any videos or information about any teardowns as you described, looking at the NAND on two Orico's, as an example. Please let me know, as I'd also be interested to see that 👍
Cheers,
Dave.
@@DavidHarry Thanks for the reply, David. As with you, I regularly transfer large amounts of data, similar to your 500GB/1TB transfers. So, as with you, SATA SSDs or cheap NVMe SSDs won't cut it. Thus, I'm not really presently interested much in either, but just saw your video and watched a couple sections of it, because a year or more ago I was actually comparing SATA SSDs vs NVMe SSDs vs SATA HDDs for storing lots and lots of data. I presumed at the time:
1. SATA SSDs are much faster than SATA HDDs, but SATA HDDs are much cheaper.
2. SATA SSDs are slower than NVMe SSDs, but are cheaper.
Point 1, I found was correct, but for point 2 I found that in my location, SATA SSDs were not any cheaper, which I was surprised at that time, but it made sense to me when I thought about it.
Anyways, I won't belabor this discussion, being it's not related to my current needs, but will inform you if I run across any other information that might be useful for others who are trying to decide between SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs.
Cheers
@@aaronlee6821 Hi, Aaron. I think for the likes of you and I, the conversation of SATA SSDs is a bit moot. Seeing as neither of us are using a cheap NVMe for our main drives, SATA SSDs are even further down the list. However, in certain territories they are cheaper than cheap NVMe SSDs and could be a deal for some people. The main point of this video was to avoid the expensive SSDs for expensive Macs and to talk relative differences when talking about Apple's cheapest Mac. I also done a video recently showing practical video editing from a SATA SSD. Again, just to show people that it can be easily done and to stop people thinking that they "have to" buy the fastest thing possible. I think too many "tech" TH-camrs try convincing people to buy the "big ticket" items, that they inevitably get more affiliate income from. I have nothing against people making money from affiliations, I do it myself. However, I get pissed off when I see viewers being bullshited about such things when they are basically being lied to. There's one particular video by a big TH-cam channel that I have recently seen where they talk absolute bullshit about the 990 Pro and a TB5 enclosure. As soon as I can get my second TB5 enclosure (my Mac's storage is too small for the test) I will totally debunk this other video. Anyway, I'm going proper sideways now. so I'll shut my big fat mouth 😂 Hope to catch up soon again in the comments. Take care. Cheers, Dave.
One guy recommends owc
There are issues w brand
Unsure if orico better than owc??
Oh it's m.2 sticks not ssd
Interesting my Mac mini Pro (24Gb RAM and 1Tb SSD) gives me a blistering Write /Read 6212 / 5082 while my 40Gbps enclosure with a 4Tb SSD Lexar rated forum to 7000 runs at 1/2 that - I get 2165/3428 which is disappointingppointimg but not an issues. It's still pretty fast ! But mine is a "Pro" not the base. Anyone considering a Mini should reflect on whether they need that processing speed to not.
Hi, Patrick. You will find that all fast SSDs wont run at the maximum speed of the Thunderbolt standard you are using, even though the SSD is capable of faster speeds. This is down to two reasons. For Thunderbolt 4 the first reason is that although Thunderbolt 4 is 40Gb/s, only 32Gb/s is allocated to data transfer. This is due to Thunderbolt using PCIe tunnelling and the PCIe bridge/controller is only PCIe 3 Gen 4 which is a maximum of 32Gb/s. The reason why you don't even get 32Gb/s (4GB/s - 4000MB/s) is because of various overheads. Also, video (DisplayPort) data takes preference. So if you use video on the same Thunderbolt 4 bus that your SSD is connected to, the video signal will be allocated bandwidth first and the higher the resolution and refresh rate of your video signal, the more bandwidth that will be assigned to the video signal, further reducing the bandwidth for the data from the SSD. This also gets worse if you use multiple monitors. Cheers, Dave.
The problem at least where I am from is that the difference in price between a an SSD and and NVME can be 20/30$, depending on model theres no difference at all.... So i might aswell get thre fast one.
Too bad I didn't see this earlier. Bought a Thunderbolt 4 encosure & 2B Samsung 990 EVO SSD. But realize that the M4 Mac Mini could read a but not wright to a NTFS SSD in a 10GB/s Enclosure fast eogh to read the files to play my Not to Complicated time lines. At 1/3 the price of the M4 MacMini it don't mater.
I heard Sata & thought hard pass, made a nvme drive using a 2tb Samsung 970 Evo Plus & a Acasis Thunderbolt Enclosure.
You could always go faster and use Thunderbolt 5 with a fast SSD. Cheers, Dave.
@@DavidHarry I just might once I get more details on backwards compatibility between Thunderbolt 4 & 5, since my MacBook is the M1 Max MBP with only TB4 Ports
@@JayfkProductions876 TB5 SSDs work great with M1 Max MBP but you won’t get the full speed out of the TB5 SSD.
Your "practical" write and read speeds are a little bit faster only because 400 GB isn't really 400,000 MB! You'd have to divide those 400 GB by 1.024 to receive 390,625 MB. But this is a minor thing to criticize ...
Nope, you are wrong. Storage, speed etc. is measured in denary/base 10 and not in binary/base 2. There are 1000 Megabytes in a Gigabyte. There are 1024 Mebibytes in a Gibibyte. These are two different measurements and all SSDs and storage etc. are measured in Megabytes.
@@DavidHarry However your files are stored in binary/base 2. Therefore it makes sense to give the space as Mebibytes (and not Megabytes/base 10).
@ Nope, the measurements are in base 10. The Mac is measuring them the same whether stored internally or externally.
Yeah this is a pass.. I would rather spend the extra few bucks for a 4TB sandisk SSD at 1000 MBs
If one wants to use the storage for TimeMachine, for example, why is a faster SSD needed?
This same principle can be applied to nvme m.2 drives, which would have the same speeds as a proprietary external ssd.
It's overkill for most normies but it cost less than half of what Apple charges for storage...I saw YT video where the creator used 2 full Thunderbolt 4 NVMe drives in RAID O (splitting data across two 1TB NVMes .... for a big speed increase)....then use a slower but big USB-C SSD on the front connector as a backup for the whole shebang. The external drive speeds now kick butt on a base M4 mini. Basically, you can saturate the TB4 external RAID...but its important to have a current backup.
@@TheDanEdwards People use externals for other than TM backups, but even in that case I would rather have it done faster than slower. Also in this case his internal drive is full and is experiencing slowness, If it was me I would use an external to move more non essential apps to. Just my IMO though.
I have been thinking about a similar setup for time machine backups, it needs to be faster than my spinning rust USB drive. Looking at 2TB drives, there is no price difference between 2.5” sata and M.2 80mm versions and I do have a bunch of m.2 enclosures available. So I’ll go the m.2 route, but the SATA route would’ve still been a massive improvement for me.
Nvme thunderbolt dude whats wrong with you
Given that I have already demonstrated the fastest Thunderbolt 5 SSD you can put together, there's nothing wrong with me. So the question is. What's wrong with you, dude?
@@DavidHarry LOL 🤣🤣🤣
you better free up some of that internal storage or your mac wont boot up soon and then your in a pickle