Gadgetory

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