The blistering fast internal Mac NVME top storage speed is not reached, in real world use, as often as you might think. All you have to do is drop them into a $15 USB 3.0 enclosure. There are internal 4TB SATA SSDs by WD, SanDisk, and Samsung that cost $375 and up depending on when you find the specials. If you are happy with the performance with it, you win, you can buy more SATA SSDs and save a truckload of money. The initial reason for the internal Mac SSD speed is using the highest grade NVMe chips, the second reason is RAIDing them internally so if you order a higher capacity, you get more parallel channels to storage. That makes it, at minimum 4x faster and maximum almost 8x than the WD drive, and minimum 8x faster and maximum about 15x than the Samsung T5. The Mac Studio internal NVMe is capable of 4000MB/sec and well beyond, some configurations can reach 7400MB/sec. The pickier PC users with money buy the high grade NVMes that are 2000-4000MB/sec like what’s in the Mac. The WD Black linked there claims up to 2000MB/sec. The Samsung T5 is a SATA based drive, so it is going to top out around 450-550MB/sec. What are the factors to consider that will help me decide? WD_Black 4TB P50-Game Drive Portable External Solid State Drive SSD, Compatible with-Playstation-Xbox, PC, & Mac, Up to 2,000 MB/s - WDBA3S0040BBK-WESN I just use the time to open another beerįor that $1500 I could instead get TWO 4TB external SSDs like this WD one: Since I don't actually work on files on the external drives I don't much care that they're slow. No experience with the units to which you linked. These enclosures are not very portable though, require power bricks, and are certainly not pocketable :). Pretty much ANY kind of external SSD would certainly beat the old worn out HDD's in this enclosure and give significantly better test results, but I can't make any guess as to how much. I have never used SSD's in an external RAID 0. Don't recall exactly what drives, but they are pretty old and were not the fastest to begin with. The second screenshot is a disk speed test run on an external G RAID enclosure configured for RAID 0 and connected on Thunderbolt 2 and containing two 7200 rpm Western Digital drives.

The first screenshot is a disk speed test run on the base spec Apple Studio M1 Max. If you perform your work on the files on your internal SSD and then transfer them to the externals, you might not get as much benefit from larger SSD internals as you would wish. Unless you wish to actually work on files residing on the external drives I would suggest the $1500 could be better spent elsewhere. externals, but any improvement in actually processing typical sized Photoshop files, for instance, relies more on factors other than disk access. Read/write performance will improve with the internal SSD vs.

Solid state external drive for mac