External SDD Drives

The internal drive is not a mechanical hard drive – but a very fast SSD.

I think one question here is how you plan to use external drives – for backups, and for archiving video projects that you are no longer actively editing? Or for editing active video projects?

External desktop (3.5") hard drives tend to have the highest capacities (up to about 20 TB, a.k.a. 20,000 GB), and the lowest cost per GB. But they're also slow by SSD standards, so if you are working on a project which has a lot of large video files, you might want to keep those on a SSD while you are working on them.

WIth external SSDs, there are several rough speed categories (slowest to fastest):

1. 2.5" SATA notebook SSDs in USB enclosures.
2. PCIe NVMe SSDs in USB-C (USB 3.1 Gen 2) enclosures.
3. PCIe NVMe SSDs in Thunderbolt 3 or 4 enclosures.

Someone who was working on a feature-length movie shot using 8K cameras might decide that what they needed was Thunderbolt 3 / PCIe NVMe SSD space, and a lot of it.

Someone who was working with short video clips shot on their iPhone might be happy with working on the videos on their Mac's internal SSD, then archiving finished projects on USB 3 hard drives.

It's all about matching what you're doing to the strong and weak points of the various storage options.

BravesWarrior wrote:

No, all I'm trying to do is to possible run final cut pro off it. Storage on it or what I can do to take the load off of the main hard drive

Fastest performance for your particular model is to have work in progress files internal.

The fastest access to work in progress files on an external SSD will be with a USB4, Thunderbolt4 or Thunderbolt3 based SSD. This will still be slower than the internal.

YMMV but I like OWC Drive Dock USB-C Dual Drive Bay Solution, USB 3.1 Gen 2.

It is "only" SATA speed ~550 MB/s. But AFAIK there are not yet similar single or dual drive docks for faster bare M.2 NVMe SSDs. And those newer drives still seem not to be as robust (bootable etc) or as cheap as old SATA drives.

https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Drive-USB-C-Dual-Solution-OWCTCDRVDCK/dp/B07KRKBTXG

Are you wanting to use the external SSD as a boot volume to increase speed? If so, it won't help.

The fastest external SSDs—ThunderBolt— are no faster in actual use than your current internal storage if used as a boot volume.