BETTER, CHEAPER & SMALLER External Portable SSD | Works on MAC & PC!

The benchmark speed testing that our host demonstrated does not tell the full story on the drive's performance. That is because he tested the drive with only 1GB of data. All consumer level SSDs are divided up into two sections: 1) Very fast NAND cells (probably 10% of the drive -- this varies for each model). 2) Slower NAND cells (can be 20x (or more) slower than #1. Manufacturers to this, to save money by using cheap NAND cells for 90% of the drive, and only use fast NAND cells for a small portion of the drive -- and it is that small portion of the drive that was used in our host's benchmark test. The drive will always write to the fast NAND cells, if there is free space available within the fast NAND cells. When the drive is idle, it transfers data from its fast NAND cells to its slow NAND cells. So most people will always see the fast performance. But if you write enough gigs of data to the drive, without rest, you will fill up the fast NAND cells, and your data will start getting written to the slow NAND cells. If our host's SSD had 50GB of fast NAND cells, and he ran his benchmark with 100GB of data, it might take ½ of forever to finish the test, and he probably would seen an average write speed of under 50MB/s -- a far cry from 1,000MB/s. There is a reason that his choice of SSD was priced that low. It is because that SSD will suffer severe write performance speed if you fill up its fast NAND cells. Note that if you do fill up the fast NAND cells, they will eventually become free, if you give the drive enough idle time to transfer the data to its slow NAND cells. Higher performance, consumer level SSDs will also slow down. But the slow down will not be as bad. On the top tier, consumer level SSDs, the slow down will be minimal. But for over 99% of us, you will never experience the slow down. Just keep in mind that if you intend to write tons of data, non stop, to the drive, then this might be an issue for you. Three drives that will not slow down by much (in no particular order): -- Samsung 980 Pro (or 990 Pro). -- Western Digital Black, SN850X. -- SK hynix, P41. A popular external SSD is Samsung's T7. When that drive slows down, it becomes a pig. Samsung's T5 is much faster, when hit with non stop writes. But for typical, nothing special, use, the T7 is faster than the T5. Next: The terabytes written (TBW) value is basically meaningless. Unless you are writing to the drive, 24/7/365, non stop, you will not wear out the drive. You can probably exceed the TBW value, 10x over, and the drive will work with no problems. The TBW value is basically a way for the manufacturer to deny warranty claims. The drive keeps track of how much data was written to it. If your drive fails, for any reason, and the manufacturer sees that you wrote more than the drive's TBW value, then they will tell you to take a hike. Lastly, there are data center / enterprise level SSDs that will not slow down at all, no matter how much data you write to them. That is because 100% of their NAND cells are of the faster variety. Those SSDs cost 20x the price of our host's SSD.

As someone who builds a lot of custom PCs I use a wide variety of NMVe drives and have seen a lot of failures from Team Group and Sabrent. On the budget end I will only use Crucial P3 or Western Digital such as the SN570 that you did recommend. Both Crucial and Western Digital are very easy to work with when doing RMAs as well. I have not had the same experience with Kingston, Team Group or Sabrent. Planning for good customer support should you ever need it is also wise as well.

First video of yours I’ve watched. Well done. Comprehensive. External storage has come a long way. I’m super old - when I was at Cal State Monterey Bay we used 100mb Zip, 1gb jazz, and whopping 2GB external SCSI hard drives which had a tendency to burn up when running them as scratch disks in photoshop (v6), so seeing all of this come this far so that all of the niche expertise I had developed that existed in the space between the software capabilities and the hardware limitations. One of the biggest changes besides being able to work at required resolution without bottlenecking from RAM that had not capped 200MB was the amount of time it would take to save a project that had 20 layers (300dpi set up for large print interpolated to between 70 - 96 dpi). It could eat up 30 minutes of time on the clock. That along with your one undo made you commit and stick with decisions that these days can easily be reversed or saved as a separate version in a blink. I use one of those Samsung SSDs along with a hyundai that’s 500GB, both of which make my iPad Pro and iMac more storage compatible when they need to be, but for the most part they hold a lot of digital research in larger video and image documents and with airdrop I often don’t really need to physically unplug and replug the thunderbolt.

Crucial P3 Plus is PCIE4 and costs the same as this for 2TB. Significantly better drive on every level. Teamgroup is just asking for problems in my experience.

This is by far the best video i have seen on youtube brilliant work no one ever told me that i had to go on disk management to see the drive i thought the drive was defective because it wasnt plug and play thanks a million the other videos makers are idiots for not pointing that out!

Thank you. I was having trouble doing this and you were the only one I found showing a step by step. Done and done.

The T7 shield is currently at $139 and 970 evo plus is at $129. I'm getting similar performance through a 10Gbps port, and the T7 shield actually runs cooler than the 970 evo plus in an enclosure (checked temp using Crystal Disk Info). The nvme enclosures can get hot as hell when I'm copying files. Though it could be a thing with the controllers. Both of nvme enclosures are using the same controller from Micron. I thought the T7 shield would run hot judging from the look, but it just seems to generate less heat. The only bummer is that the T7 shield only come with a 3-year warranty. And the TBW number is also not confirmed(saw it somewhere that it's 800 for the 2TB model).

I use a old Samsung 970 Evo and a Sabrent enclosure and get sequential read/writes of 1060/1028 and more importantly the randoms are 40.5/80.1 respectively.. all for $25.00 since I already had the unused 970 drive for a couple of years. It makes a fantastic backup drive.

I just did the same thing you are talking about before I started watching this video. I used a WD_black sn770 NVME 1TB and a Yottamaster enclosre. Works well for what I intend to use it for.

Storage costs keep coming down as speed and reliability goes up, which is awesome! I have two Nvme m.2 drives in my desktop and two in my laptop, as well as one similar to what you’re showing here - good stuff!

I decided to go with the 2TB for only slightly more than the 1TB because the pricing now 7 months after your original posting has come down enough that it's only a little more than twice the price, plus the 2TB is Gen4 PCIE at 3500 and the 1TB is Gen3 PCIE at 1800. For the extra speed (my mobo is Gen4) and only $9 more, it's a no-brainer at this point! Thanks for the info and the links! This is really helpful stuff and it's benefiting me right now.

A comprehensive and complete walk-through of self exploratory external drive build. Great video!!!:yt:

I used this method, but be warned in those small enclosures the SSD gets hot fast and drops down to HDD speeds (~130 MB/s). even an all metal enclosure and thermal pad is not enough. It's not recommended for heavy users. For long and sustained usage a decent 2.5" SATA SSD + enclosure is a much better choice.

I have to say that for an old hand with PCs and Laptops I found the initializing process fuzzed my brain and I wouldn't trust myself to avoid formatting the wrong drive and losing everything from C:\ - currently D:\ is my DVD tray. I think I would need a lot slower detailed instructions for how to set one of these up. Meanwhile I just back up to a Seagate drive and rely on it as an archive for precious files mp3 wav flac jpg tif etc and lots of documents and pdf stuff. Sorry but at my age this is a bit too scary for me. But thanks for taking trouble to explain.

Karma truly finds answers for people, I saw your video on the front panel and this is the first one of yours I have watched, I was about to enter the market of high capacity USB devices and you addressed everything I would have sought after. have just ordered from Amazon UK the two devices SSD and enclosure. Thank you now you have another subscriber, you are clear concise and factual with no waffle that others do. Well done⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

I love the sabrent one that pops open on a hinge. It's so easy and fast to change out drives

Good review. Your reasoning for getting this rig is also sound. However, checking some of the reviews, especially, the 1 and 2 star ratings, there were a few that found the speeds, read and write less than notable. Also, some even say the ssd turns useless after a few months of light usage. I think paying a little more for a more well known brand, might be better in the long run. The 1TB SSD is now running for 39.99 US Dollars. Which is cheap, but be careful what you buy and don't expect too much.

I just got something like this here in Nigeria for about 50 USD. 1tb external SSD and USB 3.2 Gen 2 enclosure. It's been great.

This is actually a really nice alternative, considering just how pricy the pre-made ones are. Actually rockin the same drive for two of my PCs and they survive repeated power outage, maybe it's just luck, but I have been pretty happy with them despite not having DRAM cache

It was a good solution. I had big problems with the SSD SATA drive. I have an r7 5800x on a stell legend x570 MBO and the system did not want to accept 3 SATA disks and 1 M2, no matter what combination of sockets I used. I bought a cheap SSD-USB3 external box. And it works great. True USB 3 does not allow more than 500 MB read / write, but it is on the front panel of my case and is easily accessible. And now I have a great portable 1 TB drive.