I'm running out of macbook pro space (currently 120Gb) and would like to boost it to the 480Gb mark.
If I go and buy 360Gb on an external USB 3 SSD device, is it reasonable to expect that to perform somewhere near as well as replacing my existing internal 120Gb SSD drive with a new 480Gb drive?
I don't intend to use this space for a backup so it needs to function pretty close to my existing SSD drive in terms of speed. I've been finding pretty conflicting information from the research I've done so far, but would really like to believe this…
"SSD easily go up to 6 gb/s while usb 3.0 is still at around 4 gbps on modern systems. To me the HDD + USB 3.0 or esata setup is probably the most cost effective setup – the hard drive would more likely be the bottleneck, and would still blow away a USB2.0 setup where the USB connection is the bottleneck."
(from Internal drives vs USB-3 with external SSD or eSata with External SSD)
Thanks for any thoughts.
Best Answer
No. And it depends.
Just using USB 3 will not make it almost just as fast. You can get close by using USB3 with an enclosure which supports the USB attached SCSI protocol, but you will still add some overhead by involving the USB stack. Using raw access via PCI-e (M2.NVME SSDs) or SATA based SSD will always be faster.
The questions you might want to ask yourself though are:
My own choice would be a single larger SSD in any laptop. And if I used that to store movies, music, iso's or other huge files I would consider an affordable classic HDD (aka rotating rust) for that since random access is not important to them and classic drives work perfectly well with that acces pattern.
But those are personal choices. And I do my gaming on a desktop, so I do not need much space for the OS. If you game on the macbook then a larger internal SSD certainly becomes more interesting.