Which external SSD drive should we buy?

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Which external SSD drive should we buy?

We've recently bought a MacBook Pro M1 Max Pro Retina 16”, 10 CPU, 24 GPU, 64 Gb (2011) and we're going to edit videos, movies (max. 3-4 layers) on it with DaVinci Resolve 19 from external SSD drive.

Our question is: regarding the external drive, what features should we look for if we'd like to use the advantages, the speed of this computer?

We guess it's about...

1. The reading/writing speed. What is the minimum speed we should stick to?

2. Liability/Quality. We've heard good stuff on Lacie and Samsung but we're open to new ideas.

3. Anything else?

For the moment we're planning to buy a 2 Tb drive.

Many thanks,

Marcell and Réka

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.0

Posted on Oct 10, 2024 11:04 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 11, 2024 7:46 AM in response to marcell17

Intel ThunderBolt-3 Macs can get up to nominal 2500 M Bytes/sec on an appropriately fast SSD drive in a ThunderBolt-3 enclosure, provided they use a non-busy ThunderBolt controller on the Mac (not shared controller busy servicing displays or other drives on a second Mac port) supported by a typical 32 G bits/sec (PCIe2 x4, or PCIe3 x2 amount of bandwidth). Apple M-series Macs have one ThunderBolt controller per port, so competition is not as much of an issue. Display data has priority, so if you need maximum speed, that drive should not go an a Hub with other devices.

Buying a drive far faster than the Bus will NOT provide any increased performance. The drive can NOT go faster than the Bus used to connect it.

Buying a really fast drive and placing it in a USB-only [as opposed to genuine Thunderbolt] enclosure could cut the speed to half of that 2500 M Bytes/sec possible maximum speed or less.

Another way to obtain TOP performance is to have source files and destination files on DIFFERENT drives. Then the reading and writing do not compete with each other for drive bandwidth.

Next issue is, where are your backups being stored?

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Which external SSD drive should we buy?

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