Luis: NVME or not?

The T5 is not an NVME drive. It’s SSD in a SATA container. I have that I use from clone backups. NVME are more expensive, and probably not necessary for post HD projects. For 4K it’s worth it, but then you usually need larger drive, and you have to weigh the price to size ratio.

As always, it depends... if the drives are meant for use with, say Time Machine backups, a SATA drive (even perhaps an HD) would be just fine, and could cost you less.

For faster performance, yes, use NVME.

Hi, Ian - sorry, this will be a bit long

There are two parts to this.

One is the connection to your mac, and the other is the SSD drive itself.

The connection to your mac will typically, these days, use the now common USB-C plug.

Now this already may be confusing, because USB-C is many things at once. You may see USB 3.2v1, 3.2v2, USB 4, Thunderbolt 4. The actual connector that plugs into your mac is visually (but not electronically the same).

In fact, there are so many variants, but let's simplify and say:

Thunderbolt can allow up to 40Gbps (gigabits per second) of throughput.

Most other formats can allow up to 10Gbps. So if you see a drive that says "Thunderbolt" or "USB-C" they can be used in the same machines, but may have different speeds.

This looks like a big difference, but even the lower 10Gbps is more than enough for most people.

My external SSD are NOT Thunderbolt, and I get some 900+MBps (that is megaBYTEs per second, which ends up being close to saturating the connection, so rather good).

On the other hand, a Thunderbolt connected SSD might give you more (but typically not 4x the speed; more like 3x the speed).

However, bear in mind that other things will usually be the limiting factor, in most cases. If all you did was copy multi-hundred GB files back and forth, sure, a 3x would help a lot, but this is only part of the work - there's RAM, there's processing in CPU and GPU and... usually the limiting factor is the human editor.

My general advice can be summarized in: if you need all the speed of Thunderbol, you already know that.

Part2 - the actual SSD - that is where the NVME comes in!

The first available external SSD used the same form factor and connectivity of traditional 2.5" hard drives (referred to as SATA). This was great, because we could open a Mac and replace the factory installed hard drive with an SSD and immediately get a muuuuch more responsive Mac. Over the years, I did this to maybe ten different Macs, from family and friends, to great satisfaction of their respective owners. The first time I did this was around 2010, on a 2006 17" MBP 🤓

But SATA is an old standard and an SSD does not have all the moving parts of an HD, so there was waste of space and there were speed improvements that could be achieved - SATA has a max of 6Gbps, so just over half of what a USB-C connection could allow.

An NVME drive is just some electronics and can fit in a much smaller case, be more portable, use less power, and be much faster.

In the picture, the Samsung is a bare SATA SSD (that is, just the drive; to mount it externally you'd need to put into a case), and the Crucial X6 is an NVME SSD. I am sure that they can be smaller yet.

You need a case to put it in with connectors. The prices are coming down. Soon the SATAs will be really cheap.