Hands-On Tech 270 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. Let's troubleshoot external storage. Stay tuned. This is Twit. Hello and welcome back to Hands-On Tech. I am Micah Sargent and today I am doing what I tend to do, which is to take your tech question and answer it. If you have a tech question you want to send my way: hot@twit.tv is how you get in touch. Today's tech question is once again I think a question worth pondering.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:37]:
Not just because I want to help this individual, but because this question could help you as well. It comes in from Lenny. Lenny writes. Hi Micah, I have a modern MacBook Pro 14 inch M5 Pro 1 terabyte SSD and find myself running out of space. I've used an external SSD to supplement my storage, but I haven't been happy with the speeds. Could you give me some advice for the best way to use an external drive? How should it be formatted? What cables should I use? Should I buy a Thunderbolt drive? Any and all advice you can provide would be helpful. Thanks, Lenny. Well Lenny, you have actually done something that I have done in the past and so we can sort of be in the same space here because I purchased a Mac that I wish I would have got more storage for.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:27]:
Now, when I am giving advice to others on what devices they should buy, I tend to advise that they buy as much storage as they possibly can, particularly when it comes to a MacBook or a laptop or whatever or you know, PC. Because it's almost certainly going to be the case that whatever you've got built in is going to be faster than anything you have externally. And that is the case here. You are seeing slower speeds and that's okay, you saved some money. But if you can avoid needing to use external storage, it's always going to be better. It's also just easier. Right? But let's take a look, Lenny, at what you've got going on. First and foremost, I mean you have quite a great machine there, this latest model of MacBook Pro.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:22]:
And even at that that 14 inch being able to pack in the M5 Pro chip. I mean what I'm getting at here is that it's highly unlikely that it's not your Mac, that instead it is indeed the cable or the drive that is at issue because your M5 Pro has what? Yes, it has Thunderbolt 5 ports. And here's the thing about Thunderbolt, it is incredibly fast, particularly in this fifth version. Up to 80 gigabits per second bi directional or up to 120 gigabits with bandwidth boost whenever it's doing video work. Now, if you are seeing slow transfers, then it's likely one of these three things is the culprit. The drive itself is a slow USB SSD. The cable is a charge only or USB 2 cable. Or the drive is formatted in a way that's hurting you on macOS in particular.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:26]:
So let's go through all of these. First and foremost it's a good idea to diagnose what you have. How can you do that? Well, through system information. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this Samsung SSD, this is a T7 SSD and I'm going to plug this in via USB C. This is actually a Thunderbolt 4 cable, but it works as USB C as well. And I'm going to plug this cable into, into my MacBook Air. Once we've got that plugged in and once we've. Once the system has sort of reconciled with it being there, what we're going to do is take a look at what we're working with.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:17]:
So what we can do is hold the option key on the keyboard and click the Apple icon up in the menu bar. This will bring up what is normally about this Mac. It will change it to system information. And that's what we want. We want to go to system information. From here we will see all of the information about this specific Mac. And what we want to do is move down to our Thunderbolt USB 4 storage and look at what is plugged in. So in this case, there are two Thunderbolt USB 4 ports on this MacBook Air.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:59]:
We want the second one. And I can see that it has currently is showing no device connected. And there's a reason for that. If we click on USB then we'll note that the Samsung SSD is not appearing as Thunderbolt/ USB4, but instead is appearing as a USB device that in this case shows speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. Okay, now let's talk about what that means. Well, a cheap or for this purpose less powerful SSD connected over USB 3.2 gen 2. I know there's a lot of numbers here. It's going to top out at around 1000Mbps.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:54]:
So that's not as fast as what you would get if you're working internally. And it's not even as fast as you would get if you are working externally with something that's a Thunderbolt port. Okay. A lot of them are actually slower than a thousand megabits in practice. And so it's a ceiling. And the, the fact here is that it's trying to get the, your Mac is working as quickly as it can to move data back and forth across the cable into this external drive. But if you're, if you were, if your drive itself can't support those faster speeds, then that's all you're going to get. So in this case, I can see speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:46]:
If it was a Thunderbolt USB 4 drive, then it would appear in the Thunderbolt USB 4 section and I could get speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second. So first things first. Again, we're checking out the actual drive itself to make sure that it is what you would expect. Now, there's a chance as well that something along the way is causing what should be a Thunderbolt drive to not actually appear as a Thunderbolt drive. So that's something you also have to check out to make sure that it is not a cabling issue. Because frankly, cables, if you'll forgive the pun, trip people up constantly, right? Not all USB C cables are equal. Many of the cables that ship in the box can be USB 2.0 charge cables. That means that you know you've got a few of them lying around, you go and you grab one, you plug it in and it's not working what you would expect.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:50]:
So there's a reason that these cables are not giving you the speeds that you would expect. Many of the cables that ship in the box, USB 2.0 charge cables that cap data at 480 megabits per second, that's about 60 megabytes per second. You take the number of megabits and divide it by eight. USB C cable can be anything then from 400 and 80 megabits per second to 40 to 80 gigabits per second. So if you want full speed, use a certified Thunderbolt cable like this one. And if you want full, full speed, if you want truly full speed, use a certified Thunderbolt 5 cable here. Now, I also want to note that there are some drives that do require the bundled cable that comes with the drive. There are reasons why that's the case, but it tends to be that if you do get a very high quality third party cable that doesn't come bundled with it, you should be okay.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:54]:
But if you're having issues, it could be that you just want to use that cable that came with it because that's going to make sure that it gets enough power. A generic USB C cable may not be able to power the drive at the. At the level that's expected. And so that's why I'm showing this Thunderbolt 5 cable from Apple. You can see it's only one meter long, but it's 70 bucks, right? And that's going to make a difference. When it comes to those speeds, I tend to buy the Apple cables or Belkin cables or Caldigit cables, with a preference for Belkin and Apples cables. First and foremost. Caldigit is fine, too.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:38]:
Others I have not had as good of luck with, and so I don't really recommend them. But a nice rule of thumb here is to simply match the cable to the drive's interface and then buy a cable that's rated for at least the drive's speed, because that's something that's kind of cool. Backwards compatibility. I have almost entirely replaced the cables that I use for hard drive interfacing or external device interfacing. So my iPhone, when I plug it into my Mac, almost all of those cables are now Thunderbolt cables, because I know that if they can support higher speeds, they can use what's there. But if they can't, it's giving as much as it possibly can. Whereas if you use an underpowered cable, then you're not going to have as much access to it. All right, back from the break.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:36]:
And we are talking about using our external storage at proper speeds with proper cables. And our dear friend also asked about Lenny. Our dear friend Lenny also asked about formatting. So here's the thing. If you're going to be using a drive across different platforms, the rules are different. But if you're only using a drive with your Mac, then absolutely, positively 100% format that drive as APFs. Now, I've got an episode of Hands on Apple that talks all about using Disk Utility for changing the way that a drive is set up and being able to properly format it. So if you want to learn more about that, you can learn about that there.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:33]:
But I'll show you here in Disk Utility that this external drive is formatted as exfat. Because I use this drive between Linux, Windows and macOS. And if you have a drive like the internal hard drive for this Mac that is only being used for that, well, then you see that it's apfs, that's Apple's file system. So that is the right call for Time Machine, for app data, for general macOS use, because the system plays ball with it a lot better than it does if the drive is formatted as exfat, like mine is, or some other format. Now, it's not that exfat won't work. Clearly it does. I'm able to move stuff back and forth, but just for the best possible speeds, the best possible interactions, the best possible compatibility, it makes sense to go ahead and use the APFS Apple protected file system as the means of doing so. Again, if you do need the drive to move between Mac and Windows, format it as I did.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:42]:
As exfat. It will handle large files, it works cross platform, but it doesn't have journaling and it is more prone to corruption if you pull it out while you're in the middle of a transfer. So don't, don't pull it out if you're in the middle of a transfer, if you're using exfat. I mean, don't do it if you're using APFS either, but it's less likely that you're going to run into issues if you do you want to avoid older versions of Mac's formatting options. So macOS extended don't do that on a new ssd. Definitely don't use ntfs. That's, that's read only. So you actually have to have third party software to be able to properly access that.
Mikah Sargent [00:13:30]:
And so that is, is I think the, the most important aspect of formatting when it comes to the drive, given that you ask that. Still though, formatting really doesn't explain a drive that is being slowed down by hundreds of megabytes per second. Formatting is really about compatibility and reliability. So if your numbers are way down, we're talking about the cable or the drive more than anything else. It's just that while we're kind of tackling all of the things, let's make sure that we're also making this as compatible as possible. Now, should you buy a Thunderbolt drive? Was another question that you asked. I think so, yes. Your internal SSD on the M5 Pro can read up to 14.5 gigabytes per second.
Mikah Sargent [00:14:22]:
So external storage is always going to be a step behind. Right. The question is how close are you able to get? And of course, what are you willing to spend? For USB 3.2 gen 2, you can look at about 10 gigabits per second or about 1000 megabytes per second. USB 3.2 gen 2 is going to be the cheapest. This is great for doing file backups, document storage, photo libraries, if you're not regularly scrubbing through them. And so this is probably the tier that you're on now and that's why you're frustrated a step up USB 4 thunderbolt. That's going to be for about 40 gigabits per second, about 2,800 to 3,000 megabytes per second. So frankly, kind of the sweet spot for most people.
Mikah Sargent [00:15:18]:
SanDisk makes a wonderful external hard drive and this may even be something that you've looked at and you said, oh, it's a little pricey and so you chose to go somewhere else. I mean, yeah, two terabytes at 529. 99 right now is not a great time to be buying storage, if I'm honest. But this has been seen for less expensive. The point is it gives you a big jump without needing to go all the way to Thunderbolt 5 with the pricing there. Plus it's backward compatible with older Macs. So much faster than what you get with USB 3.2 gen 2, but not so expensive as what you might see with Thunderbolt 5. Still, let's talk about Thunderbolt 5, because that's looking at 80 gigabits per second, which is about 6,000 megabytes per second.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:09]:
This is the top tier and this is going to be where you'll actually feel the difference. For 4k 8k video editing on the drive itself, or running apps and projects off of it too. You're kind of from the, from the bottom to the top, it tells you about your interactions. If you really want it to seem as smooth as possible, you are going to need to spend a little money. OWC sells the Express One M2. You can get it with a. An NVME SSD already built in, or you can just get it as an enclosure for 120 bucks. So with the drive built in469.99, that's a one terabyte drive with just the enclosure on its own, $120 or thereabout.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:54]:
And then there's also the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5. Now, I wasn't able to find this exact mod in many places. Again, you have issues there with, with, with things not with storage and memory costing so much right now. But you'll note if you check out this page, read and write speeds of up to 6700 megabytes per second. And excuse me, 6700 megabytes per second read speeds, 5300 megabytes per second write speeds. So we're talking very fast. It's also LaCie's well known for making drives that are safe to lug around. And so as an external storage drive, it makes sense as well.
Mikah Sargent [00:17:46]:
These are, you know, very, very fast speeds. And I think that that LaCie Pro 5 measured near 7 gigabytes bytes, not bits bytes per second in reading whenever it was being tested. So holy moly. You could get some really powerful stuff here, but you're going to pay for it. It's going to be expensive and with the memory issues we are coming up to a place where before an external bit of storage did not cost as much. So it made sense in some cases to buy your Mac and then get external storage afterward. But now with the way that things are going, oftentimes the first party maker is able to source things at a little less than you would just get from going out and getting it yourself. Ultimately though, let's talk about my honest recommendation for you.
Mikah Sargent [00:18:47]:
Before spending anything, just swap in a known good Thunderbolt cable and retest buy it. Buy it fresh and try it cheap in comparison. And oftentimes it is the issue for a one terabyte MacBook that's running short on space. I think a Thunderbolt 5 USB 4 enclosure paired with a really good NVME blade would be everything that you need. You'll get near internal speeds and then the great part is that you control the capacity and the cost. But if you don't want to worry about assembling things, I promise it's not that hard. But if you don't want to worry about assembling things, then that's sealed. Thunderbolt 5 drive from OWC Express and or the LaCie option are also good ones to go with those are you know, you're sort of grab and goes.
Mikah Sargent [00:19:40]:
That said, one trade off to be aware of, these drives can run very warm and of course they cost quite a bit of money. Plus you're not going to hit those internal SSD numbers no matter what you do. Still for offloading photo and video libraries. Oh the jump from a 10 gigabit per second USB drive to a thunderbolt 5 USB 4 drive, it's night and day and I think you're going to love it. So I want to thank you Lenny. Yes Lenny. For taking the time to write in. It's a fantastic question and I absolutely adored the opportunity to dig in on that research.
Mikah Sargent [00:20:25]:
Now if you would like to email me to ask your own questions or follow up or you know, share what's going on in your tech world: hot@twit.tv is how you get in touch. Thank you so much for tuning in. That is going to do it for this episode. So thank you for being here and I will catch you again next week. Bye bye.
