The ONLY Way to Upgrade Your MacBook...
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
947 words · ~4 min read
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you've probably noticed how quickly your storage can fill up these days between
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space hogging video games and large photo or video libraries and although
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one popular solution is to just upload extra data to cloud storage these
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services have a monthly fee and you're at the mercy of a potentially slow
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internet connection meaning that investing in dedicated external storage
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for your computer can be a great alternative so sabrin sponsored this
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video to talk about some of the options you see while external storage can
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comprise anything from a simple usb stick to an army of storage servers that
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takes up a whole closet the fastest consumer grade option
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currently is going to be an external drive or an enclosure which lets you
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connect an internal drive like an m.2 SSD via an external port one that
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supports NVMe now you can learn more about it up here but simply put NVMe is
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a storage protocol specifically designed with solid-state drives in mind meaning
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that it enables really fast speeds like
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much faster than what you would get with the older SATA protocol that was mostly
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designed with mechanical hard drives in mind however there's more to pay attention to
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besides whether that external SSD that you've been eyeballing uses NVMe you'll
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also want to figure out what interface it uses and if you're buying a
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high-speed NVMe external SSD or enclosure you'll probably want either
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usb 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3.
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so what's the difference well usb 3.1 is the more widely
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supported standard of the two that can handle maximum data rates of either 5
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gigabits per second for gen 1 or 10 gigabits per second for gen 2.
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Thunderbolt 3 on the other hand supports up to 40 gigabits per second that means
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that it's fast enough to not bottleneck even the fastest pci express ssds on the
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market and because Thunderbolt 3 connects to your computer's pci express
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bus the performance penalty that you would usually have to deal with for
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external drives will be less than with usb since usb drives have to route the
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data through a slower controller however Thunderbolt 3 has a downside or
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two for one thing fewer computers have support for it and for another these
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ssds also tend to be significantly more expensive than their usb based
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counterparts so then which one should you get well
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either usb 3.1 gen 2 or Thunderbolt 3 is
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going to give you speeds beyond a standard SATA connection when paired
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with an NVMe drive and although Thunderbolt 3 is obviously faster on
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paper in the real world you might not notice
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the difference too much unless all you do is use your drive for moving around
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lots of large files what you want to make sure that you
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aren't getting is a usb 3.1 gen1 device
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which will not be as fast as a standard SATA connection and you should
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definitely triple check that it doesn't connect via usb 2.
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it's cheaper but it's much slower than any of the standards that we mentioned
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and really only suitable for entry-level thumb drives that you just
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use to store your exciting powerpoint presentations
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another thing here is don't assume that just because the drive or enclosure uses
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the new usb type-c standard that it uses
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10 gig usb 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3.
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usb-c is great it's super useful especially since you can insert it
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either way to avoid a lot of frustration but it's just a connector and it can
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actually be used with slower data transmission standards so just take a
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quick moment to read the spec sheet instead of just glancing at the dongly
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bit and assuming it'll be okay other than that drives or enclosures
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with a metal body can help to dissipate some heat that can be useful but again
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as long as you're picking a product with support for 10 gigabit or greater you're
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not going to be losing much performance compared to an internal drive
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unless you're the kind of person who just really likes sitting around and
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measuring your file transfers down to the millisecond
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i don't know anyone like that with that said if you do like running
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benchmarks or using your SSD for actual file storage look no further than our
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sponsor for today's episode sabrin who has a great lineup of external ssds to
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fit any need you can check out their rocket pro which features not only a
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sleek aluminum body but also a lightning quick NVMe SSD inside and usb 3.1 gen2
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for great compatibility or for the ultimate in performance check out their
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rocket xtrm which utilizes a Thunderbolt 3 connection for the fastest possible
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data speeds making it an ideal partner for video editing or other bandwidth
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heavy tasks it even comes with a bumper guard to keep your data protected on the
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go so learn more about sabrint at the links in the video description
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so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos and don't
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