Building Your Own Cheap External SSD Drive For Your Mac

If you want something faster than an external hard drive, and better than a USB Flash drive, you can build an external SSD drive with an SSD and an enclosure. I built a 256GB USB 3.1 external SSD for less than $70 that works great on my Mac. Learn how to build your own.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to build a cheap, external SSD drive for your Mac.
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So if you want an external drive for your Mac you may look and find that there are a lot of different choices. Most of those are spinning hard drives or tiny little flash drives like these. Now these little flash drives are great for storage but they are not very fast and they don't really work well when you're using them a lot. So if you're editing photos or videos or things that are stored on these flash drives it's going to be tough going. Spinning hard drives are great for things like backups where speed isn't that important.
But you may think, well, isn't the perfect solution a SSD drive, Solid State Drive that's just like the drive that comes in modern Macs. It's fast, and small, and light. So you would think that there would be a ton of them out there. But there aren't really that many and the ones that are out there are pretty expensive. But you can build one yourself pretty cheaply. 
You need two things to make one on your own. First you need the SSD itself which looks like a little memory stick. It's not memory. It's storage. But they are both chips on a little stick. So they look similar. Here is one I chose. There are so many different ones like it. This one was pretty inexpensive. It's a 256GB SSD. It cost $38. It's not the fastest one out there but it was a good one for me to play around with. So you get one of these but there's no way to connect it to your Mac.
You need an enclosure. In other words a box for this to go in. For that I chose this one. Again, it's a pretty cheap model. Not the best one out there but a good price for one to play around with. Now the important thing is to match the closure to the drive. So if we look at the drive itself we can see a few things about it. One is that it's NVMe M.2 and if we look here we can see it's the type of M.2 is actually 2280. Now if I go over to this enclosure here I could see that this is NVME SSD drives. So far so good. It's M.2 and it supports 2280. So whichever one you choose you want to make sure that they are compatible between these two.
So here's what each one looks like outside of the box. You can see the enclosure is basically the internal part and then the casing around it. Then all I need to do is to basically take the SSD drive, insert it in. Each enclosure is going to work a little differently so you have to follow the instructions carefully. This one you insert in and then screw down the other end so it's firmly in place.  It also comes with this thermal insulator. It's just a special little stick-on insulator here and you just put it on top. 
Drives get hot. In your Mac there's ventilation, sometimes fans that cool down all the parts. In this little enclosure there is no cooling system. But this will help take some of the heat off of it. This is one of the problems that these flash drives have. They get really hot and they fail to work really well if you're using them intensively.
Then I put the enclosure around it and I screw that in place.  Now this enclosure has a USBC shaped port at one end and it comes with two cables. One goes USBC to USBC which is perfect for plugging into all the latest Macs and MacBooks that have been around for years. It also comes with an older style USB connector so I can still plug it into my older MacBook Pro. A lot of these enclosures will only come with one or the other. So make sure you get the one that will fit with your Mac.
Once I have this all assembled it is just a matter of connecting it to your Mac, bringing up Disk Utility and formatting the drive. In most cases you're going to want to format it Apple Pro File System, APFS, for use as an external drive with any Mac using Mojave, Catalina, or beyond. If you've got a Mac that's before Mojave you're probably going to want to format it as HFS. Also if you're going to be using this for Time Machine. But I wouldn't use an SSD for Time Machine. Time Machine really doesn't require fast read and write speed. It's a back-up. It's not something you're actually working with to edit files and things. So it's kind of a waste of money to get an SSD. You can just get a regular spinning hard drive for that because then you can go way up in size to 4 or 8 or even 12 terabyte drive to have a lot of storage space for back-ups.
Now let's talk about speeds here for a minute. You have several different measurements of speed. You've got the speed of the SSD. You've got the speed of the connection. You've got the speed of the enclosure. If you're using USB 3.1 on modern Macs that's 10 gigabits per second. The enclosure, the one I'm showing you here, the specifications say that is also 10 gigabits per second. The SSD drive shows 2100 megabytes per second. So there's a lot of confusion here because there's gigabytes per second, gigabits per second, megabytes per second, and megabits per second. All those are valid measurements of speed. More or less going from mega to giga is a jump of 1000 times. So 1000 megabytes would be one gigabyte. In bits to bytes there are 8 bits in a byte. So a measurement of 2100 megabytes per second you would take that and multiple by 8 to go from bytes to bits. Then you would divide by 1000 to go from mega to giga. So that's about 16.8 gigabits per second.
So the actual speed of the drive should be the slowest of these which would be 10 gigabits per second. When I actually tested it, it was actually a little bit slower than that coming in at around 7 gigabits per second. Now compare that to an internal drive, Macs use internal drives that are usually pretty fast. In comparison I looked at the internal SSD on my 2016 MacBook Pro and that was getting me over 18 gigabits per second. So the external drive was about half the speed of the internal drive. 
You can, of course, look for a SSD that's a little faster. Pay a little bit more and you can go better than the 2100 megabytes per second that this particular cheap model had. So you could, maybe, get a little bit closer to your internal drive speed. But it's always going to be better to run Applications, boot the system and work with files on your internal SSD than an external one. At least that's true for USB. If you're using Thunderbolt with a fast enough enclosure and a fast enough SSD, then you should be able to get the same speed from an external drive. But it will cost a lot more to do that all with Thunderbolt than with USB 3.1.
But the result that I got with this, for less than $70, I have a 256 G external drive. It's fast enough for me to work with files like Photos and Videos from. It's even fast enough for me to boot from although I wouldn't want to boot from this drive and actually work with it on a day-to-day basis. I'd want to use the internal drive for that. So I hope you found this useful and how easy it is to build a cheap external SSD drive for your Mac.

Here are the two items I show in the video:
SK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure
Silicon Power 256GB – NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4 2280 TLC SSD

Comments: 14 Responses to “Building Your Own Cheap External SSD Drive For Your Mac”

Terry

4 years ago

Thanks Gary. Is the SSD you are using sold as an “internal” drive or “external” drive? Or doesn’t it matter ? ( I’m assuming it doesn’t)

Gary Rosenzweig

Terry: You can see it with the link above.

Hi Gary, have a 256gb SSD in an OWC Thunderbay 4, would a USB C external drive be faster? Another Terry

Terry: Thunderbolt is faster than USB 3.1. "USB-C" is not a connection type but a port -- you probably mean USB 3.1.

Godfried

Can you use this also with IPAD 2 6th Gen - 2018

Godfried: No. That has a Lightning connector, not a USB connector.

Can you make this external drive a boot drive, or will it just be a data drive?

More: It can be a boot drive if you have a reason to use that. I'm using the exact one I show in this video as a Big Sur beta test boot drive now, so I don't have to have Big Sur on my MacBook for every day things.

Ed Adams

I have a mid2011 iMac running off an external Elgato 256gm SSD on my thunderbolt 1 port works great but too small. there are no external thunderbolt drives available anywhere. can you give a solution using your hint for a 500 GB SSD with a thunderbolt exclosure?

I'm not sure what else you can do. Go with USB I guess. But what speed USB does a 2011 model have? 3.0 is my guess. Probably better to put your money away for a new Mac rather than nurse along a 9-year-old model.

Ramon

Pretty cool tip that I did not know about. If you do need a Big drive Amazon still sells the one I bought a few months ago for my Mac mini 2014. The speed boost is spectacular with boot times from 3 to 4 minutes down to abt 20 seconds.

Crucial MX500 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078C515QL/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_api_i_bsioFbB5Q9NR3

Darren

I'm considering doing this for the following reasons: 1) just for the fun of it, 2) as a learning experience, 3) to have a bootable backup for my 2017 iMac, 4) to potentially make my otherwise not very useable 2009 MacBook Pro somewhat useable again. Can I boot the 2009 MBP from this SSD using an older version of MacOS? Do you see any issues with doing this?

Darren: Reasons 1 and 2 are excellent reasons. As for reason 3, the problem is a 2009 MacBook maybe have a pretty slow USB port. Check that. If it isn't USB 3, then booting from an external drive will be painfully slow.

Thanks Gary. I just bought the SSD and enclosure for reasons 1 through 3 above. Unfortunately the 2009 MBP is USB 2. I might try swapping out the internal 320 GB HHD for an SSD, just to have an older laptop to play around with. BTW, I enjoyed hearing your story on the TEH podcast this week. Stay warm.

Comments Closed.

Building Your Own Cheap External SSD Drive For Your Mac

Comments: 14 Responses to “Building Your Own Cheap External SSD Drive For Your Mac”

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