External SSDs - how practical are they in reality?

[Ben J.]

I cannot recommend OWC 1M2 enough and a quality SSD.

But then there's the price. Here in Norway, it's about $550 for a 2TB 1M2. I'm certain that I can find a used 2TB M2 chip, Kingston or whatever for ~$270 and put it in a $65 Acasis Thunderbolt/USB4 enclosure. ~$115 saved.

 

[Ben J.]

I bought an Acasis 40Gb/s M4 Mac mini dock and hub for just under a buck fifty. The M4 Mac mini sits on top of it. The dock holds up to two 8TB NVMEs; I only have one 4TB NVME installed and it works flawlessly. I bought my NVME late last year and today regret not getting two of the 8TB size given what SSD prices are today. I also have another 12TB in spinning disk storage attached to the Mac mini and this dock primarily for backup generations and manipulating (condensing primarily) and selecting files for backup to the expensive subscription cloud. The Acasis unit also includes cooling fans, not just aluminum heat sinkage.

So far after about 10 months I’ve had no problems and my setup is working very well. Hope that continues.

That Acasis M4 Mini dock (Acasis link) is 40Gbps on the connection to the mac, but the NVMe slots themselves are 20Gbps (which is not supported by Thunderbolt, so effectively only 10Gbps). You can, if you load both slots with identical NVMe chips and format them to Raid 0, achieve closer to 40Gbps speeds.

 

[Black_Mage]

I never want to deal with external hard drives after using external SSDs. The low latency is what really makes them fast. I recommend true spec cables to get the best speeds. A high-quality SSD can be ruined with a cheap cable.

Cables

www.lttstore.com

 

[bzgnyc2]

Are you aware of any good 40Gbps enclosures with space for 2 NVMEs? I wouldn't use both at the same time so bandwidth isn't a concern, more so just it is neater and possibly cheaper than two separate enclosures.

Besides some docks, this enclosure does what you want:

Acasis 40Gbps M.2 NVMe 2 Bay RAID SSD Enclosure Compatible with Thunderbolt 4/3

How to Setup Software RAID Mode The Acasis 40Gbps M.2 NVMe 2 Bay RAID SSD Enclosure Turns 2 NVMe SSDs into 2 Independent, Fast, Reliable Portable Drives! Sync data at theoretical speed up to 40Gbps and transfer 3G large files in seconds, greatly improving your work efficiency. Measured speed: It...

www.acasis.com

However, I have no direct experience with it and I tend towards one drive/one enclosure solutions as others have suggested. You're adding a power requirement (which could be good if your host system if out of bus power as Mac Mini do after 2 TB devices) and create additional heat in a small space.

Plus most of these have lower peak performance as the easiest thing to do is allocate 1/2 the TB bandwidth to each SSD even when it's not in use. I avoid RAID0 except perhaps in a purely scratch disk situation.

It also sounds like you were planning to keep each drive as an independent filesystems anyway. In which case, I would spend the extra ~ $50 (2x$100ish over 1x$150ish) for two enclosures and just route the cables as cleanly as possible.

 

[john1970]

Traveling with external SSDs makes a lot of sense for photographers or videographers. I travel with duplicate 4TB Sandisk Extreme SSD.

 

[bzgnyc2]

But then there's the price. Here in Norway, it's about $550 for a 2TB 1M2. I'm certain that I can find a used 2TB M2 chip, Kingston or whatever for ~$270 and put it in a $65 Acasis Thunderbolt/USB4 enclosure. ~$115 saved.

I would be suspicious of a used SSD but in any case you can do the same with the OWC 1M2 -- they sell an empty OWC 1M2 for about $90 USD (in the US -- not sure any premium if purchased from Norway).

Nothing against the Acasis -- I have the TBU401Pro and it works fine.