you've probably noticed how quickly your storage can fill up these days between
space hogging video games and large photo or video libraries and although
one popular solution is to just upload extra data to cloud storage these
services have a monthly fee and you're at the mercy of a potentially slow
internet connection meaning that investing in dedicated external storage
for your computer can be a great alternative so sabrin sponsored this
video to talk about some of the options you see while external storage can
comprise anything from a simple usb stick to an army of storage servers that
takes up a whole closet the fastest consumer grade option
currently is going to be an external drive or an enclosure which lets you
connect an internal drive like an m.2 SSD via an external port one that
supports NVMe now you can learn more about it up here but simply put NVMe is
a storage protocol specifically designed with solid-state drives in mind meaning
that it enables really fast speeds like
much faster than what you would get with the older SATA protocol that was mostly
designed with mechanical hard drives in mind however there's more to pay attention to
besides whether that external SSD that you've been eyeballing uses NVMe you'll
also want to figure out what interface it uses and if you're buying a
high-speed NVMe external SSD or enclosure you'll probably want either
usb 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3.
so what's the difference well usb 3.1 is the more widely
supported standard of the two that can handle maximum data rates of either 5
gigabits per second for gen 1 or 10 gigabits per second for gen 2.
Thunderbolt 3 on the other hand supports up to 40 gigabits per second that means
that it's fast enough to not bottleneck even the fastest pci express ssds on the
market and because Thunderbolt 3 connects to your computer's pci express
bus the performance penalty that you would usually have to deal with for
external drives will be less than with usb since usb drives have to route the
data through a slower controller however Thunderbolt 3 has a downside or
two for one thing fewer computers have support for it and for another these
ssds also tend to be significantly more expensive than their usb based
counterparts so then which one should you get well
either usb 3.1 gen 2 or Thunderbolt 3 is
going to give you speeds beyond a standard SATA connection when paired
with an NVMe drive and although Thunderbolt 3 is obviously faster on
paper in the real world you might not notice
the difference too much unless all you do is use your drive for moving around
lots of large files what you want to make sure that you
aren't getting is a usb 3.1 gen1 device
which will not be as fast as a standard SATA connection and you should
definitely triple check that it doesn't connect via usb 2.
it's cheaper but it's much slower than any of the standards that we mentioned
and really only suitable for entry-level thumb drives that you just
use to store your exciting powerpoint presentations
another thing here is don't assume that just because the drive or enclosure uses
the new usb type-c standard that it uses
10 gig usb 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3.
usb-c is great it's super useful especially since you can insert it
either way to avoid a lot of frustration but it's just a connector and it can
actually be used with slower data transmission standards so just take a
quick moment to read the spec sheet instead of just glancing at the dongly
bit and assuming it'll be okay other than that drives or enclosures
with a metal body can help to dissipate some heat that can be useful but again
as long as you're picking a product with support for 10 gigabit or greater you're
not going to be losing much performance compared to an internal drive
unless you're the kind of person who just really likes sitting around and
measuring your file transfers down to the millisecond
i don't know anyone like that with that said if you do like running
benchmarks or using your SSD for actual file storage look no further than our
sponsor for today's episode sabrin who has a great lineup of external ssds to
fit any need you can check out their rocket pro which features not only a
sleek aluminum body but also a lightning quick NVMe SSD inside and usb 3.1 gen2
for great compatibility or for the ultimate in performance check out their
rocket xtrm which utilizes a Thunderbolt 3 connection for the fastest possible
data speeds making it an ideal partner for video editing or other bandwidth
heavy tasks it even comes with a bumper guard to keep your data protected on the
go so learn more about sabrint at the links in the video description
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