READ THIS TO UNDERSTAND WHY THIS PARTICULAR GEN 4 NVME M.2 SSD IS BEING USED:

The reason why this particular SSD is being used, isn’t because the SSD is super fast or anything, it’s because of its sustained transfer speeds for writing data.

The data bandwidth for Thunderbolt 4 is just under 3000MB/s but no Gen 3 NVMe SSD can sustain that speed. Using a high quality Gen 4 SSD, such as the SN850X, will sustain the maximum data bandwidth that the enclosure will allow. Using a Gen 3 SSD, even one that says it’s faster than 3000MB/s, won’t sustain anywhere near that speed when writing large amounts of continuous data in one go.

It’s all down to the caching systems on the drives and the high quality, fast Gen 4 NVMe SSDs generally have better caching and buffering compared to the Gen 3 NVMe SSDs. Some cheaper Gen 4 NVMe SSDs won’t sustain that data rate either. Again, another reason for recommending what may appear to be an unnecessarily expensive SSD. That may also appear to be much faster than what you think you may need.

Also, the reason why we only get about 3000MB/s out of Thunderbolt 4 for data and not the 5000MB/s, which is what 40Gb/s is. Is because about 2000MB/s of Thunderbolt 4’s bandwidth/bus speed is taken up for video, even though video is not being used with the enclosure. The separate video bandwidth is just part of the protocols for Thunderbolt 4 and which is why the entire 5000MB/s bus speed of Thunderbolt 4 is not all used for data transferring, even when a video signal is not being used.

You can of course use much cheaper Gen 3 NVMe SSDs if you don’t require the fast sustained maximum write speeds. And you can also use smaller capacity SSDs if you don’t require large storage spaces.

The reason why I use the 4TB WD SN850X is because it will give me the maximum speed for sustained writing of very large file transfers in one go and I personally need at least 4TB of storage because I use a lot of large, high bandwidth video files.

ACASIS TBU401 enclosure at Amazon https://geni.us/u9A5heL
ACASIS TBU405 M1 enclosure with fan at Amazon https://geni.us/ACASIS-TBU405ProM1
ACASIS website https://geni.us/ACASIS
ACASIS TBU401 enclosure at ACASIS website https://geni.us/Acasis-TBU401

WD SSDs:
SN850X 4TB https://geni.us/SN850X-4TB
SN850X 2TB https://geni.us/SN850X-2TB
SN850X 1TB https://geni.us/SN850X-1TB

MacBook Pro M1 Max https://geni.us/2F4Vr
Laptop stand used with the MacBook https://geni.us/4JJd7

How To Build The Fastest External Thunderbolt 4 USB4 SSD For Your M1 M2 M3 Apple Silicon Mac MacBook.

In this video I'm showing how to build a fast Thunderbolt 4 SSD storage drive which is also USB 4.0 compatible. The same drive also works on Thunderbolt 3 and is perfect for expanding the storage of any M1 M2 M3 Apple Silicon Mac computer, be that a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or one the desktop Macs such as the Mac Studio or Mac Mini.

I would go so far as to say that this is the best external drive for a Mac and the fastest external drive for a Mac.

The drive consists of the WD Black SN850X 4TB NVME M.2 SSD and the excellent Acasis TBU401 40Gb/s Thunderbolt 4 USB4.0 to NVMe enclosure.

While I'm using it with an Apple Mac MacBook Pro M1 Max in this video. The same drive is also compatible with other hardware platforms and operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and Android etc.

I also do a disk speed test using Blackmagic Design's Disk Speed Test utility and I also show a real world disk speed test by moving files to and from the external drive.

Video chapters:
00:00 Intro and explanation
01:10 Unboxing the SSD
02:08 Unboxing the enclosure
04:00 Building the drive
10:59 Formatting the drive
15:00 Blackmagic disk speed test
16:42 Real world write speed test
19:29 Real world read speed test
21:48 End summary

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