The Best External SSD for Content Creators 

As a minimalist content creator, this is exactly the solution I’m looking for. Thanks for sharing!

I was a “content creator” in the early days of RU-vid. I gave it up to pursue my career but now i want to create content to help others who are pursuing a similar path. Times have changed, tech has changed- now I’m doing my best to advance with technology. I appreciate the information you provide, you are definitely helping me figure out the technical side of my creative pursuits. Thanks!

Recently, I've seen manufacturers creating a single housing/shuttle unit that hold four NVMe drives. It's the same size as a 3.5" SSD. Very light. Runs hot. Handles RAID configs. That option can be useful for creators with large projects who need professional-grade data redundancy and quick retrieval.

This came at such a good time as I’m doing a complete revamp of my media storage! I’ve been working mostly off the Samsung SSDs, G-Drives, and Lacie HDDs, but it’s amazing to see the options we have for external storage these days. Great video and really appreciate the BM speed tests you did!

I'm currently using the following external setup on my MBP 16" M1 Pro & Mac Studio M1 Max to edit FCPx vids. I'm getting read/write speeds of 2400 thru 2800+ MB/s (2.4 Gb/s thru 2.8Gb/s). This is among the fastest I've seen for an external M.2 setup! M.2 stick: SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe Gen 4 (MZ-V8P1T0B) - $139 Enclosure: TEKQ Cube Thunderbolt 3 SSD Enclosure, Thunderbolt 4, USB 4 - $127 Overall, I'm pretty darn happy with this setup even though the enclosure does get hot (they all do!). Also, I know the SSD is overkill since the enclosure will NEVER see the 7000 MB/s rating of the gen 4 980pro, but for the reasonable/discounted price of the pro I decided to get the highest tier option.

The enclosure alone is $140. The crucial x8 external SSD is $99. Am I missing something here? I didn't want to spend $200-$350 on 1tb...and I don't think my 2019 laptop can use 40gbps via thunderbolt. But 1050mbps may be more realistic. Definitely need some help figuring this out...financially.

My SSD Dreams were answered hahah I've been looking for something out of the norm, and this is definitely a refreshing way to go about making media storage fun! Thanks Ryan!

I can honestly say I had no idea you could do something like this. Awesome! Thanks for sharing.

I’m very skeptical of RU-vid creator recommendations. But this dude has earned my trust.

Bought the Acasis a year ago... Ended up not using it cause it's heavy and big. Instead I use a Kingston xs2000 which is small and ultralite and I have no problem even when it's hanging from my Macbook pro's usb-c port. However, I miss the speed of the TB4 Acasis case, so, I'm in search for the best way to attach the case on the screen... Nice video!

As a DJ who works every single weekend at minimum, and is also constantly updating and restructuring his library, having a fast & reliable hard drive is super duper important. I've tested this idea of a custom drive years ago during prominent 2.5 inch SATA SSD's, and my custom worked very well for basic file management. Excited to give this another go for my music libraries.

Your video is one of the best and clearest that I have seen in a long time. I am not a computer geek but an amateur photographer who completely understood your presentation. Thank you.

bro, your backing track choices are sick

Appreciate the "nerdy video", I didn't even know This was a possibility before😂

Brilliant! I thought about doing this but I wasn't sure if it was worth it or not.

I’ve had a bad experience with the Sabrent drives with the enclosure. Sure they’re fast, but I’ve had them get too hot and disconnect mid transfer. I’ve had this happen on two Sabrent purchases.

This is very useful and so timely, thanks a lot Ryan! I just ran out of space in my computer 2 days ago and i was going crazy trying to figure out what to do for my media storage and you broke it down so clearly! Im getting that Sabrant and Acasis combo right now.

Good points bro 🔥

Ahhh coming in clutch as always bro! Media storage is definitely something I've been wanting to have a nice portable system with since I didn't spring for massive storage on my Mac. Glad to see the different options that are out there and speed is always a must haha 👌🏾

Very helpful! Simple explanations, good hands on demonstration, a nice chart and finally a good summary.

Your delivery and video quality is off the roof! 😮

As someone who just got home from a remote gig doing editing on the fly and quickly for a music festival I really wish the algo would’ve recommended this video before my gig lol! Man this was so insightful and full of the exact information I need to level up my editing rig! Thank you so much!

Great tip. I can't believe the transfer speeds. Amazing.

Finally a video that is really worth watching on youtube! thank you Ryan!!

I’ll stick to the T7 2TB for $129.99. The price for the amount of storage can’t be beat and they’re fast enough for video work. I suppose if you’re shooting 6K or 8K video and you want to edit off the drive, then build a drive with good speed and heat dissipation.

I haven't been in the game for nearly ten years. Seeing this video brought me up to speed with what I need to know to make an informed decision. Thank you. I liked and subbed

Thanks. I like that you tested the same nvme SSD in both a USB 3.x enclosure and a thunderbolt enclosure. I need a drive that will work for computers that have both types of connections, so the more expensive enclosure is worth it for me. Thanks again.

I was having second thoughts on buying a T5 or reuse my old laptop's 256gb ssd. You sold me with this! Thanks Ry!

Different video but I really liked this one. I’ve been using the S7 and would love to try something different. 👏

Hi Ryan. Great vid. I purchased the NVMe M.2 SSD Acasis enclosure and the Rocket Q4 NVMe 4.0 (2TB) SSD and ran the blackmagic speed test. I am only seeing write speeds of 1073 MB/s and reads of 2381 MB/s. Connected to PC via provided thunderbolt(3) cable. Any thoughts as to why I would be seeing the slower write speeds? Appreciate your thoughts.

I use an Icy Dock PCIe 4x mobile rack in my main PC. I can take the NVMe out of the Sabrent (for example) and put it in the Icy Dock cartridge then insert the cartridge into the rack. Other users claim you can get 4.0 speed out of this on a 4.0 slot. I can confidently say, it's fast AF!! The only big drawback is that since the rack is on the PCI bus, it's not plug-and-play, requires a reboot. I haven't played around with it, yet. I tend to move the data via USB 3.+ to the NVMe in the rack. NVMe sticks are great for archiving, so you no longer need a warehouse!!!!

Do you think putting a 980 pro heatsink version into an Acasis enclosure, and leaving it open behind the Mac studio right next to the air flow is a good idea?

Did you use the thermal pad that came with the Acasis?

Definitely getting on this asap. Very helpful, thank you Ryan!

You just save me, I was about to buy a $400 SSD. Now I’m building one 🤘🏼. Thanks man

I’ve been using the acasis enclosure for almost a year now. I can’t stress how much i recommend this for speed and heat dissipation. I’ve had a sabrant 1tb’s chips burn a couple of years due to heat when i installed it on a cheap plastic/aluminum enclosure 😡. I can’t insist enough applying a heat spreader so it touches the cover. Some SSDs do not touch the case, rendering the purchase of a premium product useless. Let alone loosing a high quality SSD.

I got a WD SN850X NVME in one of those Acasis enclosures and on my MacBook Pro it can copy 30GB within seconds.

Excellent video man, precise and straight to the point, thank you!

Another great video my guy! I’ve actually been looking into getting a new hardrive, hopefully an SSD this time around.

Great idea but in Canada on Amazon the hi speed enclosure combined with the Sabrent 4 TB comes out to $1,000 with tax in CDN $. WTF. Who really can afford that?

Super insightful!!! Thanks for introducing it☺️ definitely considering switching!

I don’t believe you can fairly test the Sabrent enclosure on a Mac. While Mac’s do have thunderbolt/usb4 capabilities, anything 3.2 is not supported and gets throttled down to 3.1 speeds. I so not not the full extent of this, but I did confirm that my M1 MacBook Pro M1 Pro only has the usb 3.1 bus interface.

Super interesting! I never knew you could Frankenstein your own drive, I’ll defo be looking into this from now on :)

Do sabrent enclosures have overheating?

Thanks, very useful. One question: I read that only thunderbolt automatically executes Trim routines on the SSD, and that with USB the drive gets slower over time. True?

I'm using Sandisk E61 2TB SSD for backups on shoot, I like the durability and form factor. But I'd definitely use this setup for editing. Thanks for the tip!

Thanks, you've answered my question ... which was: will the Acacis support over 2TB SSD.

Never though about doing this but this makes so much sense 🙏🏼

Good video but There’s a mistake you said 0:45 Weather its a laptop or SSD that does not make sense you mean laptop and desktop? Right?

What about RAID system ? Everything located in a single disk when connected to your computer

bro TBH this was very insightful video thanks for the effort you have put on.

Built this setup and was excited about it, but it keeps randomly ejecting from my MacBook Pro. Any ideas on what to do? Hope someone sees this, as I can’t find any info on it.

thanks a lot, this video was really helpful. Thanks for your clear and eloquent way of explaining things... 👏🏻

I will have to check this out I have used a lot of the large and small m.2 enclosures. The only problem I had found with the small ones is that they would get so hot (even tho they shouldn't).

I heard that you need a special Thunderbolt cable to get the best speeds out of the mac. Did you use one, or just a USB-C cable?

From everything I see and have experienced, most of those drives will perform THE SAME in final cut for example. I have a sabrent rocket but now thinking I don't need to spend double the price of a new ready to go ssd, compared to the the acacis and 980pro I have saved on Amazon 😅

What do you recommend for backing up all your projects? like 6TB or so

Wow this is fantastic advice, thank you for the super practical content man!

Why would anyone choose to edit off any of those when they have transfer rates of 1000 when the laci rugged pro transfers at 2800. Is there something I’m missing?

Hi Ryan, with the same configuration I am just the half in write speed (1060MB/s, instead of your 2370MB/s). Did you formatted your Sabrent as exFAT? Cheers!

Really helpful video. Very enlightening when it comes to this topic. Do you think using the top choice in speed you tested I’m going to see a difference using this as a work drive for Final Cut libraries over a Samsaung T7? I’m working with 4K 50p regularly now on a 2021 M1 MBP Max.

Noted! Thank you 🙏

As someone in IT I find marketing the act of simply putting internal hard drives in enclosures as “custom hard drives”fascinating. Not complaining, i enjoy this pivot.

Can it be used with black magic pocket cinema camera?

curious to how are we going to store those m.2 ssd when not in use?🤔

Hi Ryan Does the speed make much difference? Hell yes. Why? With M1 macs now welding ram, hard drive and processor together the hard drive is just part of a massive computing unit. Mine regularly makes 50gig scratch files. With all the programs and OS on there it is half full already. I want to leave acres of free space for it to burn while doing heavy lifting. I do this to increase the lifespan of the drive and - cos its bonded to the processor - also the mac itself. Enter thunderbolt SSD. Now we can upgrade the fixed hard drive by bolting on terabytes of space at the speed of an internal drive. Files live outside the box - tools, horsepower and thinking space inside. I run some doozy Affinity files with hundreds of linked items. I want no lag. Thanks for this.

So it works well with a Macbook pro? I've heard some ssds do not play well with Macbooks

@1:08 "...this Samsung T7 or even T5..." Note that the T7 is very fast, until its cache runs out. When that happens, you can expect USB 2.0 speed from the T7. I do not know how much cache the T7 has. It is probably 5% - 10% of the drive's capacity. So for most people, they will never write enough data, without rest, to fill the T7's cache. Then, when the drive is not busy, it offloads the data in its cache to the very slow QLC NAND fabric. That frees up your cache. The T5, on the other hand, will not slow down (well, nothing meaningful). You can write to it, and fill it to capacity, non-stop, and it will run at (or near) its top speed, 100% of the time. For smaller write operations, the T7 will be faster than the T5. And if you will never be writing 100GB+ of data, non-stop, then the T7 is a great choice. So the T7 is a super fast sprinter. The T5 is a very fast marathon runner. I discovered the performance issues when using both the T5 and the T7 for Chia processing. The T5 was a great performer, in that regard. The T7 took something like 8x longer to complete the same job, and that is because Chia processing will exceed your drive's cache. I returned my T7. @2:26 "You'd be really surprised at how hot these little NVMe drives get". Note that that will happen, only when you are writing gigs and gigs and gigs of data, with little or no rest. For saving your 2GB video, and nothing else, it hardly heats up. And for reading data from the NVMe drive, that will not heat it up.

Good, clear explanation. Thank you.

Thank You for this! Super helpful

Could you record prores footage from an external monitor directly onto this SSD?

Ahhhhh I dunno which one to get? My new labtop has a thunderbolt 4 port that I'm not using so thinking about the more expensive one. I'm going to utilize a 1TB ssd I bought a few years ago for a desktop I didn't end up building so now I want the space to use for storing and editing videos. Any advice?

New sub here. Loved this video!! I’ve always felt that hard drives are a total rip off lol so thank you for helping us find a better solution.

Great video. Question. Love the fast enclosure idea with a 2TB ssd. I am thinking of buying a used basic iMac 24 inch. Can I use final cut and use that fast SSD to hold my video and use it to edit from Final Cut? Small videos also. Not major motion pics. Just Real Estate videos. Thanks very much

Has anybody tried this out for long-term video file storage? And if so, is a custom-built hard drive reliable for long-term file storage - aka can it ensure that my files won't get corrupted over time? Thanks for the help :)

many thanks, excellent work, sir.

If you have a MacBook Pro with 8TB Storage, what external drive would you recommend for use with Time Machine? One that is ideally somewhat portable but still fast (that is, if speed is important for a drive you use with Time Machine, maybe not?) Great video thank you for the information!

A fast Q’ for you (genius 10/10) wanting to export pro res files (motion content - not stills) from Iphone 14 pro max 1 TB daily. Wondering if this will make the cut. Lightening to USB C ? Will it go into the SABRENT system your talking of. If so I’m there in a heartbeat. Thanks again for this great episode. 🎥💪🏼🖋

Samsung T5 has jumped to 329USD. The SanDisk 2TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD - is 2 x as fast Up to 2000MB/s at 269USD. None have Thunderbolt 4. I cannot find the Acasis usb 4.0 m.2 nvme ssd enclosure with Thunderbolt 4/3 Anywhere. Do you have a link to one? Your AMAZON SCREEN SHOT indicates Thunderbolt 3/4. Thank you sir! Us cinematic composers need super high speed that allows us to run massive TB programs straight from the external SSD. I'm going with Acasis and the Rocket SSD. 4 days of researching this has paid off.

thank you for this video! will take your advice

Would love to see a render test between the different SSD's

Very impressive demo! Thanks.

This review was done in Febuary. Any new recoomendations for case and drive?

this was informative! thanks

This is impressive as I'm willing to get Mac Studio + external SSD's!

Great video! One of the best!! Does it run hot during hours of editing? I bought the space shuttle and it nearly burned me. Just wanted your thoughts on this configuration and if so, do you suggest something like thermal pads along with it to keep the temp down. Thanks again!

Man thank you this is very eye opening !!! I also recently bought a m1 macbook pro 14inch and i still didn’t get any dock nore nvme enclosure solution to go with it!!! I am thrilled that you even manage to get it running with a 4To sabrent nvme when acasis themselves advertise their product to max out at 2 To nvme limit Did you kept it ? Have you experience or notice any drop outs or disfunction with the acasis/sabrent combo! I am very curious plus i am about to shoot !!! Anyway thank you for sharing with us , and i wait for your answer anytime you get the chance. God bless you.

Can i use this to record video with my A7iv without external monitor, cause i find CF express A is overkill my budget. Thanks

Still looking for ssd that can keep up with 12bit cdng fikes from my sigma fp. So many SSD failed... Bought samsung t7 ssd it is fine very fast until it get 40% used space then it started dropping frames. Found out that it's common thing for ssmsung t7

YUP! I READ DESCRIPTION!

Dude you're a legend. I turned the bell on.

Do you know what's most affordable for 4TB? Is it possible to have 2x Gen3 NVME SSD in to the fast enclosure?

Great video, very informative. Thank You

Greetings man! Thanks for the content, you support me a lot. Now the problem I have is that the Sabrent 4TB i not find it, I have only seen the 2TB and 1TB. I just bought a MacBook Pro to edit videos but I don't want to use the hard drive of the Mac to edit or install apps. I want to do it on an external hard drive. Do you think the Sabrent 2TB will work for me or do I really need the 4TB? Thanks in advance!!

Just here to say after 7 months, this SSD has changed my life. Yes it gets hot but honestly how fast it works I don’t care 🤣

Would this be good for long term storage? Like if I left my photos or videos on this for years and kept it safe

*newbie to Mac* Can that Acasis work with the new M2 MacBook Pro's with TB 4?

Would that option would be good considering it even for transporting and travelling? Thank you!!!

My SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB giving only 300 MB/s speed .... is it fine or it's not correct.

Thanks just ordered!