How To Build The Fastest Thunderbolt 5 SSD External Storage Drive For Your M4 Mac

Acasis 15% discount code - David15

In this video I show you how to build the fastest Thunderbolt 5 external SSD storage drive for your M4 Mac. This Thunderbolt 5 SSD is made up of two parts, the Acasis TB501 Thunderbolt 5 to NVMe SSD enclosure and a 4TB Western Digital WD SN850X Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD.

As of doing this video there are no other Thunderbolt 5 SSDs that can match the sustained write speed of this Acasis TB501 enclosure paired with the WD SN850X, when writing very large folder sizes. Sure, you will see people showing synthetic SSD speed tests, such as the Blackmagic Speed Test, which will show faster read and write speeds. However, these synthetic disk speed tests are from the same performance you get in real world reading and writing scenarios using large amounts of data once a Thunderbolt 5 SSD starts to thermal throttle or exceeds the cache of the SSD used.

As mentioned in the video, there was an issue with the real world read speed test. This was down to an issue with the Mac’s internal storage, presumably a cache issue. I will do a video as soon as I can that shows this issue very clearly.

The Mac that I used in this video was the M4 Max MacBook Pro. However, this Acasis TB501 Thunderbolt 5 enclosure will work with any Apple Silicon Mac computer with either Thunderbolt 5 or Thunderbolt 4. According to Acasis, the TB501 is also compatible with USB4 enabled computers.

In the video I did not do any temperature tests. This was simply because it wasn’t necessary as the drive did not have any heat issues. Which was clear due to the sustained write speeds in the real world test.

Let me know in the comments what you thought of the speed test results.

Here's a link to my ACASIS products playlist:

Here's a link to my SSD build and speed test playlist:

Video chapters:
00:00 Intro and explanation
02:07 How to build the SSD
20:46 How to format the SSD
28:23 Synthetic disk speed tests
31:33 Real world disk speed tests
35:55 Results for the real world disk speed tests
38:09 End summary

Use my promo code David15 for a 15% discount off anything that you buy on the Acasis website.

Acasis website

Acasis on Amazon
TB501 enclosure ➡ Not available yet on Amazon

WD SSDs:

Links to Apple products:

AMAZON ASSOCIATE DISCLOSURE
I am an Amazon Associate.
My Amazon links are Amazon affiliate links.
I earn money from qualifying purchases when you use my Amazon affiliate links.

OTHER EARNINGS AND COMMISSIONS
I also earn money from other product links within my video description.

For the sake of clarity and for the avoidance of any confusion, assume that I earn money from commissions from any and all links that I have within my video description.

You can also send me a coffee donation via PayPal if you found my video super helpful:

My Amazon pages with videos and product links:



I’m David Harry. Thank you very much for watching this video, take care and goodbye now.

Cheers,
Dave.

The FASTEST Thunderbolt 5 DIY SSD - Step By Step Build Guide & Speed Tests With The Acasis TB501

How To Build The FASTEST Thunderbolt 5 SSD For Your M4 Max MacBook Pro Using The Acasis TB501

#Thunderbolt5 #FastestSSD #Thunderbolt5SSD

[DavidHarry]

Acasis 15% discount code - David15

In this video I show you how to build the fastest Thunderbolt 5 external SSD storage drive for your M4 Mac. This Thunderbolt 5 SSD is made up of two parts, the Acasis TB501 Thunderbolt 5 to NVMe SSD enclosure and a 4TB Western Digital WD SN850X Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD.

As of doing this video there are no other Thunderbolt 5 SSDs that can match the sustained write speed of this Acasis TB501 enclosure paired with the WD SN850X, when writing very large folder sizes. Sure, you will see people showing synthetic SSD speed tests, such as the Blackmagic Speed Test, which will show faster read and write speeds. However, these synthetic disk speed tests are from the same performance you get in real world reading and writing scenarios using large amounts of data once a Thunderbolt 5 SSD starts to thermal throttle or exceeds the cache of the SSD used.

As mentioned in the video, there was an issue with the real world read speed test. This was down to an issue with the Mac’s internal storage, presumably a cache issue. I will do a video as soon as I can that shows this issue very clearly.

The Mac that I used in this video was the M4 Max MacBook Pro. However, this Acasis TB501 Thunderbolt 5 enclosure will work with any Apple Silicon Mac computer with either Thunderbolt 5 or Thunderbolt 4. According to Acasis, the TB501 is also compatible with USB4 enabled computers.

In the video I did not do any temperature tests. This was simply because it wasn’t necessary as the drive did not have any heat issues. Which was clear due to the sustained write speeds in the real world test.

I will be doing a video soon showing a Thunderbolt 4 SSD build. This is using the Acasis TBU401Pro M1 and the same WD SN850X SSD. For anyone looking for a low cost SSD build for their M4 Mac Mini. I will also be doing a video soon with an Orico 4TB SATA SSD inside an Orico USB enclosure. This SSD is capable of sustained write speeds of about 400MB/s and costs less than $200 to put together. It’s fantastic for people who don’t necessarily need a super fast SSD but would like a lot of storage space and who are working to a tight budget.

Let me know in the comments what you thought of the speed test results.

Video chapters:
00:00 Intro and explanation
02:07 How to build the SSD
20:46 How to format the SSD
28:23 Synthetic disk speed tests
31:33 Real world disk speed tests
35:55 Results for the real world disk speed tests
38:09 End summary

Use my promo code David15 for a 15% discount off anything that you buy on the Acasis website.

Acasis website:

Acasis on Amazon:
TB501 enclosure ➡ Not available yet on Amazon

WD SSDs:

Links to Apple products:



AMAZON ASSOCIATE DISCLOSURE:
I am an Amazon Associate.
My Amazon links are Amazon affiliate links.
I earn money from qualifying purchases when you use my Amazon affiliate links.

OTHER EARNINGS AND COMMISSIONS:
I also earn money from other product links within my video description.

For the sake of clarity and for the avoidance of any confusion, assume that I earn money from commissions from any and all links that I have within my video description.

You can also send me a coffee donation via PayPal if you found my video super helpful:

My Amazon pages with videos and product links:

If you would like to help my channel please use my global Amazon Affiliate links. I will be paid a small commission for anything you buy from Amazon when using these links. These commissions don't cost you any extra but really do help me to buy gear for my productions and to review:




I’m David Harry. Thank you very much for watching this video, take care and goodbye now.

Cheers,
Dave.

#DavidHarry#LiverpoolTV

[KoenKooi]

I have the same setup, my 4TB WD SN850x has been used for a while now and is about half full with pictures and video. I am very happy with the performance, especially moving around video.
I disconnected the fan and added an extra thermal pad, the included one didn’t make enough contact. No thermal issues and no more grating fan sound.

[rabc]

Another very detailed technical video, awesome!😀

[oviddalmer]

Thank you for your work, best man and great dialect

[mettdare]

Many thanks for very understandable presentation. Regards from Hamburg, Germany

[marvinisrael]

My Acasis drive is coming in a few days. I already bought the WD SSD as you suggested. As a non-techie I really appreciated the excrutiatingly detailed description of how to install the SSD and thermal pads. I'm an old guy and just shifted from many years on Windows to the Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro. I was going to format as exFAT so I could transfer the more than 1TB of photos from my PC to the Mini, but after reading your thoughts on the advantages of the APFS I wil hire someone to install another user account on the SSD so that I can migrate my data from the PC to the SSD instead of the Mini's 1tb internal drive.

[KevinMuldoon]

Looks like a fantastic drive Dave. Those speeds are a game changer.

It's making me reconsider whether I pony up the cash for a MacBook pro earlier in order to jump on the thunderbolt 5 bandwagon.

The new TB5 docks and drives feel like a generational upgrade.

[nick_fox]

God bless Dave have a merry Christmas you and family thanks for another magic video champ!

[DennisdeCaccia]

Your speed measuring is that to copy from one device to another depends on both the sources read speed and the destinations write speed.

[ChaseTheSummit]

Just got this Acasis enclosure. Performance is great but the fan is annoying. It's louder than I expected, and it runs 24/7 if plugged in which I suspect will lead to failure eventually. It would be nice if it only turned on as needed but it just runs 100% of the time. Kind of a bummer, will likely return and hope another manufacturer like OWC or Sabrent make a diskless enclosure.

[aaronlee]

Very useful video. I'd be very interested if you would make those additional videos you mentioned, going into more details about the issues, doing longer/more thorough tests on the drive/enclosure, etc. The more detailed testing you do, the more consumers can determine if that enclosure/drive combination make sense for their use cases.

As a side note, I'm personally interested in how this enclosure/drive would perform on a PC with Thunderbolt 5. I'm guessing you don't have such a setup to test with, but if you do, it would be great to compare the performance on an M4 Mac compared to a PC. Some people will be transferring large amounts of data between PC and Mac, and having the fastest solution possible (on both ends) can be a great time and money saver.

[prsearls]

This is an excellent and thorough presentation, Mr. Harry. I've not watched very many of your videos but I'm impressed with your honesty of problems that others have either not discovered or gloss over. I wonder if computers with new TB5 connections have been thoroughly tested with sustained read/write of large files like you have demonstrated. I'm getting a new Mac Mini M4 Pro with TB5 connections and it might have the same problem. I'm adding a TB4 Acasis 405 Pro (with the fan) equipped with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus, 2 TB NVMe so this should not be a problem at TB4 speeds. Your comments about the 990 Pro overheating has me concerned. I guess I'll find out after Christmas (they're all presents to me). Merry Christmas, sir.

[KoenKooi]

Jerry Schulze did a video on TB5 enclosures last week and used iostat to log the transfer speeds every second to estimate the size of the SLC cache, which match your findings quite well.

[ThirdEyePix]

"DEVO" and anyone else interested .... There are some very definite physical improvements in the enclosure of the Updated Version TB501PRO (which I have just received) which are, in no order of importance ....
~ The lid can be more easily removed as there is now a recess with lip at one end which says "OPEN" with directional arrow. The mini ball bearing method feels positive and is secure.
~ The shallow bay in the lid in which the supplied thermal pads are to be added provides a better fit lined up between lid and body. Thereby avoiding the potential wonkiness you mention in this video. Some people stick a thermal pad actually onto the SSD card itself but personally I think this is a bad idea for any future use in a different enclosure. Also, does anyone want to risk leaving adhesive anywhere on an expensive SSD card!?
~ Both thermal pads now have tabs on both sides and are marked 1mm and 0.5mm. So you don't need a long thumbnail which I have! Very useful for much more than picking your nose! 🤣
~ Fit the 1mm pad first so that it is then just a tiny fraction proud of the lid's recess and avoids having to push it around to better fit as you had to do.
~ I don't think that the resulting 1.5mm of pad thickness actually touches the shiny black plastic(?) label on my WD SN850X 4TB card but if it was important, Acasis would have supplied 2x 1mm pads. How do you know if your fridge light goes off when you close the door? 😆
~ The colour of the Updated Version is a much darker metallic charcoal.

If I find anything more to add I will edit this Comment accordingly. Robin ....

~ The fan is so quiet that I had to lift the enclosure up to my ear to hear it! The On/Off is a toggled button and I wish there was a visual indication of the fan being On such as a light?

[kashi]

excellent video, I would like to point here one thing though, the READ speed calculation is incorrect - that 207 seconds is the overall operation of Reading from external SSD and writing to internal SSD so (Read+write) operation. This may sound confusing as you may then ask then why not same logic for WRITE. Well WRITE calculation works exactly as you did but READ calculation you have to subtract the WRITE timing into internal SSD from 207 seconds. the industry practice is to double that speed or half that time. so your REAL read speed for this 500GB chunk of data is 4830MB/s
hope that helps.

[SootheSound]

Very clear and detailed honest review. Thank you. Have you had any troubles with the Acasis cable and your Mac? I had an Anyoyo Thunderbolt 4 drive and it powered on the Mac, but did not show. I swapped the cable to an older possibly Thunderbolt 3 cable and it worked? The Anyoyo unit and supplied cable were brand new. To me the Anyoyo looks a mirror image of the Acasis too. Any thoughts as to why this might have been the case would be very much appreciated.

[a_mouse]

I think the write speed to the mac ssd becomes limiting in your 2nd test. Sustained writes like this will thermal throttle.

[timunderscore]

Hi David, thanks so much, I had a question. I just got this enclosure in today. It does have a bit of a whiny pitch/noise coming from the fan. How safe is it to keep it somewhat covered to reduce the high pitched sound - will I risk overheating?

[rorywalters]

That dropped speed is still very high in my eyes. I boot my Mac mini M1 off an USB4 drive, it’s an ASM2464PD enclosure with a KIOXIA EXCERIA G2 2TB in it (Screw Apple Intelligence, I don’t what it on my Mac!). EXCERIA G2 is probably the slowest PCIe 3 drive (on sequential reads and writes) still being sold, only had marketed at 2100mb/s read and 1700mb/s write, and that’s actually about the same speed I got through enclosure, noting is bottlenecked. In real use it feels very fast, very responsive, I can’t tell the difference between it and the internal 256GB drive. I’m very happy about this result.

I didn’t buy this drive internally, it was a replacement drive for my previous failed EXCERIA G2 in my Mac mini 2014, which got a different drive in it right now. Considering EXCERIA G2 is a drive with DRAM, and Macs couldn’t do host memory buffer with DRAM-less drives, I decided to put it into an USB enclosure.

[vsc]

Notable is that the Acasis enclosure shown in this review is now known as the "basic version" versus an alternative "upgrade version" is shipped when the basic version is ordered. The internal design is different where in fact close inspection the upgrade version is anything but where the fan in the upgrade version simply pulls air in from the top and ejects it out the side largely doing nothing to cool the enclosure. No air is drawn across the SSD or the interface chip. The net result is overheating and drive disconnection. In other words you want the basic version if you can get it. Additional Acasis appears to be sourcing the basic version from Wfyear and ODM manufacture, where the Wfyear product was announced in September of 2024... Attempts to get Acais to respond to the upgrade version's problem have been hopeless. It is unclear who manufactures the upgrade version, but I suspect Acasis does not respond given it's not their product nor do they stand behind even though their name is on the enclosure. In short totally avoid Acsis is my best recommendation.