How much SSD Space Do You Really Need in a MacBook?

256 512. What's the right number of gigabytes for your SSD when buying a new or used Mac? This video is about storage. This is the doughut storage that Duncan handed me this morning in the drive-thru. Just going to put that right in there. Apple's SSD upgrades are expensive. Buying too much storage on a Mac can be a waste of money. But you may have heard that buying too little can make your storage quite slow. I'm going to explain why that is. block mapping, DRAM, trash collection, and what I think is the best way to get what you want without paying too much of the Apple tax. First, it's true. The smallest drive you can get, let's say on this MacBook Air, 256 GB, this drive will transfer files at literally half the speed of just one level up to 512 GB. I know this is an M5 MacBook Pro, and that's got its whole other thing where it's way faster. I've got an M4 one also. This does have 512. I need to put a piece of tape on it. It's good to be precise. In anyway, I took some things apart for a visual aid. This is an Apple brand 256 GB SSD. This one's out of an M4 Mac Mini. The laptop ones are actually soldered right onto the motherboard and don't look quite like this, but they follow the same limitations where, see how this only has one silver square on it. That little thing is the actual memory. It's called a NAND, or in this case, it's actually a stack of NANDs. 256 GB in capacity. And everything else on this chip is there just to serve that little guy, smoothing out power delivery and providing communication lanes. This one is a third-party Chinese brand and it goes into an M4 Pro Mac Mini. This one is a 4 TBTE capacity. And other than the fact that it's physically bigger, I guess the Pro model Mac Mini does this for better heat dissipation. The clearest difference between these two SSDs is that this one has four nan stacks on it and it's over twice as fast. If you're familiar with how dual channel RAM works in a Windows computer, this is the same concept. These NANDs are all the same speed, but these NAND stacks can all communicate with the computer at once. So having more little squares means it can move more data more fast. Hence, 256 is slower than 512 because where the 256 has just one little NAND, the 512 would have two, both reading and writing simultaneously on the same SSD chip. Also, there's a bit of a diminishing return above 512 GB on an SSD. Like 512 is literally twice as fast as 256, but 1 terbte is only a little bit faster than 512. Because shortly after this point, you've basically saturated all of the communication lanes of the controller that talks to this thing. And above 1 TBTE, you won't be able to repeatedly measure any difference at all. At that point, you are completely limited by the speed of the controller. But unfortunately, it's not just that simple because specifically with Apple SSDs, the SSD controller, the like communication interface is part of the computer. Unlike when you buy an external NVME where the controller is on the drive itself, this little black square here is actually the controller built right onto the SSD. So, these Apple chips are basically like dumb raw storage. And then the M4 SOC handles the management of this storage. And like I said earlier, these are stacked NANDs. So, this isn't just one memory module. Even this one with just one silver square on it is several wafers of storage. This thing is in 3D. So each layer of this NAND takes up a communication lane of the controller on your computer. Larger drive, more NANDs, more communication lanes with your SOC. Further, M4 Pro and M4 Max, part of what makes them pro is that the controller has more communication lanes than the base model of the same chip. So 512 GB on a MacBook Air, which is twice as fast as 256 GB on a MacBook Air, is going to be a little slower than 512 GB on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro. It is a secret just how many communication lanes are available on the M4 Pro versus the M4 base model, but it seems like the speed of your SSD will top out at about 1 TB on the Pro and Max models. And even that is only a little faster than the 512 GB model. On this 512 GB drive, I get about 5,000 megabytes per second. And on this 1 TBTE drive, I get about 5600 to sometimes 6,000 megabytes per second. Okay, that was like 12 pages of thick information distilled into one page of I hope that made sense. In my opinion, 512 GB is the sweet spot for the SSD inside your new Mac computer. Not only is 256 noticeably slower, like your computer will start up a little slower, things will load a little slower, files will transfer a little slower, but also even just a reasonably sized photo album. Plus, holding applications in the system software is going to eat way into 256 GB, which is a good transition into part two of explaining the speed of SSDs. A fuller drive is a slower drive, and 256 gigs fills up fast. To vastly oversimplify, I'm going to use this paper notebook to explain this odd truth about how SSDs write and erase things. This notebook is my SSD. I am the computer. I, as the computer, can write onto my SSD, the paper, line by line. But for some reason, when it comes to deleting stuff, I can only rip out a whole page. I cannot just delete one line. And that's no problem while the notebook is new and mostly empty. As I write more things into it, I'll just write each thing into its own little page. That way, both writing and deleting can happen at full speed. If I want to delete just this one line, all I have to do is rip out this page. I won't have a second line on there that I now need to copy and move to another page before deleting the first page. You might be able to see where this is going. And also, in reality, when you delete a file, the computer just marks it as deleted. It doesn't actually take it off the drive until it needs that space back. It'll just mark it and remember it for later. Once our notebook starts to fill up, there's still tons of free space underneath the lines that we've already written on. But in order to write a huge chunk of data onto it, and especially if I'm writing that data over older data, like saving over a large file with another large file. Now, the computer will have to consolidate things from a bunch of different pages and move them around into a different spot in the notebook so that I can create a fully empty page so that we can then delete a whole page and make space for this picture I want to paste into here. And it might be important to say that I do not use any AI for the creation of these videos, writing or otherwise. And again, I'm super simplifying how all this works, but basically once your drive starts getting full, it's not just a matter of putting more data onto the drive. The drive first needs to clean up all of that data. They call this trash management. That's fun. Where the computer needs to erase a whole notebook page just to delete one line that you wrote in order to make space for the next thing that you're saving onto it. Except in the computer lingo, one line is called a page. It's about 4 kilobytes. And an entire page is called a block. It's about 4 megabytes. And this is getting more confusing. I can feel it. It all boils down to an empty drive will be however fast it can be, 5,000 megabytes per second. But a mostly full drive can sometimes be like four times slower because for every one line of data you're putting in, it has to shuffle around four other lines of data to organize it. That's why I say 512 is the sweet spot cuz that fits all the programs you want to use with all the system stuff, the libraries, and everybody's got a pretty big photo album. Now, beyond that, like maybe if you're addicted to Steam games and have a giant library, or if you're a video editor and can't stand to throw away a single frame of old footage. In my opinion, all of that stuff should be on an external drive. Ever since 2016, a decade ago, Mac computers have come standard with at least Thunderbolt 3 ports, and these can move 40 Gbits per second through them. And that just happens to be about that same 5,000 megabytes pers speed of the internal SSD on newer Macs. And more recently, Thunderbolt 4 is standard, which has a faster guaranteed minimum speed. And now Thunderbolt 5 on the Pro and Max models of M4 and M5. External drives are just as fast as internal drives, as long as you're looking at the right type of SSD and enclosure. If it says Thunderbolt or USB 4 on the listing and you put an NVME SSD in the drive, Bob's your uncle. These are every bit as fast as internal storage and they cost less than half as much as Apple's upgrade prices. And you can even set your Mac OS App Store settings to automatically download large files onto external storage for things like Assassin's Creed Shadows, which is just a monster size download. Happening behind me in real time has been a 50 GB file transfer onto one of these puppies. It's so fast. So, this is a Thunderbolt enclosure, just as fast as your internal drive. But if you want to spend even less money, you can go after a USB 3.2 2 Gen 2 enclosure, which is 10 Gbits per second, about 1 GB per second, cuz you don't necessarily need 5,000 megabytes per second to do most things, really hardly anything. I mean, it's super nice when you're transferring some kind of huge file or folder, but how often are you really doing that? Before I got my hands on this Thunderbolt 5 enclosure, I edited video off of this ASUS Rogue Stricks one with its pretty RGB lighting. And since these are limited by the enclosures port speed, not the drive speed that's inside of it, cuz the drive is always going to be faster than 10 Gbits per second. There are slower NVME SSD drives that are cheaper than the super fast ones, so you can save money both on the enclosure cuz these are cheaper than these. And on the drive, if you don't need mega mega drives with their mega speeds, this enclosure transfers at about 900 megabytes per second, which as you can see from the Blackmagic disc speed test program, is fast enough for even 8K video editing. Sometimes speed ratings are initially confusing if you're not looking at capitalization. For instance, my camera is shooting this video right now in 8K in a 200 megabits per second stream. That's bits with a little B. But this drive can transfer at 900 megabytes per second, big B. There are 8 megabits in every megabyte, which means even this slower drive is capable of 36 times more data per second than an 8K video stream shot in H.265. But, but, and this is important, even more important than which drive you put in your external enclosure, which cord you use makes way more of a difference than you might think. Also, this video is not sponsored. So, I will briefly direct your attention over to the lower left corner of your screen, where I now have this live subscriber counter device. Why don't you just click subscribe? I'm not asking you to buy anything. Just join me on my quest to be a real YouTuber and get that 100K silver play button. Anyway, chords. Blackmagic speed test will tell you how fast your computer can talk to your drive. And I expect to get pretty close to 900 megabytes per second with this drive. And there we go. Literally 899 megabytes per second. 840 read speed. So pretty close. But if I move all of this out of the way, same enclosure, same drive inside, same SSD, just use a different cord. Whoop! That test was still running. If we just use a different cord, and this isn't even a cheapo cord. This is a cord that came straight from Apple. It's the one that came with my iPhone 17 Pro and it is not designed for high-speed data transfer. And would you look at that? 40 megabytes per second. 40 39 39 megabytes per second on a 900 megabytes per second enclosure. Which means using the correct cord for your external drive makes it 20 times faster, not just a little bit faster. So if you just grab like an anchor charging cable off of Amazon, great cables for charging stuff, and they make great data cables, the ones that are marked for data. But if you just grab a charging cable and you think, "Well, this is USBC, this is USBC, it fits, and when I plug it into my computer, it turns on, it mounts," you'll have no idea why everything is 20 times slower than the handsome middle-aged YouTuber man told you it would be. So, you need a cord that's made for data transfer, and I will link a few below. But on Amazon, the listing will say 10 Gbits per second or 20 Gbits per second, or USB 4 or Thunderbolt will do the trick, too. This is even more important with a Thunderbolt drive because, well, for one, some drives, this one included, it won't even be recognized by your computer without a Thunderbolt branded cord. They look just like USBC cords, but it'll have this little Thunderbolt logo on the end of it. And these can move up to 80 Gbits per second. There are two types of Thunderbolt cords, active and passive. Basically, if you want it to be any longer than just a couple of feet, you need an active cord. This is Apple's one. And there's actually a little computer embedded on both ends on the plugs of this thing, which does error correction for the obscene amount of data that passes through here. But with super short cords, you gain nothing by having an active one. There is no data loss in a passive Thunderbolt 5. What is this, like a foot and a half long cord? Then the last thing I'm going to say about external NVME drives themselves. If you're looking at Thunderbolt enclosures for max super speed, when you pay more for something like a Samsung 990 Pro drive or the SN8100 Black versus paying less for like a Kingston NV3, you're paying more for a better SSD controller. With external NVMemes, unlike with the Apple ones, the controller is on the SSD package. That's that little square right there. And the better drives will come with their own DRAM in addition to that controller or maybe as part of it. And that RAM basically keeps an index of the blocks of the drives, which ones are free, which ones are full. And it makes that whole trash collection and organization of the data on the drive go faster, way faster. So these drives will have better sustained reads and writes if you're transferring huge files. The cheaper drives, as long as they're a reputable brand, will be just as reliable. But if you're copying like a 100 gigabytes of data all at once, the cheaper drives will start out super fast, but then slow down during the transfer, where the ones with the DRAM will stay super fast the whole time. So, where does that leave us? If you're here looking for a recommendation, I don't mind being super specific. Get a 512 gig SSD on your new MacBook, Air or Pro, or even Mac Studio. That'll make sure you get a very fast internal drive with enough space for apps in the system and your 41,000 unread emails. I am a monster. Then, if you do anything more data hoarding than office work and streaming videos, get an NVME external drive. I really think the 10 Gbits per second USBC ones are plenty fast for just about everything. But if money is no object, get you a Thunderbolt 5 one. Your computer will probably only have Thunderbolt 4, unless you're watching this in 2027. But these drives are backwards compatible, and this way it'll be the fastest thing you can have for five or maybe even 10 more years. Then you're going to need a drive to put into those enclosures. Same type of drive, either enclosure. And you're searching for M.2 NVME drives. I'll link below what I think are the best ones. And I have no sponsor for that on this video. And I've bought and tested tons of these. Oh, they're falling. So, you can trust that my suggestions are purely based on testing and research. Oh, and the final boss. If you're truly a power user or just a nerd like Victor who has a Plex movie collection with, I'm going to say like literally thousands of movies and TV shows, you may want to look into a NAS. This is also an external storage solution, but it connects to your whole network, including your computer or any computer or phone or TV in the whole house, wirelessly or wired for faster transfers. And it can hold so much data. I have 16 terb in this UG green one. And it has two NVME SSD slots on the bottom. With 10 GB networking, this thing is just as fast as having one of these connected directly to your computer. If you have a 10G network in your house, this network drive can hit speeds of that same 900 megabytes per second. And like I showed before with that Blackmagic chart, that is fast enough to edit RAW 8K, which is something I promise I will never shoot for YouTube videos. H.265 8K is where I draw the line. And it's what I'm shooting right now. And it's already 400% overkill because a majority of people are watching on their phone. Oh, there's my wife. Isn't that nice? I'm testing this Synology brand of basically the same echelon of machine. It's got NVME drives on the bottom also. But I'm finding out that this thing will only work with Synology branded NVME drives, which are double the price of every other brand for some reason, and I don't know how I feel about that. This is a ROD 20 plus. This is a 20 megabyte hard drive. Marketed as being 8 times faster than a floppy. So, this thing transfers files at a little bit faster than 1 megabyte per second. It was made for that computer right back there, the Macintosh Plus. And this, well, by volume, is probably about a thousand times smaller than this. And it is closer to 5,000 times faster at transferring data. Oh, how far we've come. I'm going to CES this week. I can't wait to look at all the humanoid robots doing robot stuff. A terabyte. That's fine.

How big of an SSD Upgrade should you get when you buy a new MacBook computer? Or any computer, honestly. In this video I will explain why I think 512GB is the sweet spot for storage space on a new laptop, mac mini or Studio. LINKS: Thunderbolt External Enclosure: https://amzn.to/4a1TkvG ROG STRIX USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) enclosure: https://amzn.to/3LTPqvH FAST NVMe drive for thunderbolt: https://amzn.to/45PfNcT Cheaper NVMe for USB3.2 Gen 2: https://amzn.to/4rTrKH9 UGREEN NAS with NVMe: https://amzn.to/4abnTxG UGREEN NAS cheaper: https://amzn.to/3ZQEFNI Thunderbolt Cable: https://amzn.to/4knng99 20Gb/s Cable for the USB 3.2 Gen 2 enclosure: https://amzn.to/45NZ8q1